News for Saturday, 11 October 2008

Yet again Apple has made a success of spin; all the Mac community and more generally the Web vibrates and palpitates with the idea of the new machines that will be announced next Tuesday.
All in all, all the attentions go towards a revival of the design of the machines with lots of aluminium, a keyboard with the spaced keys, and a look approaching that of MacBook Air. By focusing on these points, one probably forgets to question what these machines may contain. Here we will look at what Apple could propose to us. There is no magic to guess what is inside, one simply looks at what Intel is proposing and what the other manufacturers of portables are doing while taking into account the past practices of Apple.
To start with, it is impossible to circumvent the Centrino 2. With the risk to disappointing you, it does not bring much to Mac users, the majority as of its functions are already present in our machines:
- Processors Core 2 Duo Penryn at frequencies hardly higher than those currently proposed
- Ethernet Gigabit
- Chips 802.11n
On the other hand, it should be able to more finely manage the power consumption of each component in the machine thus increasing battery life, and to be able simultaneously to use a dedicated video solution or that present on the chipset according to the required load.
One can add the VPro technology that has been in the news lately and allows the remote control of a machine, even in the event of a freeze of the OS.
* In short, Apple will be able to propose on MacBook Pro with processors running between 2,53 and 2,80 Ghz with a bus at 1066 MHz, allowing a gain of 100 to 200 MHz compared to the previous generations.
On the side of the graphics chip, we would not be surprised if they announce a double solution based on the GMA X4500 in the event of light load on the machine with a chip Geforce 9600M WP which could take over in the event of a heavy load. The gain in battery life could reach 25% in normal office usage which is certainly more interesting.
Concerning the hard drives, one will be entitled to the usual disks with capacities reaching the 500 GB or the SSD of at least 128 GB. We would not be surprised that these disks are, as on MacBook, easy to exchange, and we hope that Apple, like the other manufacturers will propose two sites in order to be able to take advantage of a small fast SSD and a disk of slower but larger storage.
Concerning Blu-ray: this is more a political and commercial decision than technical. Thus it is difficult in this case to predict something.
* For MacBook, in addition to the Aluminium design that already seems to be given, the presence of a chipset NVidia is also very likely. It will make it possible at Apple to propose a machine having a video worthy of this name and especially to be able to run recent games using less resources.
Apple has the practice of proposing less powerful CPU for the MacBook than for MacBook Pro, one should have an entry level model with a processor running at 2,26 GHz (3 MB of cache) and on the others a processor with 2,53 GHz.
* For MacBook Air, in addition to to passing to engraving at 45nm for the processors, one should gain 100 to 200 MHz, a SATA interface for the hard drive that will make it possible to propose a SSD of 128 GB and a gain in battery life related to the new architecture of the components. As you may note, we remained very careful in our forecasts that do nothing but stick to what exists elsewhere. Apple could surprise us by bringing out new components. It will be already partly the case with the NVidia controller that will be officially launched the following day, but they could go further with the help of Intel.

As we already mentioned it in previous news, our sources indicate that NVidia will make a major come-back in the future MacBook models. According to the last information, the GeForce M9300 et 9400 could power the video of some MacBook models. There are definitely delivering higher performance levels than those available from Intel. In addition, NVidia sent invitations to a Special Event entitled "NVidia optimized the Notebook PC" which will take place exactly 24 hours after Apple's October 14th event:

If the notebook presented on this teaser has a MacBook Pro-like design, NVidia might be giving some hints without unveiling the final design or key details of the forthcoming MacBook or MacBook Pro.