Apple has refreshed the MacBook onto Intel’s new mobile platform this month, and the interesting part of that sentence is how boring it has become.
Three years ago an Apple laptop update meant waiting to see what could be squeezed out of a processor line that had stopped progressing, while the company explained why megahertz did not matter. Now Apple ships the same silicon as everybody else, on roughly the same schedule as everybody else, and competes on the parts it actually controls. Santa Rosa brings a faster bus, better integrated graphics and improved power management, and every manufacturer gets it at once.
That is the real consequence of the transition and it took until now to become obvious. Apple has stopped being a company with a hardware disadvantage it had to argue around. It has also stopped having any hardware advantage, which means the argument for buying one of these is entirely the software and the industrial design.
Fortunately that argument is strong at the moment, and it is about to get complicated. The operating system these machines were meant to ship with is four months late because the engineers went to the phone. So the current recommendation is a machine with a current processor running a system that is mature and stable and will be superseded in the autumn, sold by a company that has publicly said the Mac is not currently its priority.
I do not think that should stop anybody buying. Tiger works, the upgrade will be available, and waiting six months for an operating system while doing your actual work on something older is a bad trade. It is worth being clear-eyed about what it signals though. Apple is a company with one enormous bet running and everything else is being managed rather than driven.
The display technology is the thing I would actually wait for if I could. LED backlighting is coming to the professional line and it addresses the two real complaints about laptop screens, which are that they take a moment to reach full brightness and that the fluorescent tubes behind them contain mercury and dim with age. It is a better technology in every respect except cost, and cost falls.
What still separates these machines is not on any specification list. The trackpad is better than everybody else’s by a margin that is difficult to convey in text. The case does not creak. The machine sleeps and wakes reliably, which sounds like a low bar and is a bar most Windows laptops still trip over. Those are the things people cite two years later when asked why they bought another one.
Buy the MacBook rather than the professional one unless you need the screen or the graphics. The gap between them is smaller this generation than the price difference suggests.