The New MacBook Pro: More Apple awesomeness that I can’t afford.

Yesterday, Oct 14, 2008, Apple unveiled its new lineup of notebooks, ending the whole “brick” guessing game. The reason Apple code named it “brick” I think is because of the one piece-aluminium-laser-machined process that they used to carve out the notebook’s chassis. It’s pretty sweet. 

The tech blogs and the news wires inundated us with non-stop Apple coverage yesterday, all media outlet’s eyes are on this new Steve Jobs money maker. Apple fanboys all over the world were OOhing and AAhhing over the new features which are: An NVDIA 9600M GT Graphics Card and a new glass buttonless trackpad. 

But what does this mean to me personally? It comes to be more of a monetary issue. For the past 12 months my eyes have been on the MacBook Pro, the old one. The only reason I felt like I needed an Apple notebook is because I wanted to play WoW in places other than my desk. I want to be able to go to a friends house and play, or go be that douchebag at Starbucks taking up a seat all day and only drinking one tall drink.

The old MacBook model simply did not have the graphics capability to run WoW smoothly. I already have that problem playing WoW on my puny Mac mini, I don’t like taking my problems somewhere else. 

I’m still gunning for a MacBook Pro. But I surely wont turn down a MacBook. Someday, I will get one. Someday.

Here’s my personal rundown of the new features on both the MacBook and MacBook Pro:

NVDIA 9600M GT: Awesome, finally a MacBook not running on the Intel GMA950 chipset. Faster frame rates for my WoW. Also useful for iMovie and Photoshop, just incase I want to create the impromptu video or web graphic. 

All-new, smooth glass Multi-Touch trackpad: Well, from what I have heard this is a godsend for the right-clickers among us. Although I will be playing WoW with my Apple Wireless Mouse, this will be a welcome change to Apple’s trackpads. I just couldn’t get a hang of the 2-finger right click.

The Black Bezel: I think this is the sexiest part of the new MacBooks. It gives it a whole iMac feel. It’s like wearing a certain color to make your eyes pop, same effect, just awesome. Although people would prefer a matte finish on their displays (to reduce glare or whatnot) that could easily be fixed with some after market products. Also, I rarely go outdoors in the daytime.

Aluminum casing: Need I say more. It re-defines OOOH SHINY.

So either a $1600 MacBook, or a $2000 MacBook Pro. Either way, I can’t afford it right now.

Word of Warcraft Patch 3.0.2 released TODAY!

Obscured by Apple's MacBook announcement, Blizzard releases it's widely anticipated 3.0.2 Patch for the World of Warcraft.

From roborooster.com

This patch includes the 51-point talent trees, and the free reset of talent points. Although all realms are down right now (0200 PST - 1400 PST) if you log in to your account, WoW will detect that you need an update and will go ahead and start the download sequence for you.

I use a Mac, and for some reason my connection to the Blizzard servers are always slower than my friends with PC's, so it says that it will take around 3 hours to download. 

Digg is funny...

iTunes 8.0: The best iTunes update so far.

I like iTunes 8.0. all because of their new Genius Playlist.

It works. I have over 20GB of music in my music library and Genius picks songs that you would probably want to listen to next and arranges them in a playlist for you. I was a bit weary of the process because I have used playlist generators before like Tangerine! and it never really did anything for me.

But with Genius, I'm impressed. It actually picked songs that are related. Here's a quick example:

1. I picked Hatredy by Dethklok then I'll click the Genius Icon.


2. Then the Genius picks out a reasonable play list for you. As you can see, it didn't do a bad job. After picking from Dethklok it compiled a list of songs by: Killswitch Engage, As I Lay Dying, Tenacious D, Dragonforce, etc... See for yourself:


So far, I have used for creating a playlist for me to listen to while I do some PvP. I'm happy with it. It played some songs for me that I don't listen to as much, but it sounded right as the next song... it keep the energy level consistent.

The only bad thing that I can think about this newest iTunes update is, its kinda freaky in a way that Apple knows exactly what songs I have in my library. I guess just as long as everyone's playlist don't get subpoenaed, I'm fine with that for now.

For us Mac users, you can not get away from updating, but I urge you explore and check out this new feature. They're adding some kind of variant of the Genius playlist maker in some iPods with the new software update.