Just in case you've been living in a proverbial cave, Apple introduced new consumer and professional laptops today. Here are a few areas I thought were interesting.
Unibody Construction
The most obvious thing about the new laptops is the new "brick" design, where the main "exoskeleton" of the laptop is machined from a solid block of aluminum. Where all other laptops (including previous models of MacBook Pro) are built with a skin of plastic or metal covering an internal structural skeleton, these new designs eschew the thin exterior with internal bracing in favor of a strong exterior holding all the parts together. I expect these new laptops feel like solid devices and will avoid most or all of the creaks and flexing that make traditionally designed and built laptops feel cheap and fragile. In addition, all the aluminum holding everything together should act a bit like a large heat sink helping to remove heat from the laptop's interior.
Multiple GPU's in the MacBook Pro
While the MacBook receives a massive upgrade in the form of integrated nVidia graphics (GeForce 9400M), the MacBook Pro received the integrated graphics AND discrete graphics (GeForce 9600M GT) with additional processing power. The really nifty part here is hybrid SLI, which allows the MBP to decide which GPU to use based on energy requirements and processing demands.
Presently, it appears you must log out to affect this change (I assume the Window Server must be restarted). But I think the more interesting question is whether both GPU's will be available concurrently for use my OpenCL and Grand Central under Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6. If so, that would represent a massive amount of processing power available in a laptop.
If Apple continues to rewrite many of the processor-intensive frameworks such as Core Animation, QuickTime, video compression codecs, and others to take advantage of this power, it will allow for a real change in what is possible in software. All this processing power can make new heavily animated UI features possible and dramatically reduce encoding, decoding, and transcoding time for all forms of media.
The especially nice thing about Apple's Mac OS X architecture and hardware integration is simple: if this kind of power is available in many new Mac's and it is built into the Snow Leopard core frameworks, all these benefits are "free" to the programmer and the consumer. Even old software could benefit from improvements in QuickTime and the frameworks.
Blu-ray and DRM
Contrary to rumor, Blu-ray drives were not included in the new laptops. Some people found this surprising, but I don't understand why. Steve Jobs said Blu-ray was a "bag of hurt" and that it did not make sense to inflict the licensing on consumers presently.
I think there are a few reasons why Apple is not including Blu-ray drives even as options at this point:
1) As in the market in general, the improved video quality is nice but not compelling. The slow uptake in Blu-ray is because upconverted DVD's look very good. The improvement from VHS to DVD was HUGE in both quality and convenience, and there is significant improvement from DVD to Blu-ray, but it is not of the same scale in quality and there is no improvement in convenience.
2) Apple makes money directly and indirectly through video downloads, and HD video downloads are just beginning to pick up steam. Blu-ray is the only remaining competitor to HD downloads in general, and Apple will never make big money on Blu-ray.
In addition, it seems clear that physical delivery will continue to lose sales to downloads and may eventually disappear entirely. Why I like the idea of owning a physical piece of media that cannot be taken from me, the copyright holders would like to have more control. They will continue to push for downloads and streams where they have tight control.
3) And that brings us to the final and perhaps biggest reason: I believe the copyright holders and Blu-ray licensing may force Apple to include large amounts of DRM controls to protect the content from Blu-ray discs much like Microsoft did in Vista with such "wonderful" results. The copyright holders never want to see a repeat of the situation with DVD's, where the encryption was broken and they lost control of the content stored in that format. I would be shocked if they allowed Apple to include Blu-ray video playback without ensuring that there was no way to every get the video into another format, and this may force Apple to make compromises they would rather not make.
FireWire
I find it depressing to see another example of a better technology (FireWire) losing out to a lesser technology (USB). After recently removing FireWire from various iPods, Apple has now released a MacBook that also does not include FireWire. Where I like the less CPU-dependent features of FireWire, the writing has been on the wall for some time.
FireWire has always been a good hard drive connection technology, but much of it's success has been in delivery DV video. With the increasing popularity of MPEG4 H.264 and flash-based video cameras, there is less and less need for FireWire. With no compelling reason to include it over USB (which is good-enough for many things), it will likely disappear as a viable technology over the next few years.
