New MacBook Pros score with LED backlights, more RAM, longer battery life

Apple has already captured 10 percent of the notebook market, and three new MacBook Pro models are likely to put a nice kick in Apple's market share. With LED display backlighting on the 15-inch models, an 800 MHz front-side bus, a raise in the RAM ceiling from 3 GB to 4 GB and a new standard config of 2 GB, a doubling of Core 2 Duo's shared Level 2 cache from 2 MB to 4 MB, and an increase in CPU clock speed to a maximum of 2.4 GHz, new models are markedly better bang for the buck. That bang is made all the more powerful by the fact that Apple has not raised MacBook Pro's prices.

For me, the story is Apple's LED display backlighting, which Apple claims as a first among notebook vendors. LEDs replace industry-wide notebook standard CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) backlights, a move that puts poisonous mercury in the same category as equally-despicable lead: Gone from the recipe. LED backlights also hit their full brightness and optimal color temperature immediately, unlike CCFLs that require time to warm up. LEDs don't require the high-voltage power drivers that CCFL calls for, so the power savings will be substantial; Apple claims that the running time on a single charge of new LED-backlit MacBook Pros is 30 to 60 minutes longer than that of CCFL models. That's more of an increase in battery life than other PC notebooks will net from Santa Rosa alone.

Apple claims that the LED backlights drive 15-inch MacBook Pro displays to the same maximum brightness as CCFL, but add the benefit of fine-grained illumination level adjustment, and LEDs are capable of much lower minimum brightness levels. Apple confirmed that MacBook Pro takes advantage of both of these LED traits in its design; the displays dim to a far darker level than CCFL could sustain before going dark.

It's not likely that most existing MacBook Pro users would notice any side-by-side difference attributable to the new chipset apart from the increased memory ceiling to 4 GB. Santa Rosa promises to clock down the FSB in periods of reduced load, but it remains to be seen whether OS X will leverage this and how much difference it will make. It may be telling that even with the power savings of the LED backlight and the vaunted power-saving benefits of the Santa Rosa chipset, all MacBook Pro models still require an 85 watt charger. Apple does not tout advanced optional capabilities of Santa Rosa such as vPro desktop management and Robson NAND flash disk cache, and Santa Rosa's faster integrated graphics controller goes unexploited (for the better).

Following Apple's switch to Intel and AMD's acquisition of ATI, I considered it a mere matter of time before Apple dumped ATI as a supplier. New MacBook Pros ship with NVidia GeForce 8600M GT GPUs (graphics processing units). Apple is dodgy in its characterization of the performance of NVidia's GPU against the ATI X1600 GPU used in prior MacBook Pro models, stating only that MacBook Pro's performance in 3-D gaming and creative pro benchmarks show new MacBook Pros to be 50 percent faster than the original Core Duo MacBook Pro. Core Duo, not the new GPU, is the operative distinction here.