New 17" Macbook Pro announced at MacWorld

Will Clegg

Will Clegg

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From Macworld.com...

Ports: FireWire 800. 3 USB ports, ExpressCard 34 slot. Battery life indicator, Ethernet, mini DisplayPort. About what you'd expect. New glass trackpad as on the previous unibody MacBooks. 2.93 GHz, up to 8GB of memory at 1066 MHz DDR3 ram. Built-in both the GeForce 9400M and the GeForce 9600MT. 320GB hard drive standard. Up to 256GB SSD drive option. Plus the usual backlit keyboard, iSight, magnetic latch, etc. Works with the new DisplayPort Cinema Display.

For the last 8 months running, if you look at the list of laptops sold in US, MacBook has been #1 on the list. So here's the 17": 0.98 inches thin. World's thinnest 17-inch notebook. It's 6.6 pounds, which also makes it the lightest 17-inch notebook. 1920x1200 LED backlit. 140-degree height/120-degree width viewing angle. 700:1 contrast ratio; 60% greater color gamut than previous notebook display. It's got a glossy display, so they've also got a $50 anti-glare option. Same display properties as last 17".
Click to expand...
Also, the battery will not be removable anymore.
 
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Im glad they have a non-glossy display option, but is that the same as a matte screen?

Did all the whining/less than expected 15" glossy sales bring this about?

Looks like no anti-glare for 15" :(

Longer battery life is great, after 1000 cycles you'll have to take it to Apple to get it replaced. Depends how much you actually the batteries I suppose.

Anyone interested in the SSD option? Only 256gb but still cool. At $900, not so cool.
 
The entire bottom panel of the 17" Pro is held on by a hand full of screws. you can see this in the photos and the battery video. The whole thing comes off with easy access to the goods. Not really all that much of a hassle to remove, as far as I can tell. How often does one really need to replace the battery anyway? Only when it goes bad. Which is rare. Not an issue to me. Should only take a few minutes to swap out anything, Battery, Hard drive, RAM....

There's a lot of knee-jerk whining on the interwebs about not being able to replace the battery or upgrade the RAM or Hard drive. Some how people think that it's not user-upgradable anymore. But it's just a bunch of screws! In fact it looks like it's gonna be even easier to upgrade everything then it was in my 15" 2.2 Core 2. Especially the hard drive.

My complaints is that the 8GB of RAM and the matte screen options are not available on the 15"...yet. The 17" is just too damn big and bulky for my tastes. If I need wicked big screen, I got a 24"LCD for that.

But that won't be the case for long I figure. I'm guessing by the end of the year, the quad cores will end up in them, (and the iMac, since its basically a laptop built inside a bigass screen ) about the same time Snow Leopard roars its head to tame those multi-cores. And the matte screen option & larger RAM capacity will migrate to the 15" Until then, I see no desire to upgrade my 2.2. I just poped in a 320GB Segate drive and I've got 4GB RAM. Holding me over so far. Besides, I still need my DVI connection!!! And the extra FW400 port is quite handy, even though its the same bus as the FW800 and you can daisy chain the drives, there's just something about having that second psychal port on the side...

I hope FW3200 & e-Sata makes it on the next version. FW3200 is more likely then e-Sata I think.
 
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Read & Write Speeds of Solid State Hard Drives

Read & Write Speeds of Solid State Hard Drives

Does anyone know the difference in read/write speed of the 256GB SSD compare to the 7200 RPM Drives. I know the SSD drive starts up quicker but how about daily use with move large chunks of data around..?
Cheers,
Steve
 
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