The new MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air designs are intended to build on Apple's fast-growing sales in the notebook market. Executives say Apple has now over 17% of the U.S. retail notebook market and has supplanted Dell as the market leader in the all-important education market, at 39%.
All the new notebooks use a manufacturing technique developed for the original MacBook Air: instead of starting with an aluminum frame and bolting in parts, Apple starts with a 2.5-pound block of aluminum, which is carved out and shaped to receive parts. The result is a very light but extremely strong and rigid body, a design that also uses far fewer parts than previous Apple notebooks.
The new MacBook now has an LED backlight display, a sleek multi-touch glass trackpad, and new graphics based on the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chip, which combines the chipset and graphics processing unit in a single die. Apple says the result is five times faster than conventional integrated graphics designs, delivering 54 gigaflops of performance.
There are two models of MacBook, one with a 13.3-inch display, 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, the Nvidia chip, and a 160GB hard drive, priced at about US$1,300. For $300 more, you get the backlit display, a 2.4GHz Intel CPU, and 250GBs of disk.
The two new MacBook Pro models include two Nvidia graphics chipsets: the embedded 9400M, with about five hours of battery life, and the GeForce 9600M, with about 4 hours, as a separate part, for a total of 125 gigaflops of performance.
The Pro's new glass trackpad has nearly a 40% larger tracking surface, and now acts as a button itself, eliminating the need for a separate button. The trackpad now supports multi-touch gestures.
One model has a 15.4-inch screen, the 2.4GHz Intel CPU, both Nvidia chips, and 250GB hard drive, and a roughly $2,000 price tag. The $2,500 model adds a 2.53GHz Intel CPU, more memory and a 320MB disk.
The two new MacBook Air models, with prices unchanged at about $1,800 and $2,500, also sport the Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics chip, replacing an Intel chipset. Apple says the change will boost graphics performance by four times.
The lower-priced model features a 120GB disk, compared to 80GBs previously; the more expensive model now boasts a 128GB solid state disk, compared to the previous 64GB device.