Hands up if you own at least one apple product, come on, you must have one, even if its that ipod mini with 4GB disk space that you put in that draw you forgot about. So many of us are falling for the allure of Apple products even with their hefty price tag, but when they make these beautiful unibody Macbooks with i7 quad core sandy bridge processors and sometimes discrete graphics cards that can run WOW on ultra settings churning out 1200p of definition, who can refute their glory. Maybe its a bit noisy when the fans crank up, and do NOT touch the screen hinge area what ever you do, that sucka is hot. Ok it won’t damage you but its hot, the heat has got to go somewhere, its the rules of physics, transference on energy and all that.
What was my point, oh yeah, looks like the new MacBook Airs may be released late next week, as i recall thursdays or fridays are generally a launch day for apple, so looks like they’re a week away according to a fair few sources, or rather 1 sources that claims a few sources, of course it could be just chinese whispers at this point, but thats the internet for you eh grigs?
Anyway, as the OSX Lion operating system will be on the MBA and Mac Minis that are also due for their upgrade, then that means it will be in the app store to buy and download before then sometime before then. So make sure your systems are all up to date on the latest Snow Leopard (10.6.8) ready for a swift change over. For us over here in good ol’ Blighty, it comes with a very reasonable price tag of £20.99. Though if you purchased a mac product on or after the 6th june 2011 from apple or autherized reseller then you have 30 days after the official release of Lion to request the upgrade for free. It says go here http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/uptodate/, but it didn’t say anymore than what was said on the link to that page. Hopefully that’s due to change when it’s actually released into the wiled.
Now it just happens that one of the grig’s grig griggers is looking at getting the new MB Airs, Specs having been confirmed, but the lates is that it will have 128GB SSD as standard, 4GB RAM, and possibly i5 and i7 processors. ranging from 1.6 – 1.8Ghz, the 1.6 i5 can turbo boost to 2.3, whereas the 1.7 i7 can boost to 2.7 which is very respectable for an MacBook Air, the 1.8 boosts to 2.9. All 3 mentioned are 2 cores and 4 threads. Remember the previous 2010 MBA had regular core 2 duos, 2 cores 2 threads.
The architecture of the i series of intel chips is far better for efficiency and processing speeds than the core 2 duos. don’t let the number fool yas, though its hard to draw a direct comparison between the two, so i can’t say if a 1.8 i7 is better than a 2.4 core 2 duo for definite. But as that version can boost to 2.9 when needed then its a safe bet to say it is. That said my understanding of the boost technology is that it shuts down other cores to focus on the others, in the case of a duo that would be the other one, its not a big issu on the quads, but then when is a MacBook Air going to do some serious crunching?
No word on if there are any discrete graphics options for the Air, the 2010 had the Nvidia 320m, which apparently performs a little better than the sandy bridge intel HD3000 graphics that are part of the CPU chip. Normally onboard graphics suck, but the HD3000 was pretty good, just not discrete good. Well actually its better than low end discretes acording to this AnandTech article.
Anyway, other things apple, i keep seeing updates of people using IOS 5 beta, currently on v3 i believe, looking forward to that in the fall, always nice to get some new features, and this while cloud storage thing is interesting, $25 dollars a year to get your library of music downloadable in a high bitrate, legitimately, even those that you didn’t even get from apple in the first place. Sounds, good, i’ve got loads at 128kbps because 10 years ago that took up precious space dawg.