Apple Reloads Laptop Lineup

I had complained previously that I though the Unibody MacBooks were too expensive – $1500 for a 2.4Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM seemed like a lot to pay out. Well today at WWDC, Apple reloaded almost every laptop in their lineup, and things are much better now.

The cynical might say that it was in response to the Laptop Hunter series of commercials from Microsoft pushing that Windows PCs are cheaper (which they are when judged by the up-front price only). Though I would say its long overdue to fix their prices as well as features.

Starting with branding, the unibody 13″ MacBook is now the 13″ MacBook Pro. Along with adding back in the firewire port and a new SD card slot, the 13″ MBP is probably the best price/performance laptop Apple offers. For $1,199 you get a very high quality product – the only (tiny) imperfection is that it comes with 2GB instead of 4GB, although with Snow Leopard that might not be as big of a deal (all laptops sold between now and the Snow Leopard launch in September will get an upgrade to the new OS for $10).

The 15″ along with the 13″ laptops got the non-removable batteries. Wtih 7 hours of battery life, it stacks up head and shoulders above most commodity laptops with battery life between 2-3 hours. Any future comparisons to $599 laptops will be grossly off target.

Apple also introduced a cheaper 15″ laptop without discrete graphics for $1699, though to call the 9400M graphics an integrated GPU is a misnomer – it performs so much better than the Intel integrated graphics (even Intel’s most modern integrated GPU is way outclassed by the 9400M).

Apple cut the base price for the 17″ laptop by $200, and cut the price of the 13″ MacBook Air by $300 on the low end and $700 on the high end in addition to bumping CPU speed from 1.6 and 1.8GHz to 1.8 and 2.13GHz. The $1799 MBA model now is a perfect model for the road warrior – a sufficiently fast CPU and  128GB SSD for an affordable price. Once again, the tiny imperfection is the 2GB of RAM which would be an issue for those running Parallels or VMWare (though Boot Camp is an adequate alternative). The base price for the 1.8GHz model is now $1499, which seems to fit better in the new lineup.

The MacBook White (not its official name) got a bump last week up to 2.13GHz, minor but noted. I’m beginning to wonder if Apple will consider a laptop in the $799-849 price range before the year is out. One single MacBook model seems odd to me, though there isn’t much they can cut really. Apple insists on using the higher cost Intel CPUs (not celerons or other cheaper processors) and there aren’t really any other parts to remove (firewire?) to get a cheaper unit. So until component prices come down I don’t see it being too favorable to a cheaper unit but I hold out some hope.

Overall, the Apple laptop line is now set until the release of the mobile Nehalem chips sometime in the first half of 2010. Intel doesn’t appear to have much in the way of speed bumps for the Core 2 series of CPUs between now and then, and the only major change would be the upgrade of the 9400M to a slightly faster and less power hungry model (which would happen around the end of 2009).

As for myself, my MacBook just exited the three year AppleCare warranty period, so if there were a major issue with the unit (knock on wood there wont), I’d probably line up for the 2.53GHz MacBook 13″. With AppleCare it would cost around $1,800, but I wouldn’t need to consider buying a new Mac for another three-plus years* (late 2012 or 2013 – many tick/tocks further down on Intel’s cycle). Maybe an upgrade to an SSD sometime, but not until I’m comfortable with price/performance.

* Which is another point I could write a long entry on – how many people like using their PC laptop after 3 years without reinstalling Windows? When I had a Dell laptop I reinstalled Windows 2000 and XP at least once a year. I haven’t had to reinstall my Mac OS on my laptop (with the exception of when my HD failed). OSX holds up much better over time than XP or Vista does.