Should I buy a MacBook now?
It's time to play yet another game of "what can we get, what are we waiting for?"
In early November, Apple released new macs based on the Santa Rosa chipset (better integrated GPU, 4GB RAM) with Merom CPUs. This was followed shortly by OSX 10.5 which (among other things) supports 64-bit execution which lets you use all that RAM. The hardware design in today's macs is mature and current systems are very capable.
But what's coming? There are two major mileposts in the near future:
January 2008: At MacWorld there will probably be new MacBooks based on the Penryn CPU. Penryn provides SSE4 instructions which will finally let x86 do all the fancy stuff that AltiVec could do back in the PowerPC days albeit much faster. Penryn uses a new 45nm process which means smaller transistors and a hafnium dielectric which uses 30% less electric power and switches transistors 20% faster. Penryn Xeon processors (for workstations) are 67% more powerful per watt, "power per watt" being the newer and IMHO far more meaningful metric than Mhz (clock speed). There are also rumors of Apple doing a significant redesign of the MacBook case - the first since the move from Titanium to Aluminum in January 2001. There's also a rumor of an ultraportable "MidgetBook" as matrushkaka and I have been calling it, which might be a very low cost flash-only device like the eeepc or it might just be a thinner 13" MacBook with no DVD drive. (Impatient hackers can run OSX on an eee subnotebook right now.)
May/June 2008: Penryn supports a 1333Mhz frontside bus, but that's not going to start paying off until the Montevina chipset which supports DDR3 RAM up to 1600Mhz. Montevina will also support X4500 graphics, HDMI, DisplayPort, WiMax, and better NAND disk caching. (Apple isn't necessarily guaranteeing support for all of those features, nor would they even if they intended to support them.) There will also be a quad-core Penryn chip for laptops, which won't be twice as fast as dual-core systems but will be impressive nonetheless. A quad-Penryn will probably run quite hot, so you might not want to buy rev.0 hardware.
In conclusion:
This is laptop-specific advice: the desktop chips and chipsets are released on a different schedule.
In early November, Apple released new macs based on the Santa Rosa chipset (better integrated GPU, 4GB RAM) with Merom CPUs. This was followed shortly by OSX 10.5 which (among other things) supports 64-bit execution which lets you use all that RAM. The hardware design in today's macs is mature and current systems are very capable.
But what's coming? There are two major mileposts in the near future:
January 2008: At MacWorld there will probably be new MacBooks based on the Penryn CPU. Penryn provides SSE4 instructions which will finally let x86 do all the fancy stuff that AltiVec could do back in the PowerPC days albeit much faster. Penryn uses a new 45nm process which means smaller transistors and a hafnium dielectric which uses 30% less electric power and switches transistors 20% faster. Penryn Xeon processors (for workstations) are 67% more powerful per watt, "power per watt" being the newer and IMHO far more meaningful metric than Mhz (clock speed). There are also rumors of Apple doing a significant redesign of the MacBook case - the first since the move from Titanium to Aluminum in January 2001. There's also a rumor of an ultraportable "MidgetBook" as matrushkaka and I have been calling it, which might be a very low cost flash-only device like the eeepc or it might just be a thinner 13" MacBook with no DVD drive. (Impatient hackers can run OSX on an eee subnotebook right now.)
May/June 2008: Penryn supports a 1333Mhz frontside bus, but that's not going to start paying off until the Montevina chipset which supports DDR3 RAM up to 1600Mhz. Montevina will also support X4500 graphics, HDMI, DisplayPort, WiMax, and better NAND disk caching. (Apple isn't necessarily guaranteeing support for all of those features, nor would they even if they intended to support them.) There will also be a quad-core Penryn chip for laptops, which won't be twice as fast as dual-core systems but will be impressive nonetheless. A quad-Penryn will probably run quite hot, so you might not want to buy rev.0 hardware.
In conclusion:
- Buy a mac now if you're looking for something stable and long term. Leopard is shipping with all new macs, the hardware design is fully mature, Santa Rosa and Merom are a good match.
- Don't buy a 13" MacBook if you're looking for a compact, ultraportable mac. Don't buy any MacBook if you're going to feel self-conscious carrying around a mac that "looks old". The new shit drops at MacWorld.
- Don't buy a mac in January 2008. At very least wait until March when they'll have worked out the bugs in the new case design and the Montevina chipset shows up.
- Buy a Penryn/Montevina mac in June 2008, but don't buy a quad-core until you're sure that it's not going to have a heat problem.
This is laptop-specific advice: the desktop chips and chipsets are released on a different schedule.