I’ll be updating today as we get more information as many of you know we’re waiting for the unveiling of an update to the Macbook Line.

 
If you check the apple store you’ll see that it’s currently down:

Pre-Conference Rumors and pictures here at apple insider.

Update picture from engadget

Gizmodo has a live feed of this as well.
Pic from Gizmodo:

Apple outgrew the market for 14 months, 17% Market Share now.

Verification notebooks are made from a solid piece of aluminum now. Start with 2.5LB piece of metal end up with a quarter pounder with cheese.  er 1/3 Lb notebook base.

Now on to the nVidia chipset stuff.

GeForce 9400M - pretty fast… 3x to 8x performance increase

Whoa, multi-touch glass touchpad.

There is no button?! The buttons are setup in the software for customization, that is strange.

Run Down of Features:

Glass TouchPad
All aluminum
Connectors all on one side
Thinner Display
KB buttons are backlit
LED - Backlit display - less battery power
Magnetic latch
Sudden motion sensor
isight/mic (usual)
Mini display port that drives any type of connector with an adapter (sold separately of course…)
5 hours of battery life when using the Nvidia 9400 4 on the 9600 

Price Points:

Macbook Pro: 
15.4 Inch $1999 2.4 GHZ 2GB RAM
15.4 Inch $2499 4GB RAM

Update to the MacBook Air - new Nvidia 9400M 120GB drive, 128GB SSD and a Mini display port.

24″ Cinema Display LED
3 connectors
1920×1200 Resolution
$899 (I can buy a 24″ Benq display for $400. )

$999 for entry level macbook. 
$1299 Better stuff
$1599 the bestest
New Macbook Aluminum Body
LED- Backlit
Nvidia Graphics
Multi-Touch Glass touchpad
Mini-Display Port

3d gaming on a Macbook is now possible - meaning you can get reasonable performance out of these things now.

Ok www.apple.com and check out the videos.

I’ve written before about how they took care of me only after a run around for a couple of freaking screws. I’ve long held the belief that their store support was far superior to the support you get on the phone and the same holds true today after I picked up my out of warranty MacBook.

The corner palmrest of my MacBook had gradually cracked in a tiny area on the right hand side.  Search google and you’ll get over 2,000 results for cracked palmrests and most of it is on the right side, right where the palmrest meets the base of the unit.  I had super-glued the thing back to hold it but since I was out of warranty I figured I would just have to live with it.   That was until I was growing tired of it rubbing on my wrists, cause you know if I wanted to slit my wrists I could think of far better ways to do it…

Anyway I read that many people have recieved the problem only months after buying their macbooks and that others ended up not having the problem until a year or so later because they didn’t use it as much or baby’d it.  I fell in the later, I use my MacBook just about every day but I’m also very protective over it.   Many online stated that they got the palmrest replaced even though they were no longer under warranty because of it being a manufacturing defect/saftey hazard type of thing.  So I called support.

No help there aside from asking me to go into the Apple store and that most likley they’d replace it.  So I did.  I drove up to the Domain store here in Austin, after making an appointment with a Genius.  Useful Tip: Watch your name up on the board behind the Genius Bar. You should see it, and you’ll notice that they call out people, I was there listening and watching their every move and they never called my name, but one minute my name was on the board, the next it wasn’t.  I walked up and the guy said, “Well someone just canceled it.”  “Uh no… how could I cancel it, I’ve been standing here for 20 minutes..”

Long story short, he took my MacBook, promised it the next day (today) had me sign the “we’re not responsible for data loss” waiver and low and behold I got a my MacBook back today, no charge, new palmrest/keyboard/trackpad.

That is two times that, while I had to make  a total of 4 physical trips, the Domain Apple Store took care of me,  and regaurdless of the total shitty phone support, will continue to keep me as a loyal customer.

I use mint along with google to track my traffic to wetwired.  One thing can be said about wetwired’s demographic: It’s very large.  Not that we get a ton of traffic, by large I mean we have technical people that come here for tutorials and we have people who live in Austin come to see the articles written about the local scene, and we have people who come here to read up on our political commentary.   We’re not niche on one subject, which is also our downfall in some cases but that’s not what we’re about - we have multiple interests and they span multiple subjects, wetwired is a group personal blog so to speak.  So coming back to the subject, based on our traffic spanning multiple demographics, here is something that you most likely already knew.

Out of our platform specific traffic, 73% of our traffic is Microsoft Windows based.  Out of that traffic 51% is Windows XP while only 19% is Vista.  On the other hand, Apple based traffic 14% is Leopard vs 6% Tiger.

So we can look at these statistics and do what all people do with numbers - we can make an assumption.  My assumption is that based on this: more than 50% of users have not upgraded to the latest platform Microsoft has provided which is nearing 2 years of being on the market.  Where as Apple’s Leopard 10.5 has been on the market for less than a year (a year in October) and has more than 50% of its users that have upgraded to the latest version.

What does this mean?  It means two things: users have less faith in Microsoft’s product releases than they do in Apple products.  BUT.  Before you wankers jump ahead of me, you also have to look at the adoption rate and user type, the majority of licensed uses that are utilizing XP are businesses as they are always the slowest to adopt.  Apple is slowing coming into the business world so things are changing but, currently the demographics for Leopard vs. Vista are totally different.  Even said,  it’s a pretty good assumption that with each release of the current platform of Apple OS 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 that they are building on pretty solid footing and while there are bugs, users are more comfortable(in general) and trusting (on the whole) of Apple’s bugs than they are of Microsoft’s. Proof in point is wetwired’s traffic.  Of the people who are Apple users and of the people who are Windows users, more of the base of Apple has upgraded vs More of the base of Windows has stayed the same or downgraded.

What to take from this, Apple is breaking into the business world more and more.  Microsoft has it’s work cut out for it, flashy commercials with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates showing them trying to get in touch with the common man is not going to help, nor is the Mojave commercials (honestly all I can see during these commercials is Rick Moranis in Space Balls saying “foooooled yooou”).  Coming out with a reliable OS that is not bloatware will help you.