Hayward’s Corner

The size of the 15.4” Mac book pro has been proving a bit restrictive lately for me with all the business traveling I’ve been doing, if you own one too then you’ll know what I mean when I also mention that the aluminum casing tends to get so hot it’s a bit of a loosing battle not to roast your own thighs.

I don’t know about you but a smaller (and less-warm) Mac-Top would certainly be a bit of a boon for those of us who live the old planes, trains and automobiles lifestyle.

I’ve been keeping a north-eye on the door and waiting to see what happens post-leapord-launch in some sort of lame hope that Apple would surprise me and announce the 13” pro complete with Nasa-shuttle-style heat resistant tiles on the underside.

Well, nothing so far, but, today I discovered a news article from PC World that Apple have silently upgraded the Mac Book chipset to be the same as its bigger pro cousin.

After some further looking around on the online store I found Apple are now offering a Ram upgrade for Mac books to 4 meg too (same as Pro upgrade) which is a bit of a wow factor as previously the max upgrade was restricted to 2 Meg

A new feature also enables the Mac Book to use up to 144 meg of additional swapped memory for graphics over the previous 64 meg so its creeping close enough to the 256Meg of the pro’s NVida GeForce 8600M to make me go, hmmm.

In fact if Apple threw NVida into the mac book right now and gave us that GDDR3 SDRAM we’d have a 13” mac book pro in our hands and all we’d have to do is buy the extra (not in box) mini-DVI to VGA lead for a projector. I’m sure I’d live happily without the DV to home cinema socket and the back light keyboard in the name of portability and cooler thighs afforded by the characteristics of the less heat-conductive case of the mac book.

So what to do? I’m very tempted to make the switch, even though the video memory is not as good, the trade off to a smaller almost-pro version is very tempting. It’s hard to imagine that Apple won’t bring out a smaller pro at some point. I think the way Apple refuse to make pre-announcements until it’s “in stores today” is not in the consumers best interest most of the time. On this point I’d be mighty sore if I brought the upgraded MacBook next week to then discover the 13” pro came out by end of year.

I know I’m sticking my head out here at bit with fellow Apple enthusiasts, but I am beginning to wonder when compared to some of the slick small machines on the market that the pro may be starting to look like a bit of a big hot brick. I know it certainly feels like one as I carry it around airport lounges a lot of the time.