If you thought that Apple kept the white MacBook around only temporarily, you thought wrong. The white MacBook remained on Apple’s product listing, despite the introduction of the newer and faster unibody MacBooks. The newer MacBooks were more expensive than the white model, so Apple kept it around to serve the budget market. To confirm that the low-end MacBook will be around for a while, the company updated the machine today.
In a rare occurrence, the processor speed of the laptop is actually reduced, from 2.1Ghz to 2.0Ghz. It’s not exactly relevant though, as the machine got a much more powerful graphics processor: from the GMA X3100, to the NVIDIA’s 9400M architecture, which will surely bring a serious graphics boost to Apple’s cheapest laptop. In addition, the default configuration receives a doubling of memory, from 1GB to 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM.
Of interest is that the laptop retains its FireWire 400 port, despite the fact that the pricier unibody models lack the port. The upgraded white MacBook lacks the Mini DisplayPort, the connector Apple is standardising upon, retaining mini-DVI instead. Pricing remains the same.
On a related note, Apple also released QuicTime 7.6, which offers several security and bug fixes, for both Windows and Mac OS X.
“the processor speed of the laptop is actually reduced, from 2.1 GHz to 2.0 GHz” – yes, but the FSB has also been bumped up from 800 MHz to 1066 MHz, so even the processor may actually perform better.
The improved whitebook looks nice, but I’m still drawn to the nice looks and low weight of the aluminum macbook to replace my aging G4. I’ll probably get one once it’s available with the mobile core i7 (drools… next year?). I don’t mind the price premium.
P.S. I personally don’t care about firewire on notebooks, but I think they should still have a model with it because it’s still needed for a lot of audio and older video equipment.
Edited 2009-01-21 19:43 UTC
Exactly. Audio interfaces over USB still suck as they’re prone to latency and dropout issues. From a space perspective, there was no need to do away with the port. Basically Apple just saved a buck or two and seems to be hoping to eventually (once the WhiteBook is no more) force all musicians to buy a Pro.
I was recently confronted with the choice of whether to buy a new unibody MacBook or a used MacBook Pro (for around the same price). Honestly, if the MacBook had had FireWire I would have bought it, but since it didn’t I didn’t. And the old WhiteBook was out of the question due to the crappy graphics.
Perhaps if this new model had been out I might have gone with it… But no matter
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Edited 2009-01-21 20:14 UTC
Apple (and its fans) can hope.
Fortunately, a lot of musicians/producers/engineers don’t use Apple. In addition, such “coercion” tactics might backfire, as the open-source (and proprietary) audio alternatives are really good.
Yeah, tupp, go school Apple on how little business sense they have and how they are going to go out of business any day now – http://www.macrumors.com/2009/01/21/apple-reports-1-61-billion-prof…
Hey lurch_mojoff, in which reality distortion field did you hallucinate that my post was an attempt to “school” Apple?
This is an OS/technology forum — we make comments here. Moochman suggested that Apple might hope to “force all musicians” to buy an Apple product, and I made counter comments pertaining precisely to Moochman’s somewhat wishfull take on the situation.
Your insult is not directly pertinent to these comments nor, apparently, to reality.
However, since you brought up the issue of Apple’s earnings relative to its decision to exclude features, I would like to say that just because a company has a little money, that doesn’t excuse the company’s complacency and/or arrogance. If you check history, I believe that you will find a few outfits that suffered significantly because they overestimated their dominance of their market.
You don’t even have to review the past to find such cases — tomorrow, Microsoft is reporting their earnings for the last quarter.
On the other hand, even though Microsoft has been doing everything but make competitive products and is losing market share, its profit will still be several fold more than that of your beloved Apple.
A company may have money right now, but that does not mean that it’s course of action is correct nor sustainable.
Keep in mind that Microsoft isn’t Apple’s competition. Dell, HP/Compaq, Acer, and other hardware manufacturers are. Apple is and always has been a hardware company; their software solutions exist to support hardware sales. Granted, they seem to be getting a lot of their profit from music sales lately, but they remain primarily a computer and consumer device manufacturer and that is who they should be compared to in the market.
Look at their ads, for example. It’s not “Hi I’m OS X, and I’m Vista”, it’s Mac vs PC. Otherwise, why would they allow Windows to run on a Mac? If OS X were what they were all about, they’d never allow such competition to be possible. Truth be told, you bought a Mac and that’s what they wanted you to do; what you do with it from there is moot.
tupp, I don’t really find my comment all that insulting. Certainly not as insulting as your suggestions that I’m hallucinating and so on. But whatever.
Of all the information that Apple released, and that was reprinted in the article I linked to, the relevant metric is the 34% year over year growth in the sales of Mac portables. In hindsight I should have clarified that and spared you the effort to write this tirade of how even the mighty flounder and fall.
Every time Apple releases an new product, people like you, including you, come out of the woodwork to pick on all the small things that should have been done differently and all the sinister motives Apple has for not doing them differently, and always concluding that those would almost certainly backfire and lead Apple to their doom. And in doing that you overlook the realistically practical reasons Apple has for doing what they’ve done. In this particular case the engineers at Apple had to put all the ports in about half of the already cramped 8.94 inches that the side of the Macbook measures. Something’s got to give.
The reason for you always finding malevolence in Apple’s actions is a mistake all of us “OS/technology forum commenters”, a.k.a. nerds, make – we think that our needs in and opinions of a product are shared by ordinary folk, too. And they are not. The last decade of continual and all too often record growth in Mac sales shows that Apple knows very well their market. They know that the people who buy Macbooks by and large don’t care about Firewire and the people who care about Firewire by and large don’t buy Macbooks. No company can please everyone and that’s why Apple tries to please the 95 percentile. We just happen to fall in the other 5%.
As for Moochman’s comment, for one I refuse to believe that you didn’t get the implied “all musician that are in the market for Apple portables”, and for two I disagree with your retort because half of it still is based on the wrong premise that Apple is coercing anyone to do anything. Oh, and since I’m somewhat interested in the subject myself – would you care to share with us some of these open source alternatives that are “really good”.
Apple has lost over 60% value in the last year.
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AAPL#symbol=AAPL;range=5y
So? The stock price of a company is just a numeric representation of the opinion the irrational market has about the company and their prospects. The stress is on irrational. A lot of technology companies lost stock value without any particular reason. The market didn’t need much more than the mention of the word “recession”.
And also to put Apple’s results in perspective – look at how many of the big tech companies are announcing losses (or lack of growth) and are laying off thousands of employees.
You can get firewire pcmcia cards. The simple fact is that most people don’t need firewire and for general purpose use, it clearly lost to usb. I know apple favored firewire for a while, but it just doesnt make sense to put in the ports by default.
Ah, but where to stick the firewire PC card in a unibody MacBook? There are no PC card or ExpressCard slots.
I agree, USB is fine for amateur musicians like me who have time and patience to deal with latency issues and such, but if I were to get serious with my music I’d prefer a FireWire based setup.
Not to mention, Target Disk Mode is a lifesaver that dies with FireWire, unless Apple were to do a software update allowing its use over USB.
Wait for USB 3
But I doubt latency will be improved.
It will still be processor dependent.
…and of course, I bought one for my wife 2 weeks ago.
Life in the big city.
(She loves the machine, it’s just the classic “sour grapes” that everyone on the edge gets…)
Dammit!
I was hoping that by keeping the white one around they would continue improving the X3100 drivers (why does an X3100 perform worse than a GMA950 in OSX?)
Still good to see them moving back over to decent graphics chipsets anyhow.