Speeds and Feeds

Google is developing an operating system of its own, based on the company's Chrome browser and intended primarily for use in low-cost Netbooks. Now I'll tell you why I think Google is doing it.

Like any other commercial enterprise, Google is trying to make money. No secret there. But Google doesn't make money the way other computer software companies do.

(Credit: Google)

Microsoft, for example, makes money mostly by selling software (and a few hardware products) to computer users. There are two sides to this plan. Microsoft wants to make computers more valuable, so buyers will spend more of their income on computers; and it wants to increase the share it receives of that budget.

What makes Google unusual is that it wants a share of a different budget: the time people spend in front of their computers. Google makes money by displaying ads on a small part of the display while people view Internet content on the rest. Not all the time, of course, but the opportunity is there, and Google's multibillion-dollar revenue shows how well this strategy can work.

Turning the Chrome browser into the Chrome OS is technically straightforward, though of course it'll take a lot of work. A browser already has most of the key elements of any OS: application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow application software to display content and accept user input, store and retrieve data from mass storage, communicate over the Internet, and so on. Google will have to add a driver model and some other things that don't exist in a browser, but it can learn from how these things are done in existing operating systems, and possibly even borrow much of the code directly from Linux; there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

Existing operating systems such as Windows support a far wider variety of programming languages and provide far more services than Chrome OS will, but Chrome will probably be plenty good enough for Netbooks. (Personally, I don't think Netbooks are good for much, and many Netbook buyers seem to agree as shown by the huge volume of refurbished systems now available from remarketers like Woot.com.)

So, Google is after your time, not your money. It can try to get more of your time in the same ways Microsoft tries to get more of your money. Will the Chrome OS increase the time people spend in front of the computer? No, quite the opposite. There will inevitably be less to do on a Chrome OS computer than on a Mac or Windows machine. Buying a Chrome-based Netbook means giving up the chance to run most Windows games, Apple's iLife suite, and other popular software.

But for Google, the key is this: once you've got a Chrome system, Google's in charge of ALL the time you spend with it.

I don't think that's good enough, and it looks like Google feels the same way; the company intends to implement the whole Chrome OS environment within the Chrome browser so Linux, Mac and Windows users can also run Chrome applications. This plan is necessary, since Google can't very well hope to muscle aside the incumbents, but it means that Netbook buyers will have no reason to prefer a Chrome-based machine.

Or will they? Linux may be free, but Google can undercut that price if it's willing to cut OEMs in on its ad revenue. In this way, Google could bring to market a subsidized pricing model we usually associate only with 3G-equipped notebooks. Google won't have nearly as much money to throw around as the cell phone operators do--maybe just a few unpredictable dollars per month averaged across all Chrome OS users vs. the reliable $60/month subscription fees associated with 3G cards--but that could still add up. Even a $20 subsidy could amount to 10 percent of the sale price of a cheap Netbook, which could tip the balance in favor of Chrome.

Like I said, it seems to me that Netbooks aren't the ideal platform for this strategy. The Google model can't work as well on a small screen, since users will be reluctant to share what little space they have with Google's ads. But they'll work well enough, and Google has no realistic chance to place Chrome on mainstream notebook and desktop systems except in the same narrow markets where Linux sells today. (And not all of those; for example, Chrome has no shot at the engineering workstation market, where Linux is popular.)

So I'm sure we'll see some number of Chrome OS-based machines on the market in 2010, and then we'll see what happens. My guess is that Chrome will do about as well as Linux has done in the Netbook business: not well. A lot of people will try it, possibly enticed by those lightly subsidized prices and the usual interest in novel computing platforms (the information-technology equivalent of the Coolidge effect, which perhaps could be known as the Glaskowsky effect.)

And then most of those people will return those machines, or give them to their ungrateful children, or just toss them onto a shelf to gather dust, and they won't buy more of the same--at least not until Google spends a few more years building Chrome OS into a fully competitive product, which I'm sure it will do. Google's big enough, and it knows there's a business here. It just won't be ready to take full advantage of the opportunity just yet.

Apple's announcements this week expanded the range of the MacBook Pro product line, which now covers starting prices from $1,199 to $2,499.

In effect, the Pro line has absorbed the aluminum-cased models from the MacBook line, which is now reduced to a single model with a white plastic case, a look that debuted over three years ago.

Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

Some "Pro" models now have features that used to be hallmarks of the basic MacBook notebooks: integrated graphics and no ExpressCard slot. I think of these as consumer-oriented choices, and I'll throw in the standard glossy screen finish on the 13-inch and 15-inch models. A glossy screen looks better for movies, but it's unacceptable for some professional users.

Consumers should be happy to migrate to the MacBook Pro line, since they can now get features and options never before offered on MacBooks: FireWire 800, for example, and support for up to 8GB of DRAM.

Professional users, on the other hand, are now reduced to just one good choice: the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which includes an ExpressCard slot and can be ordered with an antiglare screen.

So in a way, Apple's newly expanded notebook line is narrower than it used to be -- there's room both above and below, especially if the plastic MacBook is allowed to fade gracefully into history.

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Last week, I attended a press event in Los Angeles hosted by Hewlett-Packard's workstation business unit. Hewlett-Packard was preparing for this week's announcement of three new Z-series workstation models: the Z400, Z600, and Z800.

HP briefed the reporters and analysts with all the key details of the products (the speeds and feeds, as we say), took us to visit a couple of HP's key customers in the area, and hosted presentations by software partners and more customers.

The new HP Z-Series workstations.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

The workstations are very nice, especially the Z600 and Z800: high-quality dual-processor systems based on Intel's newest Xeon 5500-series processors with specific adaptations to distinguish them from ordinary PCs. Even the Z400, though based on a more basic PC-like design, uses a single Xeon processor and provides two 16-lane PCI Express Gen2 slots.

The customer visits were well chosen: one at BMW Designworks and another at DreamWorks, the movie studio that just released Monsters vs. Aliens.

BMW Designworks actually assisted with the industrial design of the new HP workstations. They're handsome machines, but not exactly pretty--certainly not in the way Apple's Mac Pro is.

More importantly, however, the HP-BMW design is functionally superior. In about the same case size as the Mac Pro, HP's Z800 has room for more RAM, more expansion cards, and more disk drives. BMW also worked handles into the design, and they work better than Apple's.

The difference in RAM is quite substantial. It isn't just about the slots (eight in the Mac Pro, twelve in the Z800)--but even more in the fact that HP supports 16GB dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs), while Apple's machine goes only up to 4GB per slot. That's 192GB for the HP and 32GB for the Mac.

To be fair, HP is merely promising to offer 16GB DIMMs by the end of 2009; you can't get them today. Apple rarely preannounces anything, so it's possible that the Mac Pro will support more RAM by then, but HP's advantage in slot count should keep it on top.

More RAM can often give more performance than a faster CPU, especially in memory-hungry engineering applications. If the software overflows the physical memory and must start using virtual memory, performance can plummet.

These are very nice machines. But they're also expensive. The Z800 starts at less than $2,000 (actually a good bit cheaper than the Mac Pro's entry price), but most buyers will aim higher. In fact, it's no big deal to spend $10,000 or more on a high-end workstation.

Does that seem like a lot of money to spend on a PC for business use at a time when many businesses are struggling? Quite the opposite, I think.

The truth is, the cost of a superior PC is almost trivial, compared with the value it can generate in the hands of a highly skilled designer.

HP tried to make this point in its presentations at the event, but it was very conservative in its figures. First, it assumed that the total cost per employee (including salary, benefits, office space, management overhead, etc.) was just $60 per hour, which is very low. Second, it shouldn't have been using a cost model at all!

The more useful basis for this analysis is revenue per employee, which can easily exceed $250 per hour for the kind of workers who can make effective use of a high-price workstation.

For an employee generating this kind of value, a $10,000 workstation justifies its purchase remarkably quickly. Even if the employee's productivity improves just 10 percent, the payback period is a mere 10 weeks.

It's worth thinking about what it takes to generate a 10 percent improvement in overall productivity. It isn't just a matter of computer performance, but performance helps. These new HP workstations are much faster than the older models, due to the combination of the faster CPUs, faster and more RAM, and a new generation of professional graphics cards from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices' ATI.

Performance relates to productivity, in terms of how much time the user spends waiting for the computer, so that's what to look for. Assuming that the software is working as well as it can, and the user's work habits are reasonable, processing delays for engineering visualizations, animation previews, circuit simulations, and similar tasks can really add up.

So it's no surprise to me that there's still a market for pricey dual-processor workstations.

What does surprise me is that there aren't more companies trying to rebuild the market for super high-end workstations.

SGI, in its glory days, used to be able to sell some pretty amazing machines for professional users. I have an SGI Octane workstation that originally sold for over $50,000. That seems like crazy money, but even a $50,000 workstation in the right hands could still pay for itself in less than a year, a reasonable return on investment.

Alas, SGI went bankrupt again this week and then promptly sold itself to Rackable Systems for $25 million plus the assumption of SGI's debts.

I'm sad that SGI is gone, but it wasn't the workstation business that killed the company, and the numbers show that market niche still exists. HP could occupy that niche, if it chose, as could any company that makes four- and eight-processor servers, which share most of the same engineering issues.

Some small companies, such as Boxx Technologies (which I wrote about last summer in "Boxx fills in for a failing SGI") and HPC Systems, make bigger workstations, but both of these vendors' product lines are stuck with AMD Opteron processors at the moment, which are no longer performance-competitive with the new Xeons.

Later this year, new multiprocessor-capable Xeon processors will arrive that could reinvigorate the super-workstation market, and I hope that some of these companies step up to the challenge. I believe that there's some good money to be made there, and the rest of the world economy will benefit at the same time.

I suppose most of the excitement from MacWorld Expo has died down by now, but I'd still like to talk a little about two new Mac laptops introduced at the show-- Apple's own 17" MacBook Pro, and Axiotron's Modbook Pro, a tablet computer made by repackaging the components from Apple's 15" MacBook Pro along with some new parts.

Axiotron's Modbook Pro tablet computer

(Credit: Axiotron Corp.)

First, the Axiotron product. Externally, the ModBook Pro is radically different from the Apple notebook that provides most of its component parts.

In this publicity photo, the Modbook Pro's beveled edges are apparent. The shape is functional, making it easier to hold the device in one hand while writing on it with the other. The shape also facilitates picking up the machine from a flat surface as well as flush-mounting the Modbook Pro in a rotating mount to create a modern version of the traditional animation desk.

The base unit of the Modbook Pro. Clockwise from lower right: the 2.5-inch hard disk, the battery, the motherboard (with I/O connectors at left and two fans for the CPU and GPU), and the optical drive.

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

Inside the Modbook Pro's base unit, the original MacBook Pro components are mounted to an aluminum baseplate. The angled side pieces, machined out of a single piece of aluminum, connect that baseplate to the display and touchscreen assembly above. The result is a very solid assembly, but one that is rather heavy. The system's target weight is 6.9 pounds, though the prototype shown here was somewhat heavier. The other benefit of this assembly method is that the Modbook Pro can take any CPU-GPU combination that can go into a MacBook Pro, unlike most Windows-based Tablet PCs, which are thinner and lighter but can't handle the fastest, hottest chips. Axiotron says the Modbook Pro is the fastest tablet computer on the market (or will be, I suppose, when it ships), and as far as I know, that's true.

The new unit is scheduled to ship by June, 2009. In the meantime, Axiotron is also selling an updated version of its original Modbook, which is made from an Apple Macbook. The custom Axiotron software on the Modbook will carry over to the Modbook Pro, including the "Synergy Touch" feature which is optional on the Modbook and will be standard on the newer system. Synergy Touch provides translucent on-screen icons that can be used to control applications while the user is simultaneously drawing with the digitizer pen. It looks like an effective enhancement to the usual tablet user interface, and better for some applications than the usual combination of keyboard plus mouse or stylus.

The Modbook Pro is aimed at professional users and is priced accordingly: $4,998 and up for turnkey systems (which includes the price of the new MacBook Pro that Axiotron must buy in order to make the machine), or $3,049 and up if you send Axiotron your own MacBook Pro to be turned into a tablet.

Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro

(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)

Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro

The other big notebook news from MacWorld Expo was Apple's new 17" MacBook Pro, joining the previously announced 15" MacBook Pro and 13" MacBook systems that I reviewed in October (see "The new MacBooks: Beauty more than skin deep" and "Hands-on with the new MacBook Pro").

The 17" model has the same type of milled aluminum unibody chassis introduced with the other systems in October. Like them, it also has a sheet-aluminum bottom cover. But that cover is also the first indicator of the big difference between the 17" MacBook Pro and its 15" sibling: there's no battery cover because the battery in the 17" model isn't removable.

Instead, Apple built in a 95 watt-hour lithium polymer battery featuring two kinds of new technology: new chemistry developed by Apple's own "team of scientists and electro-chemists" (according to the page on Apple.com about the 17" MacBook Pro battery) and a more advanced battery-charging circuit also developed by Apple.

I'm familiar with the basic principles of this technology from my time at Montalvo Systems, where I led the company's system architecture work. Most notebooks treat lithium batteries as if they contain just a single cell, even though internally they consist of multiple cells in series-parallel connections.

For example, the most common six-cell notebook battery arrangement is two parallel strings of three cells in series. This produces a battery with an effective output voltage around 10.8 volts (3.6V per cell times three cells, sometimes also marked as 11.1 volts depending on the average cell voltage) and twice the current capacity of a single string of cells.

(Incidentally, while I'm on the subject: please, all you OEMs, stop referring to the ampere-hour specification of an assembled battery. This is a meaningless figure without also knowing the number of cells and the average cell voltage. It's impossible to compare amp-hour figures directly. Just state the energy capacity in watt-hours. That number is far more useful.)

When such a battery is charged only through its outermost connections-- the ground and 10.8V points-- it's inevitable that one cell will become charged before the others in each string, and one string will be fully charged before the other. Eventually, some of the cells wear out before the others because of overcharging, and some cells aren't used to their full capacity because others discharge first.

Good manufacturers do the best they can to match the cells in each battery pack, but this only goes so far. This is why some battery packs will age much faster than others even though they have the same basic components-- their individual cells weren't as well matched.

In the new MacBook Pro, according to the figures on that battery page, the built-in battery pack is configured as four cells in series by two parallel strings. But the charging circuit can sample the voltages between each cell in the pack and adjust the charging current so that each cell is charged in the best possible way. Apple's website refers only to intelligent charging, but this optimization could in principle extend to the discharge side as well, allowing the power supply to cut out each cell as it becomes drained, avoiding the stress that goes with being pushed past that point.

Once Apple decided to go with this kind of charging circuit, it may have been persuaded to make the battery non-removable simply because the battery connector would have been huge-- as many as ten high-current contacts just for the cells (the two endpoints plus three internal nodes for each string of four cells) plus more for the usual temperature sensor.

Whatever the exact mechanism, Apple says that the combination of better chemistry and better charging technology gives the 17" MacBook Pro far better battery life-- and lifespan-- than other notebooks. Apple says that the model with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU can run up to 8 hours from a single charge. That corresponds to an average power consumption of less than 12 watts.

At Montalvo, I tested the power consumption of many commercially available notebook, and in my experience, 12 watts is a very good figure for a 17" system. My own 15" MacBook Pro--now a couple of years old--consumes significantly more power than that.

More significantly, Apple claims the battery in the 17" MacBook Pro can go through 1,000 full charge cycles before its capacity drops to 80% of the original figure. Since a charge cycle is the equivalent of a 100% discharge--such as two cycles to 50%, or four cycles to 75%--this specification suggests these built-in batteries should easily last five years for most users without a substantial reduction in the battery life per charge.

Of course, in real life, this potential may be reduced if the charger causes the battery to cycle slightly while the machine is plugged in. High temperatures can also reduce battery longevity. So we won't really know how effective Apple's technology is until users have had these systems for a while.

Apple users may be interested to know that the "System Profiler" application will actually report the remaining charge capacity of a battery on the Hardware, Power page. On my MacBook Pro, the original battery-- which I leave in the system essentially all the time-- now indicates a maximum charge capacity of 1,364 mAH at 10.8V, or 14.7 WH-- a decline of over 75% from the original rated capacity. System Profiler also reports that the battery's cycle count is just 61 cycles. That's probably about right, since this battery usually sustains the machine only in standby mode for the time it takes to get from home to work and back each day.

This is a far cry from the promise on Apple's website that "a properly maintained battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 300 full charge and discharge cycles." Perhaps that promise applies only to current systems, not my one-generation-back machine, but still, I recommend taking Apple's battery-life claims with a grain of salt.

If I were in charge of Apple's battery strategy, I would think differently. I'd fit the 17" MacBook Pro for the same removable battery found in the 15" model... and also build in a smaller battery using an entirely different battery chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate (LFP) that provides inherently longer cycle life.

An LFP battery can be charged faster than a regular lithium-polymer battery, and can have twice the cycle life when properly maintained--long enough not to be a factor in the notebook's mean time to failure.

This combination would convey the additional benefit of allowing the machine's removable battery to be swapped while it continues to operate normally, even if the user is away from an AC outlet-- a substantial advantage for business travelers. No other notebook on the market has such a feature.

The battery compartment on a 15" MacBook Pro (previous generation)

(Credit: Peter N. Glaskowsky)

I'm sure there's enough room in the 17" chassis to support such a combination. It's significantly larger than the 15" model (15% more plan area, or 21 square inches), but with essentially the same internal components. Apple says that omitting the battery packaging and retaining hardware saves a lot of space, but from my own examination of the battery compartment in a scrapped MacBook Pro case assembly, I don't think that's as big an issue as Apple says.

In this photo from the "inside" of that lower case assembly with one of my auxiliary batteries installed, you can see that the MacBook Pro battery compartment and battery casing together occupy less than a quarter of an inch around most of the battery and about a half-inch on the fourth side where the power connector is located. It adds up to a reduction in plan area of about five square inches--significant but not exactly a severe loss. Even the new 17" system must have some internal protection around the battery, if only to stop foreign objects from falling in and shorting out the cells.

Other than the battery, the new 17" MacBook Pro looks very nice, just like the earlier unibody models. Plus, it's available with an optional anti-glare display. I don't know how this effect is achieved; I've used both matte-finish displays as well as CRTs with a glass-smooth face plus an anti-reflection coating. Whichever method Apple uses, it has to be better than the high-glare effect of the standard screens on the 17" and 15" MacBook Pros. I've seen these machines in various real-world conditions now, and I just couldn't live with that level of reflectivity no matter what it does for the black levels of DVD movies.

I expect I'll be in the market for a new MacBook Pro in the coming year, and at the moment, there's no doubt in my mind--it's the new 17" for me.

When Apple announced its new notebooks on Tuesday, it said the new machines would be in the company's retail stores the next day.

So I went to the Apple store at the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara, Calif., after work on Wednesday. I got there a few minutes after 6 p.m. and discovered that an Apple technician was in the process of replacing an old MacBook Pro with the first one of the new models.

I positioned myself authoritatively about a foot from the tech's left elbow, so when he was done, I was the first customer to get my hands on the new machine.

Apple's new MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

It looked as good in real life as it does in the pictures. The tapered edges make it look thinner than it really is, considerably more svelte than the older MacBook Pros like mine.

A few things struck me about the new design. There's no latch for the lid, but some kind of cam in the hinge keeps it snugly closed unless it's opened on purpose. I don't think this would work as well with the old lid style because there's enough of an edge on there for incidental contact to overcome the hinge tension. But with the new extra-thin edge, the lid seems to resist accidental opening.

Unfortunately, like older MacBooks and PowerBooks, the machine starts to turn on when the lid is opened only slightly. I've never understood why these switches are so sensitive. It seems to me it would be better to wait until the machine is opened more like two or three inches to avoid accidental actuation, especially when there's no latch.

The trackpad was very nice, easily the best I've ever used. It also doesn't look or feel like glass. I can confirm that Apple thought of the same thing that I did in my previous post--a click with one finger generates a left-click, and a tap with two fingers generates a right-click. Awesome. So now Apple has the world's only two-button mouse that doesn't have any buttons at all, and it isn't even a mouse!

(I also tried three- and four-finger taps, but I couldn't see any difference in the behavior of the Finder. I wonder if that's something applications can detect, though.)

Too glossy
As for the new glass-face display: I'm sure it'll be great for watching movies in a dark room. I'm sure it'll be fine for most purposes, if you're in a dark room. And wearing dark clothing, and nothing shiny. But wow, I really don't like to see windows or lights or my clothing reflected in glossy displays, and the only way this new machine's display could be any more glare-prone is if it were mirrored like a highway cop's sunglasses.

I picked the machine up and turned it around in my hands, somewhat constrained by the attached power and Ethernet cables. It felt good in my hands. The surface finish is good-- not slippery, but not rough either. I gave the machine some light tweaking between my hands--both the lid and the base separately, as well as the whole machine with the lid closed--and in all tests, the new machine seemed to offer more torsional rigidity than my old MacBook Pro. So that says the new manufacturing techniques have paid off, at least in that respect.

The bottom covers for the battery/HD and RAM felt very securely attached, not rattly, and the seams were remarkably tight. I hope they stay that way over time, always a difficult thing to achieve with sheet aluminum, which is not the most stable material. (Cars, for example, could be built with even smaller gaps between doors and frames, but makers don't do that because the inevitable shifts over time would then be more conspicuous--and most cars are made out of steel.)

Apple used its snazzy technology for nearly-invisible indicator lights on the sleep indicator; you basically can't see the light unless it's on. (The same technology is used for the "on the air" light next to the Webcam on older MacBook Pros like mine, and it's really almost like magic.) Oddly, however, there's a short slot next to the indicator on the new machine that compromises the clean look Apple was presumably seeking with this design feature. I don't even know what the slot is for! My only guess is that it might have the infrared receiver for the Front Row remote control behind it.

Out of respect for the store, I didn't pop the battery cover off, though I am curious how that latch works. The latch is at one side, but it has to seal tight across a very long edge. That's usually difficult to arrange.

Sharper feel
The edge of the aluminum around the keyboard and palm rests does, indeed, feel sharper than the plastic on the older MacBook Pros. Not physically sharper, but the low friction of the old plastic makes the edge feel smoother because skin is less likely to hang up on it. Skin doesn't slide over the new aluminum edge nearly as easily.

Since the new machine had accumulated quite a crowd within just a few minutes while I examined these elements, I turned to a couple of guys on one side who had arrived shortly after I did, rubbed my palm across the edge of the new MacBook Pro a few times, did the same on the older model next to it, and asked them to do the same. Then I asked "does the new one feel sharper?" Both said yes. But we all also agreed that visually, they appeared to be about the same, so I think the answer is that Apple ought to round over this edge just a bit more.

And with that, I stepped back and let the rest of the crowd fight over the new machine. I didn't see any new MacBooks on that visit (and I couldn't get my iPhone power adapter replaced under the recall; they were out). But seeing the new Pro was enough to justify the visit. I love the looks, but I can't justify buying a new laptop right now. So I'll wait for the next refresh and hope those machines still look this good.

I couldn't be at the Tuesday morning Apple launch event for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro systems, but I've had a chance to review the announcements.

Normally I focus on the technology in new products, but this time, I have to say my first impression is dominated by the appearance of these systems. These are some good-looking laptops.

Apple's new MacBook Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

The most dramatic change is the new display surround, black glass that goes right out to the edge of the upper case just like on an iPhone. The lower case also looks significantly cleaner now that the old gray plastic edging is gone. I never liked this edging on my MacBook Pro. It looks and feels like what it is: a compromise forced on Apple by the inherent difficulty of making bare metal edges meet cleanly.

Apple dealt with this problem on the new machines by relocating the case seams to the underside of the machine, where they're less visible--and where they can serve a more useful purpose, that of simplifying access to the battery, hard disk, and RAM. I'm especially sensitive to the whole hard-disk thing on the old machines, having upgraded my hard disk twice in two years.

The new case is what Apple calls a "unibody" design, recalling the term used in the automotive industry to describe a car chassis made by welding together many sheet-steel pieces...but in fact, Apple's new manufacturing is much more unitary than that. The lower chassis of all the new machines (as well as the original MacBook Air) is made by milling down a solid block of aluminum to the exact shape needed.

This approach makes for an exceptionally strong, stiff chassis. Milling (also known as stock removal) is more expensive than some other methods, but it provides almost unlimited design freedom. It's the same method I'd use if I were building low-volume, high-value custom notebooks; for Apple to be using it on high-volume system expresses a strong commitment to product quality. (The only method that would produce an even stronger chassis is net-shape forging, in which the metal is formed under high pressure to the exact shape required...but that approach would also be more expensive, and it imposes significant design constraints.)

I also really like the new trackpad. It's huge, and it supports more multi-finger gestures than a New York cabbie. My MacBook Pro uses two-finger dragging to scroll within the window under the cursor, and really, I think this was one of the greatest improvements in general usability in years. More gesture recognition should be even better. With any luck, Apple will support both one- and two-finger clicking for left- and right-clicking.

Apple's decision to use Nvidia chipsets is especially significant on the MacBook models, because the Intel chipsets usually used in midrange systems have really weak graphics. Mac OS X and many Mac applications rely on good 3D acceleration. Nvidia has it, Intel doesn't. On the MacBook Pro models, Apple would have included a good discrete graphics chip no matter who made the chipset, but the fact that both come from Nvidia made it easier for Apple to support switching between integrated and discrete graphics depending on whether the user needs battery life or 3D performance at the moment.

There are some things I'm not so sure about on these new systems. I generally prefer a matte-finish display, but there's no longer any alternative to a glossy, glassy screen. Apple says reflections are less of a problem with a high-brightness LCD such as these machines are equipped with, but I'd have to live with one for a while to believe that.

I'm also not sure if the crisp new aluminum edge around the keyboard and palm rests is entirely a good thing. It doesn't look any sharper than the edge on the plastic around my own machine, but the plastic has a glass-smooth and, more importantly, low-friction surface. This is another thing I'll have to try for a while before I can make up my mind.

Is this really the right time to shift all of Apple's portables to the new DisplayPort standard? Apple's new 24" Cinema Display with DisplayPort and a built-in MagSafe power supply is a very cool product, but most of the displays in the world use analog RGB (over a VGA cable) or DVI.

Apple used to throw in a free DVI-to-VGA adapter, but the new MacBooks require extra-cost adapters--three different ones!--for the same functionality, and some of these dongles are active electronic devices. It looks like one of these even needs to draw additional power from a USB port!

The battery-level indicator is now built into the side of the machine itself, rather than being part of the battery. This puts the indicator where it's easier to see when a battery is installed, which is good, but I wonder if there's another indicator on the battery itself, since it's even more important to know the condition of a battery when it isn't installed.

A few things that aren't quite so awesome:

There's no new 17" model, just a lightly updated version of the old 17" model. (If you really must have a matte-finish LCD screen on a MacBook Pro, that's the only way to get it.) I expect this is just a temporary situation.

There's no Blu-ray optical drive. At the post-announcement Q&A, Apple CEO Steve Jobs explained that Blu-ray licensing "is just a bag of hurt" today, so the company is holding back until that gets straightened out.

The maximum RAM is still only 4GB. With OS support for considerably more, I was hoping Apple would remove that particular limit in this generation of notebooks. Personally, given my tendency to keep a dozen applications open plus, sometimes, Parallels Desktop running Windows Vista--and the low cost of DRAM today--I'd be happier with as much as 16GB of RAM.

Apple doesn't yet offer 500GB hard disks as a build-to-order option. With two companies making these drives, Apple's a little behind the times on this one.

There's no eSATA or FireWire 3200. The MacBook Pros still have FireWire 800, which is plenty good enough for any single-disk or dual-disk RAID boxes, but it's old technology now. (And as a commenter points out below, the MacBooks have lost FireWire 400, a problem for video editing and other applications that benefit from fast external hard disks.)

I mention these things because they matter...but really, not as much as the high quality and aesthetic appeal of the new machines. I'm not in the market for a new laptop quite yet, but if I were, I'd have placed my order by now.

Monday, I wrote about the process of upgrading the hard disk on my Apple MacBook Pro, and the as-yet unsolved problem of migrating the 20GB Boot Camp partition on the old hard disk--along with its Windows Vista installation--to a 32GB partition on the new drive. (See "Another new hard disk...and an unsolved problem.")

Well, it's all working now. As I've always said about the Mac, most things are either easy or impossible...and this one turned out to be easy.

My thanks to my friend EDN senior technical editor Brian Dipert who provided half of the solution, and also to CNET member rob66778, who apparently signed up for a CNET account just so he could tell me about the other half. That was very kind of him!

Rob66778's contribution, in the comments to my post Monday, was to tell me about a program called WinClone, which can copy Boot Camp partitions to a disk-image file and then copy from the image to a different Boot Camp partition.

Equipped with this tool, I was able to wipe out the Boot Camp partition I'd previously created, use Boot Camp to create another one of the same size, and copy the Boot Camp partition from the old disk to the new one.

But I wanted a larger Boot Camp partition. I think now I could have just created a larger partition to begin with and WinClone would have handled it correctly, but I had tried that before--using a different tool to copy the partition data--and it didn't work.

So to be safe, I had WinClone make the exact copy, and used the program Brian suggested-- Paragon's CampTune-- to expand the Boot Camp partition to the size I wanted.

CampTune comes as an .iso file that is used to create a bootable CD just for this purpose. I burned the disc, booted from it, and everything worked perfectly for me. CampTune is currently "pre-release" software, though, so make sure you make reliable backups first.

At that point I was able to boot Vista from the Boot Camp partition, and when I rebooted into Mac OS X, I was able to run Parallels Desktop to bring up the same copy of Vista in a virtual machine.

So all is well, and I'm documenting the process here for the next person who needs to get this done.

I'll also second the comment on my previous post from CNET user Mr. Dee , who said that Apple's Time Machine software ought to take care of backing up and restoring Boot Camp partitions, since Apple is responsible for creating those partitions in the first place.

Please leave a comment if you try this process yourself, especially if you can confirm that WinClone can do the whole thing in one step. Thanks!

I bought my 2.33GHz MacBook Pro about two years ago, shortly after it was introduced. It came with a 160GB hard disk, but that wasn't really enough for all my stuff, particularly when I wanted to add a Boot Camp partition for Microsoft's Windows Vista.

So last July, I upgraded to a 250GB drive, a process I described here ("A new hard disk for my MacBook Pro").

Samsung's Spinpoint M6 500GB mobile hard disk

(Credit: Samsung)

That drive started feeling a little tight within just a few months, chiefly due to videos downloaded from the iTunes Store. Although I rarely buy videos from iTunes, there's a lot of free stuff there. I have a particular weakness for video podcasts about automobiles, such as VOD Cars and BMW's own video magazine, BMW-web.tv. Oh, and I've also lost some potential productivity to the Onion News Network video feed and the original Onion Radio News, which are also available through iTunes.

I hung tight through the 320GB generation of laptop hard disks, figuring that wasn't enough of a capacity improvement to justify the cost.

But shortly after Samsung started shipping the Spinpoint M6 model HM500LI, Montalvo Systems shut down, and I had other things to think about than upgrading my hard disk. I decided to wait for Hitachi or Western Digital to introduce a competing model, so I could make sure I was getting the best product when the time came.

Hitachi has a 500GB drive, but at 12.5mm thick, it won't fit in the MacBook Pro. Then Western Digital introduced the new Scorpio Blue, a 9.5mm drive with specifications pretty much identical to those of the Samsung drive. I was able to get a pretty good deal on the Samsung drive, so that's what I decided to go with.

I went through the same upgrade process I used last time, which I recommend to anyone upgrading a hard disk: back up the old disk to the new disk in an external enclosure before swapping in the new drive. With a Mac, it's easiest to do the backup by connecting both drives to another machine using the special feature called FireWire Target Disk Mode.

In this case, I only backed up the Mac partition this way, since Macs can't natively write to NTFS partitions; I used Windows to back itself up separately to a different drive.

After going through the usual grief involved in upgrading a MacBook Pro hard disk-- which I don't recommend to anyone who isn't very familiar with safe maintenance procedures for modern laptops-- everything just worked. The new drive is fast, silent, and huge, everything I love in a hard disk.

Well, all but one thing. The Boot Camp partition isn't so easy to migrate over. After booting from the new drive, I let the Boot Camp Assistant program create a new Boot Camp partition with an NTFS filesystem, then used Mike Bombich's NetRestore application to copy the old data to the new partition.

But although the copy proceeded normally and the new partition received all the files from the old one, it also received the old partition's size-- 20GB instead of the 32GB I had allocated for it. And it didn't come out bootable, nor would Parallels Workstation work with it, in spite of being configured to use the Boot Camp partition on the old drive.

I can't find anything online about migrating a Boot Camp partition when upgrading a hard disk. So let me ask all of you folks: does anyone know how to do this?

I'll post an update here when I get it figured out. In any event, I can always just wipe out the new partition and reinstall Windows...

Update: now solved! See my followup post: "Migrating and resizing a Boot Camp partition". Thanks to everyone who commented.

I have Comcast cable modem service here at home. It's been very reliable. Service interruptions have been rare and brief. The cable modem I was given years ago is still working fine. Network performance has been reasonably good.

So all in all, I'm happy with the service.

(Credit: Comcast)

But I just found out about something that really bugs me--and may explain why I've received occasional reports over the years that an e-mail I sent didn't get through at all--or was marked as spam when it did arrive.

This came up about a week ago, when I noticed that some (but not all) outbound e-mails sent through Apple's .Mac service (now known as MobileMe) were not going out. After waiting about an hour for the messages to go through, I reported the problem to the service's support desk.

It turned out that... Read More