It’s yet another great Tuesday for Mac lovers. Strangely, we got a little more than we were expecting today. Without much fanfare, Apple has released the much (and I mean MUCH) anticipated Intel Penryn based line of MacBook Pros. But wait, what do we have here? New MacBooks as well? Wow, for the first time in a while, Apple has surprised us with a nifty little upgrade to a product line that didn’t manage to get out to the rumor sites before hand. Well, at least not until yesterday.
In addition to the updated Penryn processors, the MacBook Pros are now the latest MacBook line to feature the Multi-touch trackpad, as found in the MacBook Air. Unfortunately, the MacBooks were not lucky enough to receive this feature this time around (but hey, next Tuesday is right around the corner). The MacBook line has, however, been updated slightly in terms of pricing. The prices the selves remain the same, but Apple has decided to be a little more generous in terms of hard drive space as well as RAM. The three models of MacBooks are now equipped with 120GB, 160GB and 250GB hard drives respectively and the two higher models now come with 2GB of memory standard (as oppose to having to pay $250 for an extra 1GB).
The pricing and base specs for the new MacBooks are as follows:
$1099. Macbook 13″ 2.1GHz / 1GB / 120GB / Combo Drive/ White
$1299. Macbook 13″ 2.4GHz / 2GB / 160GB / Super Drive / White
$1499. Macbook 13″ 2.4GHz / 2GB / 250GB / Super Drive / Black
On the Pro side, a major highlight of this release is of course the integration of the new Multi-Touch Trackpad, allowing additional hand (finger?) gestures to be used as oppose to the standard two finger scrolling found on the MacBooks. But that’s not all, the two higher models are now equipped with 512MB of video memory to go with those nice 8600M GT’s. Last but not least, last year, Apple refreshed it’s 15″ MacBook Pro’s to incorporate new, brighter, thinner and more power efficient LED backlight LCD display panels, however the 17″ model was left out. Well, good news, the 17″ model has finally gone LED. Now if only Apple would put some LED into those MacBooks.
The pricing and base specs for the new MacBook Pros are as follows:
$1999. Macbook Pro 15″ 2.4GHz / 2GB / 200GB / 256MB Vram
$2499. Macbook Pro 15″ 2.5GHz / 2GB / 250GB / 512MB Vram
$2799. Macbook Pro 17″ 2.5GHz / 2GB / 250GB / 512MB Vram
Both the updated MacBooks and MacBook Pros are available via the Apple Store starting today.