MacBooks Get Upgrades -- Should You Have Waited?
Not content to sit back and bask in the praise for Leopard, Apple has given its MacBook line a bit of a freshening. None of the specs are a huge boost, but they will bring some welcome performance increases to the slick portables, and, like so many of Apple's surprise updates, will be enough to make anyone who purchased last week wish they'd waited.
All the MacBooks have moved to the Santa Rosa architecture. This is a new(er) offering from Intel that offers a better blend of performance and power efficiency for mobile computers.
More important, though, is the shift to a new graphics processor, the GMA X3100, which should offer much better performance in games and other graphics-intensive applications than the GMA 950 processor found in older MacBooks.
Finally, the MacBook Pro series top speed has been upped to 2.6-gigaherz from the previous 2.4-gigaherz, though that upgrade comes at a $250 premium. The base MacBook still starts at a quite economical $1,099. The MacBook Pro starts at $1,999, though if you want that 2.6-gigaherz chip, you'll have to spend at least $2,749.
So, if you were thinking of moving on to a new MacBook, now would probably be a good time -- before Apple upgrades again and you're one of the poor suckers who bought a week too early.
From Engadget
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