Or, more accurately, they’re not the laptops I’m looking for. Apple speed-bumped its already impressive MacBook line this morning, upping the speed, hard drive capacity, and RAM on their lower-end portables.
Unfortunately for me, I want the MacBook Pro to be revised because that’s the laptop I’m really jonzin’ for. Mystic, my aged PowerBook G4 1.5-GHz, has served me well, but it was underpowered when I bought it in July 2004 since Apple couldn’t find a way to squeeze a G5 into a PowerBook.
Three years is a long time to hold a laptop for a computer consultant, but that’s about what I’m hoping to average. True, I got four years (May 2000 to July 2004) from Trinity, my G3/500 Pismo PowerBook, but that last year was a horrible struggle that left me unable to run a lot of software. In fact, I would have bought a laptop a year earlier except that the best thing going was only a PowerBook G4 running at 1-GHz and that just seemed like such a lame upgrade over a G3/500.
That lack of portable performance (specifically performance per watt) hamstrung Apple to the point that that shifted from PowerPC to Intel chips. Now armed with Core 2 Duo chips in the portables, Apple’s laptops are again speedy.
For those looking at an everyday laptop, don’t discount the MacBooks based on my disappointment. The only significant difference right now—though it may change soon, because I think a MacBook Pro revision is imminent (he said hopefully)—is that the MacBook Pro line has a separate graphics card. For most folks, that doesn’t even matter. For people like me who want to do video editing with Shake, Final Cut Studio, etc., it’s show-stopping. Those programs won’t even run on a machine with integrated graphics.
So…I continue to hold my breath for the next MacBook Pro revision. I expect it within the next few weeks—probably at the World Wide Developers Conference in June. I’ll be waiting, cash in hand.