September 20th, 2006
MacBook Pro arriving fashionably late to the Merom party
Almost every PC notebook vendor and their brother is hawking Core 2 Duo powered notebooks these days and Mac-heads are starting to get a little miffed. Understandably so.
Didn’t Apple jumped into bed with Intel because they had a great chip pipeline and they could deliver the silicon - fast? Yes and yes. This time Apple can’t blame their inability to ship on Intel, though. It’s their own doing.
I’ve previously posted that Apple will release a MacBook Pro based on the Intel Core 2 Duo (formerly "Merom") processor in late October or early November and sources indicate that this is pretty close to the mark.
Apple’s slow adoption of the latest Intel chip has nothing to do with Intel at all. In fact, Apple has been sampling the Core 2 Duo chips since as far back as June. It’s Apple that has been putting the brakes on the C2D notebook launch. Of course they want to ship notebooks with the new silicon ASAP but there were a litany of problems with the original MacBook Pro (heat, whine, moo, battery, you name it) that they were forced to deal with first.
Now that the revised MBP motherboard design appears to be finished the company has devoted more resources to chipping it up to the Core 2 Duo. Personally, I don’t mind the delay. After the well-documented problems with the original MacBook Pro, Apple doesn’t need to rush the speed-bump out the door. They wisely elected to ship the first Core 2 Duo processors in upgraded iMacs that were just announced on 6 September, instead of trotting them out in portable enclosures first.
There’s a discreet possibility that Apple will pull a rabbit out of the hat at Photokina in Cologne Germany next Tuesday, but it’s more likely that you’ll be ordering your new C2D MacBook Pro some time after Hallowe’en.
The real question is: will Apple bump the MacBook to Core 2 Duo at the same time? Or will they make us spend the extra US$1,000 for the privilege?
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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