With MacWorld San Francisco 2006 winding down, the biggest topic on everyones mind is the newly release iMac (with Core Duo processors) and the new MacBook Pro. Read on for some of my thoughts on these new products from Apple.
The dust has finally settled now, and the smoke has finally cleared. Well, sort of. While the release of these new machines is a heralded event in for most Mac users, there are tons of unanswered questions. Steve Jobs answered some of the bigger ones in his Keynote. (e.g. When will the Pro Apps be updated to universal binaries?, Are the iLife apps universal binaries?, etc.) Here are a couple of questions that he didn't answer. What is the battery life of the new MacBook Pro?Well, this is an interesting question, and unfortunately one that does not have a definite answer. The MacBook Pro's shown at MacWorld are pre-production models, and therefore some things could change between now and their shipping date in early February 2006. One of those things is battery life. The anecdotal evidence from one MacWorld participant is that the battery life on the pre-production models is about 4 hours on a full charge. While this is not bad, it is also not what many users are hoping for. 6 hours may be a little much to ask for in a dual-core mobile processor, but that is what I would like it to be under normal usage.
Can I install Windows onto my new iMac/MacBook Pro/insert new Intel based Mac here?This one is a little tricky. Apple has stated that they would not support multiple OS installations on their machines, but they would not do anything to prevent it. While this is true, the nature of the machines themselves will do that on their own. Part of the switch from PowerPC to Intel involved new firmware, and a switch from OpenFirmware in the PowerPC based Macs, to something that would work with Intel chips. In this case, that "something" is EFI. So, what is the big deal? The big deal is that no shipping 32-bit version of Windows (including XP) supports EFI. Windows Vista most likely will, and the Itanium and x64 versions of Windows do, but Windows Vista is still a long ways off, and the current Intel chips powering the iMac and the MacBook Pro are 32-bit. So, sans some clever hack or workaround, for now OS X is your best and only bet.