No rumors. No predictions. No misinformation. Just the facts about Apple’s new portables, straight from Apple’s campus. Join Harry as the MacBook Pro he bought in June suddenly becomes an antique. Our liveblog of the press event starts at 10am Cupertino time.
[SHAMELESS PLUG: Technologizer will be liveblogging the Apple notebook event on 10/14/2008 @ 10am PT. Please join us.]
his is, I’m reasonably sure, the last time I’ll write in any detail about what Apple may announce tomorrow at its notebook event. I’m about to hit the hay, and will be at the event itself not too long after I wake up. But information (some of which may turn out to be misinformation) is still hitting the blogosphere, and I thought a quick update made sense.
First of all, if you read only one more pre-event post, make it this one by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. He’s the furthest thing from a rumormonger, and he seems quite positive about the following:
–the new MacBook Pro combines elements of the MacBook (latchless case), MacBook Air (black keyboard), and iMac (black frame around display) and indeed sports a case made out of one piece of aluminum;
–it has a glass touchpad with no button–you press the entire pad to click;
–this is a 15-inch MacBook Pro we’re talking about; there’s no new 17-inch one.
John then says “I have some educated guesses as to what else will be announced,” and I can’t quite tell if he means that everything after that sentence is less definitive. But he says that there are new MacBooks that are similar in industrial design to the new 15-inch Pro; that the MacBook Air is getting bigger hard drives; that all the systems have Nvidia’s 9400M GPU; and that the MacBook Pro also sports an Nvidia 9600M GT. (Yup, it supposedly has two GPUs.)
Oh…he also says that there is no $800 MacBook. (I’ll channel Joe Biden and say that again: There is no $800 MacBook.) But the current white MacBook will hang around at $999. And Apple will also introduce a 24-inch LED-backlit Cinema Display.
Okay, once you’ve read Daring Fireball, go to Engadget for a fuzzy photo of the new MacBook Pro. It certainly looks legit.
Actually, I think those are the only two posts you really need to read. See you at 10am tomorrow for our live coverage from Cupertino. Happy thought: By around 11:30am tomorrow, there will be absolutely no Macbook rumors to sort through. For a little while, at least…
[UPDATE: I did indeed ask Steve Jobs a question on behalf of the Technologizer community. Here are the details.]
At the typical Steve Jobs keynote unveiling one or more new Apple products, no time is set aside for questions. That’s not meant as stinging criticism: Time usually is set aside for attendees to get some hands-on exposure to the new products, and there are always Apple reps there who you can buttonhole for answers. But it’s rare to have an opportunity to pose queries to Steve Jobs himself.
Rare, but not unheard of: Every once in awhile he does open the floor to questions, and as I recall, this is more likely to happen in the more intimate setting of Apple’s campus “Town Hall” auditorium than the cavernous environs of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He’s also been known to linger in the demo area and chat with attendees. So it’s possible, at least, that those in attendance tomorrow (such as me) will get some face time with the man himself, or at least with other Apple bigwigs such as Phil Schiller.
It is. of course. kind of hard to decide what questions you’d ask at the end of an event that hasn’t happened yet. But assume for the moment that tomorrow’s announcements are at least vaguely along the lines that people expect, with significantly new MacBooks and a sharply lower entry price point. What would you ask Steve Jobs? Throw out some ideas; if I like any of ’em and have the chance, I’ll pose one to him.
(And yes, you could ask him questions that have nothing at all to do with tomorrow’s news. But if you did, I know what the answer would be: “We’re here to talk about our new notebooks.” Which is not unreasonable…)
[Photo of Steve Jobs from Wikipedia by Matthew Yohe. That’s a MacBook Air he’s holding, not some unannounced wondermac…]
[SHAMELESS PLUG: Technologizer will be liveblogging the Apple notebook event on 10/14/2008 @ 10am PT. Please join us.]
Apple predictions? I think I’ve declared more than once that I’m done making them–Apple is just too good at confounding expectations. So let’s call the thoughts I’m about to share about tomorrow’s Apple notebook event something else. Scenarios, speculations, stabs in the dark–whatever you please is okay with me.
For no particular reason, I’ll provide a predic–er, an informed guess about the likelihood that each of the following things will happen tomorrow, in the form of a percentage.
Shall we begin?
[SHAMELESS PLUG: Technologizer will be liveblogging the Apple notebook event on 10/14/2008 @ 10am PT. Please join us.]
This we know for sure: Apple is having an event next Tuesday, and it will involve notebooks. Possibly sub-$800 notebooks and/or notebooks carved out of solid blocks of aluminum. But really, Apple being Apple, it could announce almost anything on Tuesday–multiple anythings, even.
So over on Twitter, I asked my pals to chime in with their what they were hoping for–and since it was Twitter, they had to do it in a maximum of forty characters.
Here’s what folks told me:
wardomatic: Affordable (yet fast) Macbooks, please.
amarvin: i hope apple announces a 13-inch aluminum macbook but keeps the current macbooks as entry-level (cheaper) models.
kellieparker: free laptops for everyone! But seriously, I think it’s a MacBook & MBP refresh
dtnick: A MacBook that doesn’t crack. Is that too much to ask from them?
randypeterman: I would like Apple to announce a Mac Basic [$799], a Mac Book+ [$1199] & a MBP Upgrade for $1799.
james_atomic: MacBook pro air?
strixus: not a laptop. New Mini.
ugadawg94: I want a 15 inch MacBook.
CallanH: I hope the $800 laptop rumors are true. I know many people who would be into that.
mikebarton: Re: Apple, I think it’s got to be sub-$800 or go home in this economy. Here come the netbooks…http://ping.fm/SUO0F
PatrickMoorhead: Would like to see APL announce laptops with integrated graphics that can actually do something more useful than web surfing. [NOTE: Patrick works at AMD.]
pcubed: really hope for a high-end netbook, like an Air for the rest of us. Somewhere in the $650 range would be optimal.
willswideweb: Nothing. I can’t afford another laptop at the moment…
Now that you’ve read this wish list for Tuesday, why not add to it with a comment? Feel free to use way more than 140 characters if you need ’em…
And hey, if you want to follow me on Twitter, please do! I go by the cryptic handle of harrymccracken there.
The T-Mobile G1, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and now the BlackBerry Storm. The iPhone-like touchscreen phones are coming at us fast and furious. And while the Storm doesn’t look to be the mythical “iPhone killer” that folks like to talk about, it’s the most interesting iPhone rival from a hardware standpoint.
Continue Reading →
[SHAMELESS PLUG: Technologizer will be liveblogging the Apple notebook event on 10/14/2008 @ 10am PT. Please join us.]
Fact: There’s no better way to spur debate among technology fans than to start talking about whether Macs are overpriced in comparison to Windows PCs. I did that in a series of stories back in August, and they remain among the most-read, most-commented-upon pieces that Technologizer has published to date. (I found that my conclusions varied depending on which Macs I was looking at, and which PCs I compared them too…and I got feedback both from people who said I was too partial to Macs and from folks who said that I was unfair to ’em. I took that as a sign I was reasonably balanced.)
With new Apple portables due next week, I’ll need to update my assessment. Whatever Apple announces, it’ll change the comparison at least a little–and it seems a dead certainty that any new models will sport more RAM, larger hard drives, and faster CPUs than the ones they replace.
From a pure price standpoint, the most interesting rumor about next week’s news is that it will include an $800 MacBook, which would be the cheapest Apple portable ever. (Current MacBooks start at $1099.) It’s an entirely plausible idea, and while that doesn’t mean it’ll turn out to be true, it got me to thinking about what a machine might be like.
So why don’t we try to configure it, spec by spec?
When the crescendo of rumors about upcoming Apple products gets really deafening, it’s usually a sign that the company is about to hold a press event to unveil something (or several somethings). And it’s true again: Journalists have received invitations for an event at Apple in Cupertino next Tuesday, and to nobody’s surprise, that event involves notebooks:
[SHAMELESS PLUG: Technologizer will be liveblogging the Apple notebook event on 10/14/2008 @ 10am PT. Please join us.]
So Engadget has published a shot of what might be a next-generation MacBook built with an innovative manufacturing process:
The shot has several things in common with most tech-product spy shots:
1) It’s of an unannounced but eagerly-anticipated product;
2) Nobody really knows whether it’s real or not, except, maybe, for the person who leaked it;
3) It’s a horrible photo, one that’s fuzzy and which otherwise just doesn’t show the product in question in a manner that would help anyone judge its veracity.
