MacRumors

With even more media attention on Apple and the rumors surrounding the latest release, more sites have gone out of their way to call out those who got things wrong. While this has given an opportunity for some to say that you shouldn't listen rumors at all, I think it just goes to show that sources matter and not all rumors are created equal.

Much of the blame is being targeted at the Inquistr site who initiated the false rumor that Apple would be releasing an $800 MacBook based on what they described as a "reliable" source. Since we are unable to question these sources directly, the reliablity and reputation falls on the reporting sites that vet these rumors. As has been shown in the past, sites that have little experience in handling Apple rumors have proven to be less reliable.

The Inquisitr was not the only source to suggest price drops, however. Analyst Piper Jaffray has been expecting price drops on both MacBook and MacBook Pros since July. Initially they expected more modest drops (MacBook $1099->$999 and MacBook Pro $1999->$1799), but in the week before the release suggested the prices would fall to as low as $899 even for the aluminum models. It's no secret that we put less value in analyst reports as its difficult to distinguish what is speculation, original information or simply the reciting of circulating rumors.

Winners

The Chinese/Taiwanese web continues to be a major source of photos of unreleased Apple products. Apple.Pro was the most surprising source of legitimate Apple product images this round. Unfortunately, the site has been inconsistent. While their original MacBook Pro images and aluminum casings were spot on, their MacBook images and video were clearly wrong.

Meanwhile, detailed images of the MacBook Pro "brick" enclosure originated from Chinese forums with high quality images finally leaked. It appears that MacHome.com.cn was the original source of these images.

9to5Mac proves itself once more with their long-running "brick" rumor. 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had moved to a new manufacturing process for the new MacBook and also first described the inclusion of a glass trackpad. While they did miss a few other details (plastic MacBooks), the specificity of their accurate information is hard to ignore.

AppleInsider remains a consistent source of accurate Apple rumors. They were the first to reveal that Apple's notebooks would adopt aluminum enclosures akin to the iMac and MacBook Air. Early spottings of MacBook Pros on Apple Campus accurately described the elimination of the Firewire 400 port and "what appear[ed] to be" a mini-DVI port, which turned out to be a mini-DisplayPort. AppleInsider was also the first to report the surprising news that Apple was migrating away from Intel chipsets and was able to later confirm the NVIDIA chipsets.

Daring Fireball's John Gruber accurately predicted that October 14 would be the release date for Apple's new notebooks. Gruber later had a detailed description of the new laptops, though this information didn't come until the evening before their release.

Despite a lively forum debate, it's also clear that Engadget's JR source has had access to photographs of new Apple hardware immediately prior to their launch.

Losers

- Inquisitr - $800 Apple MacBook
- Piper Jaffray - $899 Aluminum MacBooks
- PCPer - MacBook Air shown but not released until January
- PhoneNews - Apple to update MacBook Air with faster processors (August)
- Kevin Rose - Blu-Ray in notebooks (though to be fair, Rose suggested this was from a "bad" source)
- Jason Calacanis - no Apple networked television (though no timeframe was given for the product)
- Fake mockups: one, two, three

Up Ahead

The next major Apple event that is scheduled is Macworld San Francisco 2009 in January 2009, though there has been a suggestion that we may see minor iMac updates prior to then.

Apple has posted a media alert announcing details for the October 21st release of their financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008. The results will cover sales from June 29th through September 27th, and will be released at the close of trading (4:00 PM Eastern / 1:00 PM Pacific) on Tuesday. Apple's conference call discussing the results will follow at 2:00 PM Pacific and will be available via a live audio webcast.

Apple's most significant release of the quarter was the iPhone 3G and the associated App Store in early July, with the iPod lineup also seeing a refresh near the end of the quarter. No new Macs were released during the quarter, but recent data from research firms Gartner and IDC suggest that quarterly U.S. Mac shipments are still growing ~30% year-over-year, well ahead of the pace set by the PC industry as a whole.

Primate Labs publishes new benchmark tests comparing the new MacBook (Late 2008) and MacBook Pro (Late 2008) to their predecessors. These benchmarks measure both processor and memory performance but do not appear to measure graphics capabilities (GPUs) which should be clearly improved in the new machines.

The findings show very little improvements in both processor and memory performance in the new laptops. Processor performance was unlikely to be greatly impacted as the processors remained much the same between the revisions. In theory, memory access should have been improved with bus speeds increasing to 1066MHz in the newest models, but it appears in practice the improvements are minimal.

Of course, real use performance of these new notebooks will be improved due to the faster graphics cards. In fact, ArsTechnica posts some early impressions from the new MacBook Pros and were impressed by its performance:

It's important to note here that, while no serious gamer is going to be trading in his or her main gaming machine for a MacBook Pro any time soon, this level of performance in such a compact form-factor and at this price-point is pretty impressive. The new MacBook Pro is definitely up to the task of gaming on the road or for use at LAN parties when lugging around a desktop machine finally starts making your back hurt.

Another early set of benchmarks from PCMag actually showed dramatic increases in 3D benchmarks even when compared to other PC laptops with the same graphics hardware. This original led some people to believe that both GPUs were being used. This has since been denied by NVIDIA. The discrepancy is hard to explain, however, so we may have to wait for more benchmarks to believe these dramatic gains.

In the latest email response from Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO responds to one customer's complaint that the new MacBook won't support HD camcorders:

Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2.

Whether or not you agree with Apple's decision to remove Firewire from its low end laptops, it's clear that Apple is abandoning the feature in their consumer-targeted machines.

Apple helped to develop Firewire in the 1990s and still offers Firewire support in the rest of their Macs at this time, with the notable exception of the new MacBooks.

iFixit has posted photos of the complete disassembly of the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. The disassembly guides show how to access the hard drive, battery and RAM on the new machines. No video adapter is included in the packaging.

Meanwhile, AppleInsider has posted a set of high quality comparison photos between the new 13" MacBook and new 15" MacBook Pro.

Apple announced today that the iTunes store is now offering High Definition prime time programming from all four of the major networks.

Weve got an incredible Fall 2008 TV lineup with over 70 primetime comedies and dramas, including many of the most popular shows on TV in stunning HD, said Eddy Cue, Apples vice president of Internet Services. With over 200 million episodes sold, iTunes customers have proven they love watching television on their computer, iPod, iPhone and TV with Apple TV.

Apple reports that they have sold over 200 million TV episodes with over one million HD episodes purchased since their initial offering just last month.

Apple's iTunes store now has over eight million songs, over 30,000 TV episodes and over 2,500 films (600 in HD).

When Apple introduced new MacBook Pro notebooks with two types of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) from NVIDIA, many wondered if both GPUs could be used simultaneously. NVIDIA's Hybrid SLI/GeForce Boost technology allows some notebook configurations to use one or both of a notebook's GPUs. When both GPUs are utilized simultaneously, the user can see dramatic performance boosts.

NVIDIA has since clarified that the new MacBook Pro only supports the ability to switch between the integrated and discrete GPUs for power conservation ("HybridPower"), but does not allow the use of both at the same time ("GeForce Boost"):

Apple's Macbook Pro (Late 2008) does feature both the NVIDIA GeForce9400M motherboard GPU for everyday computing and the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT discrete GPU for high graphics performance. You can switch between the Geforce 9400M motherboard GPU (called energy saver mode) and the Geforce 9600M GT discrete GPU (called performance mode), but you cannot use both GPU's at once in this implementation.

In fact, it's been revealed that switching between the two GPUs on the MacBook Pro requires the user to log out of Mac OS X. Apparently, other implementations of NVIDIA's Hybrid SLI allows on-the-fly switching between GPUs, so it's not clear if this limitation in the MacBook Pro is a software or hardware issue.

This inability to use both GPUs simultaneously appears to be a hardware limitation and unlikely to be improved in future software updates.

Reviews of the T-Mobile G1 Android phone have started trickling out. Walt Mossberg found the phone to be a "very good first effort".

Computerworld reveals, however, that the new Android phone also includes the ability for Google to remotely remove applications from the device:

In the Android Market terms of service, Google expressly says that it might remotely remove an application from user phones. "Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement ... in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion," the terms, linked to from the phone, read.

Apple received some negative press after it was revealed that the iPhone included the ability to remotely deactivate applications. Jobs later defended this ability:

"Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull"

Notably absent from the new MacBook Pro releases yesterday was an refresh of the 17" MacBook Pro. Instead, Apple provided a minor upgrade to the high-end MacBook Pro but with no change in external casing:

The updated 17-inch MacBook Pro keeps its original aluminum design, and now comes standard with a high resolution 1920 x 1200 LED-backlit display and a larger 320GB hard drive or an optional 128GB solid state drive.

As a result, there had been some uncertainty surrounding the fate of the new 17" MacBook Pro.

AppleInsider says, however, that the 17" MacBook Pro will see a refresh in the next few months to bring it in line with the latest MacBook Pro designs. The next opportunity for Apple to release new machines falls in January 2009 at Macworld San Francisco.

Intel's processor and chipset codenames have long been a source of confusion, and the adoption of NVIDIA's chipset in the newest MacBooks and MacBook Pros won't help matters.

One of the updates that had been long anticipated for the late 2008 MacBook and MacBook Pro updates has been the adoption of Intel's Montevina platform. This topic got lost with all the recent rumors of hardware redesigns and the adoption of NVIDIA's chipsets.

Despite Apple's migration to NVIDIA chipsets, Apple has still adopted the key advantages of the Montevina platform. This primarily includes a 1066MHz front side bus and the latest Penryn processors. How much of a difference (if any) the higher bus speeds have will have to wait for side-by-side benchmark testing, though the graphics performance of the new NVIDIA GPUs should give the new notebooks a clear graphical advantage.

This likely doesn't change anything for future planning as Apple will certainly adopt Intel's upcoming Nehalem processors over time. Nehalem is expected to offer a dramatic performance boost over existing processors. These next-generation Intel processors will be first launched for servers in Q4 2008, and come to desktop and mobile platforms in 2009.

Meanwhile, Intel confirms that Apple has quietly replaced the processors in the MacBook Air with the latest 45nm Penryn processors.

But new Intel processors did make a debut in the refresh of the MacBook Air. Instead of the Small-Form-Factor (SFF) 65-nanometer Merom chips, Apple has gone with with the more advanced 45-nanometer Penryn SSF processor. Penryn chips typically boast either 3MB or 6MB of cache memory versus the 2MB or 4MB that the older mobile procesors offer. (Cache memory speeds performance.)

The MacBook Air's processors now carry 6MB of cache memory (up from 3MB) and use a more power-efficient design. Apple had previously been using a custom 65-nm Merom chip. Any power savings from the new processors, however, may be offset by the adoption of the NVIDIA graphics card as Apple has not advertised any benefits to the change.

During the Question and Answer session of yesterday's media event, Steve Jobs responded to a number of questions of interest. The Apple Core blog summarizes the answers. Of note:

Blu-Ray - "Its great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, were waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace."

TouchScreen Display - "so far it hasnt made a lot of sense to us."

Netbook (low cost laptop) - "a nascent market thats just getting started."

While Apple did drop the price of the lowest-end MacBook yesterday to $999, that model retains the old MacBook architecture and casing. Readers should note, however, that the new entry level MacBook ($999) now ships with a SuperDrive. The previous $1099 MacBook contained only a Combo Drive.

Apple's new MacBooks and MacBook Pros have already arrived at retail stores. A forum user posted photos of the Sydney Apple Store setting up the new laptops.

Engadget posts a series of unboxing shots, and both Engadget and Macworld posted their first impressions. We've also gathered a few other notes of interest:

- MacBook is half a pound lighter than previous.
- MacBook Pro is two-tenths of a pound heavier than previous.
- Trackpad is surprisingly usable: "The click feels similar to the traditional button -- though slightly more resistive -- and you're able to do right-clicking by either a two-finger gesture or assigning one of the bottom corners." (Video demo) - Engadget
- "Place four fingers on the trackpad and flick them up, and Expose hides all your windows and exposes the desktop. Flick down with the same four fingers, and Expose shows all windows. Swipe left or right and the application switcher appears." - Macworld
- Kodawarisan has already posted some disassembly photos of the new MacBook.
- The mystery port from the leaked photos is the battery indicator (now on the side)
- The MacBook does not have Firewire
- The MacBook Pro has Firewire 800 (which supports Firewire 400)
- Apple has posted a manufacturing video (QuickTime) of how the new MacBooks are created from a slab of aluminum.
- The $1299 MacBook does not have a backlit keyboard