Amongst all the fancy announcements of new looks for the MacBooks and the 15-inch MacBook Pro someone was forgotten, or perhaps just overlooked. The 17-inch MacBook Pro was refreshed today, but it still has that old aluminum look (that look is sooo last week). The 17 incher now sports an LED-backlit display with a native resolution of 1920 x 1200. The hard drive options have been bumped to a max of 320 gigs for a traditional platter based disk, while those of you who like to roll solid state style can get a 128 gig drive for $500 more.
Worth noting for you glossy display haters: the 17-inch MacBook Pro is the only MacBook of this generation that offers an optional ‘anti-glare display,’ which I can only assume is the same as the matte display of yore.
A stock 17-inch MacBook Pro ships with 4 gigs of RAM, a 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo with 6MB shared L2 cache, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, a 320 gig drive, and a trackpad with a button (how retro!) for $2800.
[For what it’s worth, this isn’t the first time the 17” has lagged behind its smaller brother. The 15” MacBook Pro was first announced in January 2006, while the 17” didn’t roll off the line until the following April; so don’t count the big boy out yet. -DM]
Does this signal the end of the line for 17"? I was gonna jump on a new one, but even with the new graphics chips, 1440 by 900 is not that great.
It would make sense for them to hold off updating the 17" until the quad-core mobile chips hit. The extra chassis space will help with heat dissipation, and since Apple let loose with a dual GPU design just now, why not make the 17" hold two 9600GTs for good measure?
This is great.
This is the last chance to get a matte screen MacBook Pro.
Look, I know how great gloss screens are. My parents have a glossy screen iMac, and when the window is to its side, i.e. no reflections, the gloss screen is totally superb. But turn the screen towards the window, and it becomes a mass of reflections. I want a matte screen, and Apple shows its Microsoft'ish disdain and will not listen. First, the loss of the matte screen from the iMac, and then the MBP.
At least I'll be able to get a MacMini with matte cinema screen. Apple, one hopes, will never remove the matte screen from the cinema displays, otherwise it'll have all the graphics pro's up in arms.
Apple have lost my sales for the MBP and iMac. I'm going to try and make my current iMac and MBP (both matte) last as long as possible. I see that some computers can last 10 years.
I hope so, but that means more waiting.