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The MacBook

April 10th, 2006

I think that’s the one that’s going to change a lot. Certainly in my part of town.

The MacBook Pro is for people who have a lot of money to drop on a laptop. The iMac is certainly big, as it’s cheap and fast, and it looks good. But laptops are a key market, and when the next consumer Mactel laptop comes out, I think that’s going to sell a lot–especially timed perhaps a month or so after Windows officially gets running on Mac computers.

Rumors now have the MacBook coming out in May, on the tail of announcements introducing Boot Camp and Parallels, two products that allow you to run Windows on Macs, either alternately or alongside with Mac OS X. Apple is honing the consumer laptop as well–better resolution (1280 x 720), a down point of past iBooks; the new resolution is almost the same as a 15″ Powerbook, but is on a 13.3″ widescreen display. This is a compromise between the tiny 12-inchers and larger screens, with good resolution without making the screen detail so tiny that you have to set all applications to display at zoomed-up sizes. The laptop will reportedly come with a Core Duo–not a solo, which would have hobbled it, making it harder to run dual OS’s.

And that last is a key point. In the classes I teach, usually only about 1 in 20 students has a Mac (just about right for market share, in fact). When I show them OS X in class as a demo, most are impressed and many want to buy one–but too many are wedded to Windows. But with a cheap laptop that can run both? I know a lot of my students will buy one…

For me, I made my decision almost a year ago, when I bought the last Powerbook G4 out of the gate. I buy a new laptop every three years, so it’ll be two more years before I snag a MacBook Pro. But by then, the kinks will have been worked out, and who knows–with Intel talking about quad-core processor chips a year from now, we might be looking at some wicked fast laptop chips by 2008.

In the meantime, I might just invest in an iMac….

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  1. ykw
    April 11th, 2006 at 03:13 | #1

    An imac with a 20″ lcd monitor with 1600 x 1200 resolution, driven with a DVI cable to make it very sharp, is not a bad setup for another $430.

    http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productlisting.aspx?c=us&cat=snp&category_id=5194&cs=19&l=en&Page=productlisting.aspx

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