Daring Fireball confirms the leaked MacBook Pro photos from earlier this evening and adds some intriguing details about the new notebook.
Specifically, Gruber confirms that the new MacBook Pros will have "buttonless" trackpad which is made of glass. However, it appears the entire trackpad is one large button:
The new trackpad is similar to the Air’s, in that it is bigger and supports additional multi-touch gestures. But unlike the Air’s, the MacBook Pro’s new trackpad is made of glass, and is a button itself. You just press and it clicks.
In addition, he confirms what some have suspected -- that the new MacBook Pro is not available in matte-finish, only glossy. There will be no new 17" MacBook Pro immediately available, and it's unclear when/if it will be revised. The existing 17" model will still remain on sale.
Gruber also confirms that regular MacBooks will be revised and that Engadget's footnote is wrong. The MacBook will contain the same buttonless trackpad and similar case design as the new MacBook Pros. MacBook Airs will be updated with a larger 120GB hard drive and larger 128GB SSD option. He also confirms our report about an $899 24" LED Apple Cinema Display.
CPU speeds are expected to remain about he same, however, but the MacBooks will benefit from improved graphics performance with built in NVIDIA 9400M GPUs. MacBook Pros will also contain a dedicated 9600M GT GPU, which should provide a large performance benefit as we've previously detailed.
Finally, Gruber addresses the pricing confusion from today. Apple apparently will only be offering two new MacBook configurations
- $1299: 2.0 GHz, 2 GB memory, 160 GB disk
- $1499: 2.4 GHz, 2 GB memory, 250 GB disk
The existing $1099 2.1GHz MacBook model will apparently remain to fill a $999 price slot but will not have the advantages of the new machines. Gruber was the first to accurately predict the October 14th announcement date for the new Apple notebooks.
