Daily Debrief 2nd Edition: No surprises at Apple laptop event
Tech Industry
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>> Welcome to the Daily Debrief. I'm CNET's Kara Suboy, here with senior associate editor, Michelle Thatcher [assumed spelling] for CNET Reviews. And we are at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, where an Apple laptop event has just concluded. And Michelle, what is the biggest news that came out of this event?
>> I think the aluminum MacBook is the biggest part of the announcement. People have really been asking for it for a long time, and they've wanted a MacBook, they've wanted an Apple laptop at a MacBook price point, that looks like a MacBook Pro.
>> Right. And so the body has been redesigned, it's a lot slimmer now, isn't it? A point nine five of an inch?
>> Yeah I guess it tapers a little bit, but at the thinnest part it does get less than an inch, which is kind of a big deal. It's really nice to not take up that much room in your laptop bag.
>> Now we also saw some changes to the MacBook Pro line.
>> We did, yeah.
>> Describe what we saw.
>> Well the seventeen inch laptop, it kind of surprised me, the seventeen inch version of the MacBook Pro is just getting a component refresh, which is not that big of a deal. But the fifteen inch laptop is getting a whole new manufacturing process. They're working from a single piece of aluminum, and just scraping away parts to make the case. And it's also getting dual graphics cards from nVidia, which is pretty cool. You can switch between integrated graphics, which will conserve battery life, and the dedicated graphics, which will give you better graphics performance, but maybe use a little more battery.
>> Mm-hmm. Now people had suspected that Apple was gonna team up with nVidia. So you were not surprised with this announcement.
>> I actually wasn't surprised at all.
>> By any announcement.
>> No, come to think of it. I guess the display was unexpected, but you know, I actually made a list of the characteristics that were rumored I suppose, and almost all of them came true.
>> Mm-hmm.
>> It was like a wish list out there in the internet world.
>> Now all these screens on these laptops are gonna be LED, is that right?
>> Yes, except for the lower end MacBook, the white MacBook, which got a price drop. It went from a thousand ninety nine to nine ninety nine, which is you know, a good thing, it's always good to pay less for the same thing. But they're gonna have the traditional LCD display still.
>> Okay. And by the way, that is the first entry Apple has into the laptop market for less than a thousand dollars.
>> It is, yeah. Yeah.
>> What did you think of that price? Nine ninety nine, I mean that's really only a buck less than a thousand dollars.
>> Yeah, I really don't think it's that big of a deal. You've been able to get Windows PCs for far less than a thousand dollars for a while. I mean it's a little bit of a concession I guess on Apple's part that people are concerned about the prices, even for premium products like what they're selling. But you know, if you're just, if you're just like not a fan boy and just a typical computer user, I don't know that a hundred dollars is really gonna tip the decision making process for you.
>> Okay. So going up, moving forward besides the aluminum case, some of the other hardware features, changes that we saw. The glass touch screen, that was a big one.
>> That's really cool actually. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on one. So it looks to me like essentially an iPhone, kind of embedded into your laptop, it's the best way I can come up with an analogy. It's a glass touch pad, and they've eliminated the button so that the touch pad itself is the button. And it's also, it's all gesture controlled as well, so you can do all your one finger, two finger, three finger, and that gets the added four finger gestures to control all of your software programs.
>> So we're just a little more than two months away from you know, the holidays. Was this announcement big enough, was this exciting enough to really you know, rev up Apple's laptop market?
>> I think, I think it was enough to keep the momentum going, yeah. I think that, I really think that aluminum MacBook is gonna appeal to a lot of people who can, not, who aren't necessarily looking for the cheapest laptop they can buy, but want like a quality premium product. And I think that that MacBook is gonna fall right into the sweet spot for them.
>> Perfect, thank you very much.
>> Sure.
>> CNET Reviews senior associate editor, Michelle Thatcher, I'm Kara Suboy. We'll see you on the next Daily Debrief.
