The new Apple Pro laptop series may look about the same as the old ones but open the hood on these little powerhouses and it’s the equivalent of adding a turbocharger onto a Hemi.
The 2011 MacBook Pro claims to have a battery life of 7 hours … hard to believe they’ve done this without changing the size of the case or weight from the old version.
It has a FaceTime HD camera which operates at 720p and allows you to video call from one Pro to another. This fast little bugger of a camera also lets you call other Mac Intel based devices and the iPhone.
Both the 13inch and 15 inch Pro models come with 4GB of ram. The 13 inch high end version spins a 500GB HDD drive and so to does the 15 inch low end version. The low end 13 inch model uses a 320GB HDD and the 17 incher a 720GB HDD. Display resolutions improve as you pay more. 1280 by 800 pixels at the low end and 1920 by 1200 in the top end 17inch. The machines stick with Mac OS X Snow Leopard software.
The Thunderbolt Intel super high speed connectivity technology that earlier this year appeared in the Mac Air now also resides in the Pro series. At 10 gigabytes per second transfer speeds it is 20 times faster than a USB 2.0 port … but so far not much is available to connect to it that can use the speed. Sooner or later though look out for some whiz bang gaming.
New AMD Radeon graphics processors in the high end models run about three times faster than their ancestors.
If you want quad core processing power then you have to go with the high end models, or you will be stuck with mere dual core performance at the low end.
In spite of what the rumor mill has been saying about the capabilities of the new Pro series, all these new technologies wrapped in the same old box still has come as a bit of a surprise … ahhh the price you ask.
You have 5 models to pick a price point with. The low end 13inch starts at $1199 and the 17inch tops out at $2499. In between … the other 3 models are spaced at $300 to $400 intervals.
Tags: 2011 MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro specs, thunderbolt connectivity
