It’s been a massive morning of Apple announcements out of the Worldwide Developers Conference in the US, so it’s only natural to summarise all the local implications here in one place. Here.
Apple just announced a spec bump for their 13-inch MacBook that brings it into MacBook Pro territory, and the MacBook Air got a whopping $US700 price drop.
Apple just announced new MacBook Pro models with the same upgraded, 7-hour battery life as the 17-inch MacBook Pro, a bump in memory, processor, and storage, as well as an SD-card slot. Most importantly, they’ll be shipping today. Yes!
Although the upgrades that Apple’s last-gen $US999 Macbooks received last week seemed unimpressive, when benchmarked and pitted against the $US1299 unibody Macbook, last-gen’s model proved to be 5% faster than its unibody counterpart at nearly every test. [PCWorld]
Before we had the great unibody fail-off of 2009, another batch of MacBooks began to falter on account of shoddy Nvidia hardware. Apple has extended their free repair offer on those laptops from two to three years after the date of purchase.
Apparently, several Apple users are reporting in forums that the screen in the unibody MacBooks has been quietly upgraded to MacBook Air standards, offering noticeably better quality than older units. It all started last April.
Ole’ Whitey, Apple’s last-gen, $US999 stalwart, has been treated to a second round of internal upgrades, this time a bit less impressive: a 133MHz processor bump, 40GB more storage and speedier DDR2-6400 RAM. [Apple—Thanks, Richard!]
“Don’t do nothing stupid.” That’s what Dwayne Stewart allegedly said to a man leaving the Apple Store, before he disappeared with the man’s Mac. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this, nor the last.
Intel is launching their Calpella quad-core notebook chips in the third quarter, according to DigiTimes’ sources. Knowing that Apple always nicks their chips first, we probably can expect new MacBook Pros around that timeframe.
Adding to the pile of evidence that MacBooks are gonna get built-in 3G—like the search for Mac hardware 3G testers—the updated System Profiler in Snow Leopard has a dedicated spot for WWAN, which would only be the case for built-in hardware. June does seem like a good time for 3G MacBooks, don’t you think? [AppleInsider]
