Cupertino (CA) - Apple CEO Steve Jobs today introduced the new MacBook Pro notebook at the Apple Town Hall event held at Apple's Cupertino campus. As expected, the new notebook comes with more graphics horsepower performance thanks to a single-die hybrid graphics chip. It also features hard drive, processor and display upgrades and is manufactured from a single piece of aircraft-grade aluminum using a new manufacturing process called "Brick." The new MacBook Pro also comes with a glossy screen surrounded with black borders like the iMac and a bigger trackpad that supports multi-touch gestures.
The new MacBook Pro unibody enclosure is thinner than that the structure of previous models (0.95”) and enables easy access to the internal hard drive and battery without voiding the warranty. Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed previous rumors about Nvidia chipset move. The new MacBook Pro features two Nvidia graphics GPUs. The basic graphics chip is the yet announced GeForce 9400M, a single-die hybrid graphics solution consisting of an integrated graphics chipset as well as GPU with 16 cores and a theoretical maximum floating point performance of 54 GFlops.
According to Jobs, the 9400M runs "up to 5 times faster than Intel Integrated graphics," with a real world performance being "3 to 8 times" faster than what Intel offers. Apple adds the GeForce 9600M GT graphics core as an option – with 32 cores, a 512 MB frame buffer and 120 GFlops performance capability.
Users can switch between the integrated graphics core and the 9600M GT on-the-fly. When the new MacBook Pro is used with the integrated 9400M graphics, batter life is estimated at about five hours. Using the 9600M GT will cost about 1 hour of battery life. There was no word of OpenCL addition to Mac OS X Leopard that would allow these graphics cores to be used for general-purpose computing, but the upcoming Snow Leopard due early 2009 will most likely introduce such a capability.
The expansion ports are located on the left side and the optical DVD-R drive is found on the right side. The notebook features Magsafe power connector, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, two USB ports, a Mini DisplayPort for external display units, audio in and out (both analog and optical digital), an ExpressCard 34 expansion slot and a battery indicator. The Mini DisplayPort is a smaller version of the full-sized DVI connector, but Jobs said it can do everything that the full-size DVI can.
The new MacBook Pros are shipping today in two configurations. The 15.4” LED backlit model priced at $1999 model comes with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB L2 Cache, 2 GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, SuperDrive and two Nvidia processors (Nvidia 9400M and 9600M GT). The more expensive model priced at $2499 offers a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6 MB of L2 Cache, 4 GB of RAM, 512 MB of dedicated video memory and a bigger hard drive. Apple touts the new MacBook Pro as environmental-conscious notebook, with 37% less packaging and the EPEAT Gold rating.
The new MacBook Pro unibody enclosure is thinner than that the structure of previous models (0.95”) and enables easy access to the internal hard drive and battery without voiding the warranty. Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed previous rumors about Nvidia chipset move. The new MacBook Pro features two Nvidia graphics GPUs. The basic graphics chip is the yet announced GeForce 9400M, a single-die hybrid graphics solution consisting of an integrated graphics chipset as well as GPU with 16 cores and a theoretical maximum floating point performance of 54 GFlops.
According to Jobs, the 9400M runs "up to 5 times faster than Intel Integrated graphics," with a real world performance being "3 to 8 times" faster than what Intel offers. Apple adds the GeForce 9600M GT graphics core as an option – with 32 cores, a 512 MB frame buffer and 120 GFlops performance capability.
Users can switch between the integrated graphics core and the 9600M GT on-the-fly. When the new MacBook Pro is used with the integrated 9400M graphics, batter life is estimated at about five hours. Using the 9600M GT will cost about 1 hour of battery life. There was no word of OpenCL addition to Mac OS X Leopard that would allow these graphics cores to be used for general-purpose computing, but the upcoming Snow Leopard due early 2009 will most likely introduce such a capability.
The expansion ports are located on the left side and the optical DVD-R drive is found on the right side. The notebook features Magsafe power connector, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, two USB ports, a Mini DisplayPort for external display units, audio in and out (both analog and optical digital), an ExpressCard 34 expansion slot and a battery indicator. The Mini DisplayPort is a smaller version of the full-sized DVI connector, but Jobs said it can do everything that the full-size DVI can.
The new MacBook Pros are shipping today in two configurations. The 15.4” LED backlit model priced at $1999 model comes with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB L2 Cache, 2 GB 1066MHz DDR3 RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, SuperDrive and two Nvidia processors (Nvidia 9400M and 9600M GT). The more expensive model priced at $2499 offers a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 6 MB of L2 Cache, 4 GB of RAM, 512 MB of dedicated video memory and a bigger hard drive. Apple touts the new MacBook Pro as environmental-conscious notebook, with 37% less packaging and the EPEAT Gold rating.