Live Ars Technica coverage of Apple’s 2008 notebook event

Newest updates are at the top!

-Event is over! We're heading to the briefing area for hands-on. :)

-Someone asked about touchscreens and if they make sense, and Steve said no, not right now

-"Can we see a netbook from Apple soon? and does the 17" MacBook Pro come out with the rest of them?" Steve says 17" is around now, but it's not updated like the new ones are updated. Steve says netbooks are a new market and "we'll see how it goes." 

-What's the concern about the glare on the new screens? Are you planning to incorporate matte screen in the future? Steve says "We're going straight glass. A few of our customers prefer matte screens, but a vast majority (capital "V" on Vast) prefer glass because of brighter colors, etc."

-How should we talk about cost of manufacturing, old vs. new? Apple says they'll talk more at the financial call but they're really excited about being able to drop prices

-What's the size and weight differences between new and old MacBooks? Tim Cook says MacBook goes from 1.08" to 0.95", same as the MacBook Pro. MacBook is 4.5 lbs and MacBook Pro is 5.5 lbs

-Someone asks whether the MacBook will be stealing demand from the high-end to the mid-end. Steve says "there may be some, but we'll see."

-Someone asked about 17" MacBook Pro, they say it's still around and being "refreshed"

-"The licensing is so complex, we're waiting until things settle down before we burden our customers with the cost of the licensing and the cost of the drives."

-Regarding Blu-ray: Steve says "You know, Blu-ray is a bag of hurt."

-Someone asks about Blu-ray and the display port. Steve says "As you know, HDMI is limited in the resolution it can drive." Tim Cook says you can get to HDMI via connectors, but for typical computer use, they think Display Port is the future of the computer

-Steve says Apple is the only company to take the new NVIDIA chips to market right now

-"We are not economists, you can ask other people about the economy who are smarter than us"

-Steve's blood pressure: 110/70, "This is all we're gonna talk about Steve's health today"

-Now the Q&A session coming, Jobs says they can't talk about earnings stuff that they're announcinglater this month

-"We've refined every single detail to make it sensual." — Jonathan Ive

-"We made the entire glass trackpad the button! Worked for months to develop just the right texture."

-"LED backlight is on instantly, energy efficient, takes less power than standard display. Colors have more pop."

-From the video:

-Watching video about the new MacBooks

-Shipping today, should be in stores tomorrow

-Second model adds faster processor, larger hard drive, backlit keyboard, $1599

-To get into all these features yesterday, it cost $1999 to step up to a MacBook Pro. Now you can get these features for $1299 in a MacBook

-5 hours of battery life, all environmentally friendly, slot-loading superdrive

-multitouch trackpad (glass), same unibody construction, 5x the graphics performance

-Introducing a new generation of MacBook: thinner, metal, all-new MacBook

-So these are the three top things we've heard, Steve says, and they're coming to the MacBook line

-People lust after the MacBook Pro's metal enclosure, want faster graphics, want an LED-backlit display

-Entry price is currently $1099 and we're gonna keep right on selling these, but reducing the price to $999

-Macbook! The best-selling Mac EVER

-One more thing…

-$899 available in November

-1920×1200, built-in iSight camera, built-in stereo speakers, MagSafe, Mini display Port, three-port USB 2.0 hub

-Another is USB, another is power

-One of the cords is a MagSafe connector to plug into notebook and power notebook

-Very thin, corner to corner glass, has some cool features for notebooks

-First cinema display that uses LED backlighting

-Another cool product: 24" new Cinema Display

-Second model for $2499 gives faster processor, solid state drive, available early November

-128GB SSD in the MacBook Air now, also putting in a Mini Display Port, $1799

-Now putting 120GB hard drive in, 50% more space

-MacBook Air is getting updated graphics, now getting the GeForce 9400M (have to run it a little slower for thermal considerations)

-We have another cool product to talk about: MacBook Air

-Apple has left out toxic chemicals, uses arsenic-free glass, BFR free, mercury free, PVC-free, highly-recyclable, 37% smaller packaging

-Shipping today, hits the stores tomorrow

-Second config is $2499, 15.4" screen, 2.53GHz, 6MB L2, can upgrade any model to 2.8GHz

-Come in two models, $1999 for 15.4" LED-backlit display, 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo/3MB L2, 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 memory, both NVIDIA chips, 250GB hard drive, slot-loading superdrive

-802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1, it's 0.95 inches thick

-Access battery and drives through lid in the bottom, full accessibility to battery and the drives

-MacBook Pro will have HDD and SSD (solid state drive)

-Mini Display is the equivalent of a fullsize DVI connector, building it into everything Apple makes

-Slot-load superdrive, MagSafe on the other side, gigabit ethernet, firewire 800 (no FW400 port), two USB, Mini Display Port, audio in & out, expresscard 34 slot, battery indicator to the side of the product

-Go into turbo mode and use the fastest graphics, 4 hours of battery life

-If you're using the 9400M you get 5 hours of battery life

-Include both of them in the new MacBook Pro

-The 9600M GT is state of the art, has 32 parallel graphics cores, 120 gigaflops, 512MB GDDR3

-Next up is next-gen graphics. NVIDIA GeForce 9400M in the MacBook pro. We've added the GeForce 9600M GT as well

-Just touched one. Confirmed: it's tough. ;)

-"Hundreds of people have worked on this for many, many, many months."

-Unibody saves us half the parts, much more rigid construction too. Steve is now passing around the enclosure to the audience so everyone can see how tough it is

-Precision aluminum unibody enclosure, LED backlit display, next-gen graphics, multitouch glass trackpad, mini display port connector (putting on all new macs), environmentally responsible

-Today we're replacing the old one… full glass screen (looks just like iMac), thin display, all connectors on one side

-Today introducing a new MacBook Pro

-Steve is now demoing the different gestures (one, two, three, four-fingered gestures)

-And we've added some more four-fingered gestures that are "really nice"

-Multiple buttons via software

-The entire trackpad is the button now, the entire thing gives you more area, keeps you from hunting for the button

-39% larger tracking area than we've ever had before, multitouch, glass for silky smooth travel (that's a quote)

-Gorgeous multitouch glass trackpad-New trackpad for notebooks

-If you compare this with the pro graphics in the MacBook Pro, we're at 55 percent of 3D graphics performance instead of 10 percent. If you look at overall graphics performance, we're at 82%

-From about 3x to 6x speedups when we go to play games on it (real world performance)

-Chipset + GPU on one die, 70% of die area is GPU, 16 parallel graphics cores, 54 Gigaflops of graphics performance, up to 5 times faster graphics than Intel integrated graphics

-This is the chip here: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M

-This is fantastic, but we'd like to use it in a notebook

-We also have some new graphics for notebooks: "NVIDIA came to us many months ago and talked to us about an amazing graphic part that would combine the chipset and an extremely powerful embedded graphics processor in one part."

-Using this to build some new notebooks. Ive is gone, Jobs is back.

-Solid slab of aluminum to start that weighed over 2.5 pounds and end with a "remarkably precise part" that only weighs a quarter of a pound. It's not only light, it's incredibly strong

-We use rough cutting to make the basic cutting and also create some of the mechanical features, blast the part, anodize it

-Rather than start with a thin piece of aluminum, Apple discovered if you start with a thick piece and remove parts to create features and the mechanical structure, we can make a much lighter and much stronger part

-You won't find a notebook as thin, robust as the MacBook Air

-For years, we've been looking for a new way to build a better notebook, and we think we've found it

-Finally, plastic gasket helps control the junction between palm rest and bottom case

-Palm rest is also made with aluminum and welded to the underside of the palm rest, provides support for trackpad and keyboard

-Structure is primarily derived from the internal frame, and the bottom of the case is a very thin aluminum pressing

-"I think you'll be surprised to know that the enclosure you can see makes a small contribution to the overall structure."

-Ive: "One of the most significant challenges is… when you're designing a product as thin and light as the MacBook Pro is making it strong, robust, rigid."