Software and Much More

New MacBooks are eventually open for sale now! Certainly, an interest in the contents of the new machines is growing. We all read the press release, of course, but we’d like to look inside the notebook and get an idea ourselves. What we want is to disassemble the notebook and see how everything works there.

Some, particularly passionate lovers of dismantling forget to stop at the right time. Don’t repeat this mistake because «inside» it is all very difficult. This can be seen by looking at the well-known iFixit, where the guys disassemble MacBooks and MacBooks Pro literally till the basic structure.

And here starts the interesting stuff. First, Apple, even having abandoned the chips from Intel for the sake of NFORCE, is still using 32-bit technology in their laptops, which means that you will not be able to expand the RAM of your MacBook to more than 4 GB. Secondly, according to iFixit, in respect of the MacBook Air it will be impossible to apply two NVIDIA videochips at the same time as it is done on the new MacBook and MacBook Pro, because the chips occupy too much space on the motherboard.

More is to come. For example, Bluetooth-cable runs between the layers of LCD panel, which makes it very difficult to replace and may require the purchase of the monitor entirely due to the minimal defect. The panel itself, on the other hand, is protected by a glass shield, fragile at first glance, but quite hard in reality. It can be replaced only as a whole, together with the aluminum frame.

Keyboard is orgonized similarly. It was clearly seen as one component by the Apple technicians. An attempt to replace some individual keys can result in replacement of the whole keyboard, which is quite expensive. However, the keyboard itself looks very stable.

New, unique system fans produce the positive impression due to larger number of blades that are more effective for cooling machines at a lower speed. This means that the laptop will be quieter, which is always good.

Built-in speakers are significantly better now. One cannot expect any serious bass from them but the quality of average sound is very good.

Battery indicator can now be seen on the left edge of the body, which is convenient.

OS X 10.5.5 has been also modified specifically for the new models, although noone have seen the release of 9F2114 so far.

The system settings were also modified: energy saver and the new multi-touch trackpad settings are now there.

By the way, the new multi-touch truckpad is one of the main breakthroughs of the new models.

Here is the video, on which Steve Jobbs explains how to operate the the new trackpad using 1,2,3 and 4 fingures.

What else? For the first time Apple has used optical drives with the SATA interface. This will allow you, for example, to replace the optics with a regular hard drive. Theoretically, you can equip your MacBook Pro with two hard drives of 500 GB each – 1 TB of memory in such a compact device! Notebooks are now equipped with the moisture sensors that will help to distinguish the real breakage from something being spilled on them.

We can’t help noting that the new MacBook and MacBook Pro can still be easily upgraded, access to RAM and hard drives is very easy.

In general, very interesting new products these are. Hopefully the Apple quality will speak for itself.

Tags: apple, Hardware

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.