New Laptops Have More Features Than Benefits

Last Tuesday saw yet another Apple product release, and once again the fervor of Apple's fan base worked against it. Apple released new hardware with some impressive new features, but because the rumor mill had raised the expectations even higher, the announcements have been greeted with a cool, and at times hostile, reception.

To be fair, some of the rumors were probably unrealistic to begin with. For example, the $800 price point that had been rumored. Apple has never been known to be aggressive with their pricing, and dropping their prices that low would be a major shift.

On the other hand, a lot of what Apple did announce really did lack any kind of significant wow factor. Consider the feature that got top billing: the new unibody design. It does sound quite interesting, but the benefits to the customer aren't entirely clear. They said it will allow them to make a laptop that is lighter and more robust, but the new MacBook Pro is actually slightly heavier, doesn't sound like it's that much faster (except for graphics rendering), and has fewer ports, even though they've moved to a smaller display port.

Speaking of ports, there were some odd decisions there too. I understand that the new display port is apparently a new open standard, but adopting a standard that almost nothing can connect to, without including any adapters seems ridiculous. I can't believe it would be any hardship to include one or two such adapters with the sale of a laptop costing two thousand dollars or more.

The real puzzler, though, is the elimination of firewire from the Macbooks. There's a huge installed base of firewire-based video cameras out there, and will be for some time to come. Dropping this port from a laptop that should be geared to consumers (and would therefore logically be used for video editing with iMovie) makes no sense at all.

Even that consumer appeal seems questionable, though, not only because of the port restrictions, but also because of the price. Consumer portables that start at $1200 seems really high, considering how many options are out there for half that.

I should also mention that all Apple portables now only offer glossy screens. This is an interesting one to me, because I've never worked with a machine that has a glossy screen. I've talked to a smaller number of people who have and don't mind them, but there is also a very vocal population of people who despise them.

One benefit I have heard for the new laptops is the new graphics system, but even there it sounds like Apple failed to implement the new system in the way that would provide the biggest benefit (where both graphic sets could be used simultaneously).

In the end, it seems Apple's new laptops have few substantial benefits, and offer a number of people reasons to stay away. Maybe if enough people do just that, Apple will go back to doing what it does better than anyone else in the computer industry: building great machines with the end user in mind.