Apple Notebook Event News: A Case for New Technology

As expected, Apple unveiled a new series of MacBook products, plus a new 24” Cinema Display. But what really took center stage were the technology used in the manufacturing of the notebook cases and the technology being placed inside these new lighter, thinner notebooks.

New Case Design

As speculated, Apple is using a new milling process to create notebook cases from a single block of aluminum. The result is a notebook that is stronger and lighter than notebooks produced by the previous manufacturing process, which used a collection of parts, including a chassis, frame, and shell, made from pressed aluminum or milled stock.

Apple’s new manufacturing process, which was used to produce the MacBook Air, starts with a single brick of aluminum that weigh 2.5 pounds. By removing material, the brick is milled and shaped into a unibody case that weighs a mere 1/2 pound (MacBook Air).

Apple will use this new method of manufacturing cases on all of its notebook products. And although it wasn’t mentioned, this process may also be used later in 2009 for new iMac models, which when you think about it, are just really big notebooks.

Multi-touch Glass Trackpad

New MacBooks will incorporate a new glass multi-touch trackpad that is 39% larger than previous offerings. The glass surface provides for “silky-smooth travel,” and the entire trackpad, with its multi-touch capabilities, serves as the mouse buttons.

The all-new glass trackpad will support new four-finger gestures, as well as two- and three-finger salutes. Two-finger gestures include pinch and rotate. Three-finger gestures include swiping to move between images or documents. The new four-finger gestures are used for switching between applications and controlling OS X’s Expose services.

Mini Display Port Connector

All new MacBooks will use the new mini display port connector, which can drive any display the older DVI port could drive, but at a fraction of its size. This preserves space and allows the new MacBooks to be thinner than their predecessors.

NVIDIA Graphics

Apple will use one of two NVIDIA chipsets to handle the MacBook’s graphics capabilities: the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M or the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M.

The 9400M has the chipset and GPU (graphics processing unit) on a single die. It contains 16 parallel graphics cores that can produce a stunning 54 Gflops of graphics performance. To put that in perspective, a base configuration using the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M should have real-world performance that is five times faster than the Intel integrated graphics solution used on some earlier MacBooks.

The 9600M is similar in design to the 9400M, but offers 32 graphics cores and 512 MB of graphics memory. Although no performance specs were provided at the Apple event, the 9600M should outperform the 8600M option used in older MacBook Pros.