The new Pro laptops sport Core 2 Duo Mobile processors at 2.2 and 2.4GHz, faster Front Side Bus (800MHz), 802.11n wireless networking, power-efficient LED display backlighting, and the new nVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT mobile graphics system.
All in all, an excellent and long-awaited upgrade but not quite dramatic enough to make owners of previous Macbooks feel behind — even the latest 2.4GHz MBP is only modestly faster than the original Macbook/Pro models in most operations with the exception of FSB bandwidth (~10-12%), wireless networking (50-125%) and graphics performance (35-60%).
Display sizes remain 15 and 17 inches with 1440×900 and 1680×1050 pixels respectively.
The actual panels are not significantly different from previous models, according to internal technical documents provided to Rumors in the days leading up to this revision — but have merely had their backlights switched out for LED models which are “Greener” and offer substantially better energy performance. Read more
ZFS in Leopard
The original “leak” occurred this morning when Sun CEO Jon Schwartz mentioned in front of a corporate media event for Sun’s latest blade servers that Apple will be announcing at next week’s WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) that ZFS will be Leopard’s default file system.
The news spread across the grapevine like wildfire, coming close on the heels of similar rumors which rumor-mongers have been analyzing since last week.
Thus far we have been able to get clear-cut confirmation from at least three separate, well-established sources in Cupertino and fairly confident confirmations from several third party developers who are privvy to the “mainstream” build of Leopard which includes many features not included with developer seeds to date.
The “mainstream” build will be merged into the developer-test variant as of the WWDC Developer Preview 2 release (last year’s WWDC brought DP1 and there have been over 20 major seeds plus countless minor ones since then) and only a handful of features, if any, will remain secret after that according to the latest source reports out of Infinite Loop. Read more