The 2009 Apple World Wide Developer Conference Keynote was yesterday and Apple announced quite a few things. Here’s a compilation of my thoughts on the announcements. Updated Notebooks
The first substantive announcement was updates to the Macbook and Macbook Pro lineups. I don’t have the patience to detail all of the changes, but you can read up on them here. The gist of the updates are: The Unibody 17, 15, and 13 inch models now all fall under the MacBook Pro label. The polycarbonate 15-inch Macbook gains an official place in the lineup. The Macbook Air gets a price drop. Firewire 800 and a Secure Digital card slot are present on all Macbook Pros, regardless of size. And finally, ExpressCard remains only on the 17-inch Macbook Pro. Notably, although not surprisingly, missing from the announcement was the long dreamed for Apple netbook.
To me, there are some interesting implications of yesterday’s notebook announcements. First, Apple has finally seen the problems inherent in maintaining a Macbook vs. Macbook Pro distinction arbitrarily based on screen size and port availability. Now it is clear that Unibody models (excepting the Air) are to be seen as “professional” machines and the polycarbonate model(s)
