Apple’s MacBook Pro line-up received an upgrade last month. On Tuesday Apple geared up its plain vanilla MacBook with a tweaked CPU adding more storage and longer battery life, among other things. Excitedly it retained the device’s US$999 price point. The upgrade comes one month after Cupertino refreshed its MacBook Pro line and just weeks before its World Wide Developers Conference, to be held in San Francisco.
New MacBook Key Specs
• For the upgrade, Apple tweaked the MacBook’s Intel Core 2 Duo processor to deliver a clock speed of 2.4 GHz instead of 2.26 GHz as before.
• The new MacBook uses the Nvidia GeForce 320M instead of the GeForce 9400M. Both have 256 MB of video ram, or VRAM. However, the 9400M has only 16 CUDA processing cores while the 320M has 72.
• CUDA is an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture. This is a parallel computing architecture developed by Nvidia.
• The extra CUDA processing cores will accelerate multimedia applications, enabling faster video editing and easier photo management.
• The new MacBook can come with up to 500 GB of hard drive space, unlike its predecessor, introduced in October 2009, which had a 250 GB hard drive only
. • Battery life has been extended from seven hours to 10, depending on usage, according to Apple.
“Apple’s rationalizing their product line and, as they become more mature, they’re pushing things like the video card and the longer-life battery into the lower end of their product line,” explained Carl Howe, director of anywhere consumer research at the Yankee Group. Despite the upgrades, the MacBook remains at the lowest end of Apple’s laptop line, but even there it’s undercut on price, sometimes by several hundred dollars, by many Windows PCs. “The MacBook’s already a fairly expensive entry-level laptop. But Apple’s always fixed the selling price then produced devices for that price point. It doesn’t play the price competition game,” Howe added.
“Apple has plenty of momentum going into the market,” IDC’s Shim pointed out. “It seems to be working — they haven’t made a lot of fundamental changes, but consumers seem to like their products despite the price point.” “Consumers who want a more robust product that they can keep around for a long time, unlike your $350 netbook, will definitely get MacBooks,” Howe said.
Tags: computing architecture, cupertino, device architecture, drive space, Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, parallel computing, video ram, vram, windows pcs, world wide developers conference