Brian Garner
The mad geniuses over at iFixit have already thoroughly disassembled and examined the new MacBook, less than 24 hours since the product hit the Apple store.
The new model replaced the existing MacBook line, and kept the same $999 price point. The price point is one of the only aspects that has remained from the previous generation. The new MacBook instead borrows heavily from both the MacBook Pro and Air models.
Some of the major changes include:
- Polycarbonate unibody construction
- Display featuring LED backlighting
- A multi-touch glass trackpad
- Integrated battery
- No more FireWire or IR port
- No external battery indicator
- No Mini-DVI port, replaced by a Mini DisplayPort
iFixit has highlighted several interesting aspects of the new design:
- The new battery is only 5 more watt-hours than the previous version's yet it adds two hours of run time, meaning the machine is markedly more efficient
- The battery is actually lighter than the older model
- Unlike the earlier model, AirPort and Bluetooth share the same board, and all three antenna cables route into the display, meaning a possible improvement in Bluetooth range
- The MacBook has exactly the same GPU and CPU as the baseline 13" MacBook Pro
iFixit plans on creating detailed repair guides for the MacBook in the future, updates can be monitored by following the Twitter feed @ifixit.
David Schloss
Christine McKee
Amber Neely
Malcolm Owen
Andrew O'Hara
William Gallagher
Oliver Haslam
78 Comments
that is pretty impressive..
It actually looks like the battery, RAM and Hard Drive are technically user serviceable. Woo Hoo
Also impressive the amount of efficiency put into the machine.
On the down side, if the internals are same as the MBP13 it is sad that firewire was omitted would have been nice port for a backup drive.
Similarities? Like their FireWire and SD slot?
The rest of the day's annoucements look at least sort of interesting, but the new mac book fails badly. No FW?! Seriously, didn't they learn their lesson the last time they tried to remove FW?
They should have implemented FW3200 across the board in all new macs for the past year anyway. Maybe Light Peak can take it's place, but until then removing FW is just dumb. I was going to be in the market for a low end mac laptop soon, but I will most certainly not be getting one of these. Without FW3200 or some obvious way to add Light Peak in the future, I think I'll just hold out a bit longer.
I'm so dissapointed in the omission of Firewire. I was going to get the previous model white macbook because of it's lower price and Firewire. I then heard about this upgrade so I decided to wait a few days. Now this! I don't get it..
My video camera outputs Firewire. I was so looking forward to this purchase. I use both Macs and PCs. I understood why I was going to pay a little more and was Okay with it. Now, I just don't know. I'm going to investigate my options and one thing is for certain; I'm going to wait!