[Chris Newman]

I have the first version MBP (May 2006) and am holding off for a compelling reason to upgrade. The core2 does not cut it for me. More storage and RAM, 15-20% faster???, Wireless N card. So what?

That begs the question 'what has Apple got up it sleeve for MBP buyers' for the next revision. Not sure if there will be any 1.5 specific features.

Anyone read Robert X Cringley's latest column and his prediction that Apple will incorporate hardware for H.264 decoding/encoding. Works a whole lot of sense if you work with new media. That would represent real value.

Anyone prepared to share their predictions?

[mduell]

Next revision (May 2007) will be mostly marginal: 2.6Ghz CPU, 800Mhz FSB, 4GB RAM max, and maybe a faster video card. But it should have at least one and possibly two new things: Flash and HSPDA.
Flash can be found two places, on the chipset and in the hard drive. Robson is Intel's code name for flash memory acceleration at the chipset (~512MB). Seagate, Samsung, and few others also have hard drives with smaller flash memory amounts (~128MB) for caching writes. Both will increase battery life and the former should also speed up boot/wake times and app launch times.
HSPDA is 3G cellular data, which there have been rumors that Intel is including support for in the upcoming Santa Rosa platform. Conveniently, Cingular has the only HSPDA network in the US and Apple is pretty close with them already.

I read Cringley's column and I think he's an idiot. Every Mac already has an H.264 accelerator in it (the GPU), Apple's drivers just don't take advantage of it. Adding another $100 chip just to get HD H.264 hardware encoding seems like a waste of money for the vast majority of consumers. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a PCIe card for the Mac Pro that does H.264 encoding and other tasks to improve FCP performance (google for the FCP Extreme rumors).

edit: Intel GMA only accelerates MPEG2 and VC-1 (aka WMV HD) decoding, not H.264. So the MacBook and Mac mini are the only models without H.264 accelerators today

[Simon]

Originally Posted by mduell 

Flash can be found two places, on the chipset and in the hard drive.
...
Seagate, Samsung, and few others also have hard drives with smaller flash memory amounts (~128MB) for caching writes. Both will increase battery life and the former should also speed up boot/wake times and app launch times.

The HDs that use flash memory do not do it transparently in hardware. The flash caching needs to be initiated by a driver running on your OS. Vista supposedly can do this. However, when Samsung demoed the technology to potential customers Apple declared they weren't interested.

[wilsonng]

I wonder if the GMA 965 would have H.264 encoding/decoding capabilities?

Originally Posted by mduell 

=
I read Cringley's column and I think he's an idiot. Every Mac already has an H.264 accelerator in it (the GPU), Apple's drivers just don't take advantage of it. Adding another $100 chip just to get HD H.264 hardware encoding seems like a waste of money for the vast majority of consumers. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a PCIe card for the Mac Pro that does H.264 encoding and other tasks to improve FCP performance (google for the FCP Extreme rumors).

edit: Intel GMA only accelerates MPEG2 and VC-1 (aka WMV HD) decoding, not H.264. So the MacBook and Mac mini are the only models without H.264 accelerators today

[mduell]

Originally Posted by wilsonng 

I wonder if the GMA 965 would have H.264 encoding/decoding capabilities?

No, assuming by GMA965 you mean GMA3000 which is included in the 963/965 chipsets.

But your question made me look at the Intel site again, which revealed some ambiguity in my previous post. GMA950 only appears to do MPEG2 decode acceration; GMA3000 adds support for VC-1 (WMV HD) decode acceleration. Neither supports encoding acceleration for any codec.

But this is really getting off topic since the MBP doesn't use GMA.

[olePigeon]

I'm waiting for the LED backlight before I upgrade. That should help out a lot in terms of battery life.

[SierraDragon]

For us heavy graphics users more storage, esp. dual hard drives would be excellent, as would more RAM and even better graphics.

-Allen Wicks

[Javizun]

i love my core 2 duo.

I will wait 2 more years before i upgrade. Anything now is just the after shock of core duo with minor enhancements.

A case design will be sweet-specially with that patent multitouch keyboard.