New MacBook Pros released

[fleurya]

There are tons of matte vs. glossy threads on this forum. If you do some searching you'll find plenty of information. My personal choice is for matte because it makes the MBP usable in more places and I don't use the laptop screen to watch movies or play games, which in my opinion is the only time glossy is better.

 

[flilow06]

I'm happy I made the choice for glossy so far. Beautiful colors. I'm sitting next to a window right now with no problems.

 

[Tetsuo]

Ok, so MBP line has been updated. But there's no rumored 12" model, any chances to see it by the end of this year? :/

 

[bobtomay]

Just discovered that MCE Tech is offering a second hard drive bay for the MacBook Pros. The kit includes an enclosure for the SuperDrive so that you can use it externally. Dual 300gb 4200rpm, 250gb 5400rpm, or 200gb 7200rpm drives...awesome!

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

Edit: They said that the MB/MBP uses a non-standard 9.5mm optical drive for which no enclosures are available yet, but they give you the option of an external portable or desktop burner if you want it.

Looks pretty awesome if you just have to have the internal drive space. Think even if I did have to carry mine around would still go with an external. Their 160GB kit is $369 vs $310 I just paid for OWC's quad interface enclosure and a 750GB Seagate. It works out to $2.30 / GB vs $0.41 / GB.

Setting up a RAID0 internally would be pretty cool on the MBP though. And definitely can get a lot faster burners than the Super Drive, although I don't exactly know if the increased speed of maybe the Pioneer 112D would compensate for the loss of speed on FW vs the internal bus.

Guess I'll do a comparison this weekend and encode a 7+ GB movie to both the internal drive and the external on FW800. Am guessing I am going to see my times hampered by the slowness of the Super Drive though. Think what I'd really like would be to replace the SD. Also, think I remember baggss mentioning he has an external burner. He'd prolly know the difference.

 

[cwa107]

Ok, so MBP line has been updated. But there's no rumored 12" model, any chances to see it by the end of this year? :/

Only Steve Jobs knows for sure! Rumors are rumors...

 

[kaidomac]

Looks pretty awesome if you just have to have the internal drive space. Think even if I did have to carry mine around would still go with an external. Their 160GB kit is $369 vs $310 I just paid for OWC's quad interface enclosure and a 750GB Seagate. It works out to $2.30 / GB vs $0.41 / GB.

Setting up a RAID0 internally would be pretty cool on the MBP though. And definitely can get a lot faster burners than the Super Drive, although I don't exactly know if the increased speed of maybe the Pioneer 112D would compensate for the loss of speed on FW vs the internal bus.

Guess I'll do a comparison this weekend and encode a 7+ GB movie to both the internal drive and the external on FW800. Am guessing I am going to see my times hampered by the slowness of the Super Drive though. Think what I'd really like would be to replace the SD. Also, think I remember baggss mentioning he has an external burner. He'd prolly know the difference.

If I get it, I won't be doing RAID. I don't use the optical drive a whole ton of a lot, so an internal secondary hard drive would be put to much better use. Lacie offers a very nice slim external Firewire DVD burner with Lightscribe:

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10517

That would be perfect for toting around when I need to use a CD or DVD. Plus I could use the secondary internal drive to store SuperDuper backups, Parallels virtual machines, and so on. Only problems are that (1) IDE laptop drives aren't available in larger than 160gb and (2) 7200rpm IDE laptop drives aren't available in larger than 100gb sizes. So maximum capacity would be 160gb 5400rpm and maximum speed would be 100gb 7200rpm, compared to the optional 160gb 7200rpm drive in the MacBook Pro. So two 7200rpm internal drives for a total of 260gb...not bad