billpalmer.net

Why my next Mac will be a MacBook

So we can all stop pretending there's any chance that the iBook will be renamed to something other than "MacBook" when it goes Intel, right? At this point I think there's about as much suspense in that one as whether the next version of iLife was really going to be called "iLife '06"...as if they were randomly going to call this year's version "iLife '09." Even an employee at the Market Street Apple Store absent-mindedly referred to the iBook as the "MacBook" they day after the Keynote during a conversation about the MacBook Pro. It's not that he knows any big secrets that the rest of us don't; it's just that the logical naming convention for the new iBook is just that self-evident.

"MacBook" actually makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. I remember back in 1999, showing off my original iBook to a co-worker, and commenting that Apple had slyly left the word "Mac" out of the product's name entirely, in an effort to work around the perceived plague that the name seemingly carried with it back then. But that was then, this is now, and lots of people actually want a Mac these days, so why on earth shouldn't Apple's laptop line be easily identifiable as being Macs without the potential buyer having to look beyond the nomenclature? I think reasserting the fact that Apple's laptops are indeeds Macs is a great, great move by the company at this time.

But with Apple's impending laptop lineup presumably consisting of the MacBook and MacBook Pro, the more intriguing question is that of whether the two lines will actually join each other to become one solidified lineup. Although the current iBook/PowerBook lineup does make sense once you examine it from top to bottom, it's admittedly a bit difficult to satisfactorily explain to someone why the 12 inch PowerBook costs more than the 14 inch iBook before they go assuming that they're just paying extra for the silver paint job.

So you have to wonder...will the entire lineup become silver? Will we see the laptop line marketed as the following?

1) the 12 inch MacBook, available as either the MacBook or the MacBook Pro

2) the 15 inch MacBook, also available as either the MacBook or the MacBook Pro

3) the 17 inch MacBook, only available as a MacBook Pro

...or are we looking at something less unified, something more like what we have currently?

I've always felt that a laptop buyer should start with screen size (or screen resolution, actually, but try explaining that to a newbie), and then decide on whether or not "pro" specs are necessary. Right now that's kind of hard to do, but the above lineup would make it fairly easy...especially if the MacBook and the MacBook Pro look the same. Let's go ahead and eliminate any misperception that you're paying extra simply for the silver paint.

But then again, with both the iBook and the PowerBook running on G4 processors, we kind of have been paying extra for the silver paint job for the past year or two. That'll change now, with Intel's ridiculously faster processors allowing Apple to make the MacBook fast and the MacBook Pro even faster.

"Yes sir, the 'pro' version of the 12 inch MacBook is twice as fast. Do you want the 'pro' version for $300 extra?"

"Yeah of course, I want all the speed I can get" or "No thanks, the regular one is plenty fast for me."

Seems like an easy decision for each potential buyer, instead of the rummaging through details now required to figure out whether the iBook or PowerBook is more suited for you. Of course I'm oversimplifying it and there's more to it for some users (read: the geeks). Stuff like monitor spanning and card slots (presumably only available on the Pro) will make it an easy decision for those users who actually care about such specs, regardless of speed issues. But then again, those are the type of users who have likely already decided they want the fastest possible model before they get to the part where they find out whether the MacBook has such features.

I know there's some yacking out there about the lack of FireWire 800 and a PCMCIA card slot. Means nothing to me. Nor does it to ninety-nine percent of other existing and potential users. The other one percent of users have a legitimate gripe, especially those who have to wait for the new-style cards to come out and then replace all of their existing cards. But I can't recall a new technology as still-born as FireWire 800, which died about five minutes after it came into existence, and about ten seconds after Apple decided to remove FireWire from the iPod equation. I'm not saying there's a legitimate non-FireWire alternative to replace the lack of FireWire 800; I'm just saying that you had to know this was coming.

As for me, I'm awfully tempted to jump on a 15 inch MacBook Pro the day it hits the market. My iBook is fast enough, but I know how much more productive I could be on a machine whose processor rates out four to five times faster than the one I'm currently using. In fact, now would be the ideal time to part ways with my current G4 iBook, as it's still the current-model iBook and it's still under the original warranty, both of which will sit well with potential takers. If the initial MacBook Pro rollout had included a 12 inch model, I might already have one on order. Now that I've happily settled into a 12 inch life here on my iBook, I have to decide whether I actually want to go back to the 15 inch life. Sure, I could make use of the extra pixels. But I've also enjoyed the lighter weight and (especially) the smaller footprint.

So I've got to think about that. Do I wait until the 12 inch MacBook Pro hits the market, presumably within a few months? Or do I go ahead and wait for the 12 inch (non-Pro) MacBook, which we might not see until mid-year? Or do I just go ahead and take the plunge on the 15 inch MacBook Pro now? Lucky for me, I've got some time to think about it, as it won't see the light of day until "February," which in traditional Apple terms has meant "February 32nd" but here in the Intel age might mean twenty minutes from now. Most folks don't like buying "Rev. A" models, but I don't think it's as much of an issue as it used to be. Apple always used to want to hold something back until the second revision so they could get that secondary sales bump down the road, but what the heck are they holding back at this point? I'd say they've thrown in the kitchen sink this time. This thing's a multimedia iMac with a flip-top head.

In my case, the Rosetta translation stuff is a non-issue for me. I spend probably ninety-five percent of my time in consumer-level Apple applications, all of which are native already, and the rest of the time I'm in something like an FTP client where processing speed doesn't come into play. I don't use Classic. I don't use MS Office except for the rare times someone sends me a document, and in that case only to view it. I don't use Photoshop or any of Apple's not-ready-yet pro apps. I use Dreamweaver about an hour a month, and if it runs a bit slower, than I suppose that's a fair trade-off for having the entire rest of my experience four times faster.

My one concern? Battery life. The lack of anything about the topic stuck out like a wounded appendage during Steve's Keynote, and indeed I've heard from several folks that when the display units on the Expo show floor were unplugged in an attempt to view the battery life, the machines simply dropped into an endless "calculating" loop, almost as if such behavior had been dictated by an AppleScript of some kind. Let's hope that this is simply a matter of Apple having yet to certify the actual battery life, and therefore wanting to keep that particular statistic under wraps for now...and not some impending bad news about the machine only having a three hour battery life or some such nonsense. My current iBook is rated at five hours, and let's just say I wouldn't want to touch a machine that was rated at anything less. So we'll just have to see how that goes.

So at this point, while I don't know whether my next laptop will be a 12 inch or a 15 inch, or whether it'll be a Pro or a non-Pro model, or even whether it'll be white or silver, I do that it'll be a MacBook of some kind. It'll be my fourth Apple laptop, and to be honest, it's somehow comforting to know that I'll finally get to own one that has the word "Mac" in its name.