Seems like all I'm doing is post Apple threads lately but yeah. Thoughts? People are already in an uproar about the fact that the 13" didn't get an i3

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

Quick info:

MBP 13": C2D spec bumped to 2.4/2.66, 4GB ram now standard, 512GB SSD now available for $1K extra in a BTO, battery life extended to 10 hours, new GeForce 320M integrated graphics (custom for Apple, basically a 9400M on steroids)

MBP 15": i5 and i7 options, GeForce 330M GT, everything else is the same as 13". Base model $100 price hike, highest-end model $100 price cut.


MBP 17": i5 option only but you can CTO with an i7, everything else the same as 15". $200 price cut.




I don't need a new computer and <3 my thinkpad so this update isn't that relevant to me but I think it's a decent update (mainly because with a student discount a 13" w/ 4GB ram and an SSD now costs ~$1420 instead of $1700 (retail) and is moderately tolerable)

If the 13" got an i3, it would be stuck with a craptacular Intel integrated video card (worse than the 9400Ms on the old models). Instead, I'm sure the integrated 320M is going to be better than the old 9400M. And Core 2 Duos aren't that worse than i3s. They made the right move.

Other than that, don't care, still overpriced.

On another note, I recently found out someone hacked around the bios issues and now it's relatively easy to put a modern linux distro on a macbook. I will be doing this soon.

Wouldn't it be easy anyway? Isn't modern OSX basicly just a fancy closed source Linux distro?

Linux doesn't support EFI?

For Christ's sake.

And Linux is based on UNIX, right?

I'm happy that people are miffed about the 13" upgrade. It curbs my jealousy of the shiny new ones <_<

They didn't make the right move with the 13". Why does it have to be an i3? The logical option would be an i5, not an i3. i3 would be something I would expect on the regular Macbook.

All in all, the 13" they have there is only slightly better than the 13" I bought way back when the Macbook line first went Aluminum (not the MBPs).

NVidia's not allowed to build integrated GPUs for i3/i5/i7 motherboards though. So to have gone with an i3 or i5, they would've had to use an Intel integrated GPU in it or put a discrete NVidia GPU in it.

I'm no authority on this. My understanding was that there was some sort of bios-emulation layer going on and that most if not all distros use it. This is a semi-recent addition, or else I completely missed it. When I bought my mac, I did some searching and there was no (easy) way to get linux installed. Now I see stuff like this:

http://arunraghavan.net/2010/02/pure-efi-linux-boot-on-macbooks/

and the ubuntu docs say they support it out of the box, so likely vanilla debian will to.

W/out using the bios emulation thing, you have to use this:

http://refit.sourceforge.net/

I don't know if any distros use that by default.