What Price Speed? Apple Speeds Up MacBook And Pro.

What’s the price of speed on a personal computer these days? Except for the geekier among us, nobody cares.

Remember when megahertz, then gigahertz determined computer performance? Those days are gone. Today’s Macs are just as much screamer machines as an Windows PC.

Apple updated the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines with faster chips, bigger hard drives, better and faster graphics chips, and a new Multi-touch trackpad for the Pro. All that for the same price as yesterday.

These new MacBooks come with Intel’s new 45nm Penryn chips inside, the mobile, lower power version of the screaming fast chips recently introduced in Apple’s higher end MacPro and Xserve line. Smaller, faster, cooler. That’s Apple’s mantra these days.

Consider this important news that no one really cares much about (except the aforementioned ‘geekier’ among us who track such things because we can, not because it matters much). For the most part, the gigahertz wars are over. Most Mac and PC buyers are not overly concerned with the stated clock speed of their new computers.

Today’s buyers just want their purchase to work well, run fast, and not grow old too quickly. Consider that Apple’s aluminum MacBook Pro design hasn’t changed much, externally, in about five years.

If you’ve been holding out for the latest and greatest among Apple’s notebooks, now is the time to look closer. Chances are good, MacBook or Pro, that you’ll like what you see. Make no mistake. These notebooks look pretty much like the notebooks Apple sold yesterday.

They’re sleek, durable, well crafted with tight fit and finish. They’re just faster and cooler and cooler, so to speak. The Multi-touch trackpad that showed up in the MacBook Air last month is now standard on Apple’s MacBook Pro, further differentiating the line from the plastic MacBooks.

The Pro line also gets bigger hard drives, starting at 200 gigabytes at the low end, and 250 gigabytes for the high end models, both the 15-inch and 17-inch high end MacBook Pros also get a raging fast NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card with 512 megabytes of video RAM.

This is the Mac that Tim ‘the tool man’ Taylor would use. More power.

Missing in action is an optional Blu-ray DVD SuperDrive. Apple is sticking with the double-layer SuperDrive for now. Did I mention more speed? The 2.5 gigahertz Intel Core 2 Duo is standard on the high end MacBook Pro models, 2.4 gigahertz on the low end 15-inch, and an option for a 2.6 gigahertz model for the 15 and 17-inch size.

It will be interesting to see performance statistics across the Pro line, with only .2 gigahertz separating the low end model from the high end model. Faster is better but if you can’t tell the difference between the CPUs, does it matter? Other than paying more money.

2 gigabytes of RAM is standard on the high end models, with an option for 4 gigabytes. Both high end models also have an option for the standard matte screen or a glossy widescreen display.

The 13 inch MacBook remains the same price, but gets the Multi-touch trackpad, faster Intel chip and larger hard drive options. The high end MacBooks also have double-layer SuperDrives standard and come with 2 gigabytes of RAM. Only the low end, entry level MacBook comes with a Combo CD/DVD drive, 1 gig of RAM and the slowest of the new Intel CPUs.

Note that the popular Black MacBook is now $200 more than the comparably equipped White MacBook (except that the former comes with a 250 gigabyte hard drive, while the white model is standard with a 160 gig drive).

The MacBook Air can be considered as revolutionary as Apple gets these days. The new MacBook and MacBook Pro models are purely evolutionary, even with the Multi-touch trackpad standard.

Mac watchers expect the Mac mini and iMacs to receive the Intel ‘Penryn’ chips in an update later this year. One more thing. No Blu-ray. Yet. But these new Apple notebooks are the fastest most feature-laden the company has ever shipped.

In a moment of reflection, I remember the first Mac notebook I bought. It was a PowerBook 100 back in mid-1992; a close out special for $999 that came with a black and white screen, a 40 megabyte hard drive. $100 more today gets you a MacBook with a huge hard drive, loads of RAM, a wonderful screen, and Mac OS X Leopard, plus iLife ‘08.

Value might be in the eyes of the beholder but the Mac notebooks are surely more valuable today.