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MacBook Pro Gets Santa Rosa Chipset, LED Screen
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jun 06, 2007 09:46 AM
from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
frdmfghtr writes "TechNewsWorld is reporting that Apple has updated the MacBook Pro line with the Santa Rosa chipset from Intel. In addition, Apple is also introducing mercury-free displays with some models. 'When Apple presented new editions of its MacBook line last month, the company excluded the latest Intel Centrino chips, dubbed "Santa Rosa," which had been released just days prior. The chips have found their way into Apple's new high-end MacBook Pro notebooks, which the company revealed Tuesday. Certain models use mercury-free displays, falling in line with the company's recent ecological promises.'"
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How about... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, while Apple folks and other tech-savvy folks may know the Intel-based Macs run Windows, why does the news article not even mention that? For many people even considering buying a Mac, the fact that a laptop like this can easily run Windows natively or seamlessly alongside Mac OS X with packages like Parallels Desktop [parallels.com] at least bears repeating.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Funny)
I can't speak for you or the grandparent post's author, but I like to leave the house occasionally. A laptop is a good decision for people who occasionally stand, walk, or otherwise engage in self-locomotion.
I try to stick to the simple things, like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Quake 4, etc.
All that snarkiness aside, I am really into games, so I did exactly what you said. Powerful system, peripherals, and huge monitor. It's called my Wii, PS3, and my HD television.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Funny)
So, if you like to leave the house and be outdoors, WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU TAKING YOUR GAMING LAPTOP WITH YOU? For god's sake man, unglue yourself from the machine!
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, come on. Anyone even remotely considering buying a Mac can read all about its ability to run Windows programs on Apple's website. Given the fact that all new Macs have been able to do this for a year and a half now, it's not exactly news anymore. And it's not as if there has been a shortage of coverage of this ability, either. There's a difference between "bears repeating" and "repeating ad nauseam".
Re:How about... (Score:5, Informative)
That is very true. People don't understand Virtualization and Confuse it with Emulation. Emulators tend to have a lot of problems with compatibiliy because anything that the programmer didn't think of will not work. Virtualization is having the program run nativly and only emulating a few Low Level calls (Memory Containment, Video, Hardware). So if it request some strange opt-code from the processor the processor will nativly handle it, as well the other OS is running so unlike Wine which translate system calls to the host OS. Virtualization handles the OS's System Calls. But historically before Mac Going Intel Everything needed to be Emulated so some stuff didn't work or work well.
As for boot camp people don't understand where the Hardware code stops and the OS begins. Some people think boot camp is Windows Running on Top of OS X (Like a single user virutalization) Leaving resources reserved for OS X to keep it alive. All boot camp does is work as a boot loader for Windows and once windows is loaded Windows has full control of your system.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Funny)
you forgot to add "...muhuhuhahahaha"
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. And that's fine.
The fact that it can run Windows does not.
The fact that a *Mac* easily/natively/seamlessly runs Windows doesn't "distinguish" it from other computers, and that's exactly the point. And it does distinguish it from every other Mac for the over-two-decades before Intel-based Macs started shipping (horridly slow emulation aside, no matter how well it was done).
And as I said elsewhere, the fact that Macs can now run Windows is the single biggest reason people are buying Macs in many markets, especially education, research, and government, and there are still many people who don't understand that, Yes, Macs Really Can Run Windows.
It was at least worth a passing sentence in the article.
Re:How about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How about... (Score:5, Informative)
updated features (Score:4, Informative)
Re:updated features (Score:5, Informative)
Re:updated features (Score:5, Informative)
How about color quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
As some one who's concerned with color correction, though, I wonder how accurate and vivid are the colors on these new screens. I'm not ordering one to find out.
Re:How about color quality? (Score:4, Informative)
However, from what I understand, the iPod screens have been LED based for some time; while I don't have one myself, from what I've seen the colors are very nice on them.
Take that as you will 8-)
Cheers
Re:How about color quality? (Score:5, Informative)
The LEDs do just provide the backlight.
The color spectrum that a given LED provides will necessarily be different than the spectrum that CCF backlights generate, and different from the spectra that the various CRT monitor phosphors generate.
If a given portion of the spectrum is not present in the "white light" (using that term very loosely here) backlight, no amount of filtering by the LCD screen overlay can put it back. If this is not intuitive, imagine trying to create blue using only a pure-red LED backlight. (You can't do it - the backlight must have at least some blue).
So if, for example, the LED backlight has more green and red light available in its "white light" spectrum than a CCF backlight has, the LCD overlay so-illuminated can produce yellow tones (since red and green are the constituent primaries that make yellow) that a LCD illuminated with a CCF cannot. That gives the LED-illuminated LCD a wider gamut.
However, if both the LED-illuminated and the CCF-illuminated LCD overlays only filter light at a resolution of 8 bits per channel, they will both be able to display the same amount of information about color, but because the gamut of one is different from the gamut of the other, in many cases they will not be able to display the same colors.
The "6-bit" comment in my earlier post refers to the fact that Apple has been shipping 6-bit displays on its Powerbooks and MacBook pros for a while. I believe there has been a /. post on this situation.
If a manufacturer provides more bit depth (more than 8 bits per channel, f.e.) the LCD overlay will be able to filter the available light more finely than 8- or 6-bit displays can do. In general, an 8-bit display should in fact have a larger (but not necessarily wider) gamut than a 6-bit. A 10-, 12-, or (allow me to dream here) 16-bit-per-channel display would have still larger (but again, not necessarily wider).
In an LCD display the spectrum of the backlight will determine how wide the gamut can be at its absolute maximum - if a color is not present in that spectrum, it cannot be filtered into existance by the LCD overlay. By the same token, the bit-depth-per-channel of the LCD overlay will determine how many individual color tones are in that gamut.
In reality, it's a lot more complicated than this, but this is the gist of it.
LED Screen (Score:5, Funny)
display (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish they quit keeping the "price points" (Score:5, Interesting)
I like the discreet video, I do not need the 2.4, the monster drive, the large memory....
so what about 1.66 or 1.83s with similar features, chipset, and such at a lower cost. 1gb memory, discreet graphics, for around $1500?
Are they trying to protect the value of the previous generation still on the shelf?
Re:I wish they quit keeping the "price points" (Score:5, Insightful)
When I bought my MacBook (in January), I was a little wary of the idea of share video/system RAM, but it actually makes sense if you're not doing 3D work. Why carry around a bunch of RAM for your display if you're only going to render 2D windows with text and images? I've even played a few 3D games on it, and it performs acceptably, though has to work pretty hard and gets quite hot. Plugging in a 1680 x 1050 additional screen was no problem and it looks great for photos/videos.
Seriously, if you're a gamer, get a desktop; if you're a 3D artist, get a MacBook Pro; but if you're someone who wants a fully-featured laptop for $1500, just give up on your 'I have to have the pro level gear' attitude and get the black MacBook. You'll be glad you did.
Yay! nVidia! (Score:5, Insightful)
(ATI's drivers are teh suck, on OS X as well as Linux.)
((Opinions mine, not IBM's.))
Re:Apple surrenders? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple simply issued a statement about its product environmental plans, among other things.
Numerous other vendors were "greener" by Greenpeace standards because they had a public "environmental plan", or even a "plan to have a plan", whereas Apple was silent on futures as it relates to future products, as it always is.
Perhaps Jobs thought it pragmatic to offer its plan publicly so that it would stop getting hammered by Greenpeace as having one of the worst environmental commitments in the industry, when in reality it has one of the best (sure, sure, cue the "but so-and-so is better/first/whatever than Apple is such-and-such category" comments). And besides, I thought it was actions, not lip service about possible future directions, that actually mattered?
But the bottom line is Apple didn't "surrender"; it just published what its already-existing environmental plans were. If you call that a "surrender", then, hey, wave the white flag, Apple.
Re:Apple surrenders? (Score:5, Interesting)
From talking with my former co-workers, Apple had been working with engineering sample LED backlight systems for almost a year when Greenpeace made their attention whoring report. Apple didn't choose LED systems only because they were mercury-free, they were also looking at lower power, brighter, longer lasting, and far cheaper to mass produce than cold cathode.
Clearly Greenpeace had learned Apple was working on migrating their whole lineup to "greener", so they beat them to the punch with a completely bogus report. At that point, anything Apple did would seem as if it was a reaction to Greenpeace. Engineering lead times are far too long for these new backlights to have been brought in after the Greenpeace slander job.
Re:How does the chipset help? (Score:5, Informative)