« ASUS Eee Top Provides an Inexpensive Touch Screen PC | Home | Wandering London With Your iPhone »
Few Surprises in Apple’s New Laptops
By Dave Peterson | October 14, 2008
Today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage once more to announce a refresh to the company’s laptops. Having bought a new MacBook Pro in March, I was somewhat relieved that nothing in the announcement was so amazing that I even considered needing to buy a new one.
The most talked about change is probably Apple’s new manufacturing technique, where a solid block of aluminum is carved out to make a strong light case for the laptop. Talk of this has been floating around the web for a while under the generic term “Apple brick”. For me, the most intriguing element of the new machines is a reworking of the trackpad, giving it a glass surface (and no separate button) and more sophisticated multi-touch, opening the door for command gestures using three and four fingers.
Last weekend, I Twitter-mused that I’d love to see the power ports located on both sides of the laptop. The new design does in fact shift the ports around, placing them all on the left side of the machine. This is a highly individual thing and might be great for some users, but for me it’s virtually a deal killer. I do almost all my laptop work sitting on the right end of my sofa. Power, router and external drives are all to my right. At this moment, I have three cables coming out of the right side of the machine and one (power) out of the left. The new design would (for me) place them all on the awkward left side.
Maybe the most interesting thing about today’s announcement is how accurate the rumor mill proved itself to be. There were almost no surprises, save for the details of pricing and the absence of a Blue-ray drive in the new MacBook Pro. The online tech rumor system is becoming good enough to effectively strip the sizzle from these Apple events.
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
October 15th, 2008 at 11:56 am
[...] by Apple must be something that should never even exist in their opinions. There are also voices unhappy about arrangement of all the power ports on the left side of the notebooks. But of course here happiness or unhappiness depends on personal [...]