10/28/2007, 6:15pm, EDT
Sunday, October 28thLeopard drivers hint at upcoming MacBooks
Apple may have tipped its hand and revealed a near-term update to its 13-inch MacBooks and potentially its Mac minis, based on files discovered inside Mac OS X Leopard's system folders. The company has included a full set of recent drivers for Intel's GMA X3100 integrated graphics chipset, which is only built into the semiconductor firm's mainboards for notebooks based on the Santa Rosa platform. Apple currently uses Santa Rosa for its most recent MacBook Pro line but equips these higher-end systems exclusively with dedicated graphics chipsets from non-Intel providers like NVIDIA, leaving the regular MacBooks with slower but lower-cost Intel offerings.
No other driver-related clues as to the MacBook and Mac mini upgrades have been found, though all the drivers are dated from October 11th -- suggesting that the company had finalized the current version of the drivers only days before Leopard was sent to manufacturing. The Mac producer historically refrains from including drivers for unreleased hardware in its major and minor operating system updates alike unless it expects the current version to be preloaded on to new systems.
The GMA X3100 chipset is said to provide a significant boost to 3D performance on systems where dedicated graphics would be too costly or space-consuming; unlike the GMA 950 graphics used in today's MacBooks and Mac minis, the new chipset adds more advanced pixel and vertex shaders (drawing instructions), hardware transform and lighting acceleration, and better video decoding. Many Windows-based notebook models have begun using the upgrade since it was introduced along with Santa Rosa in May.
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First, Front Row was part of Tiger as well (just not the initial version). So its not like its something 'new' to change the product line-up.
Second, Apple's had the chance to improve the mini and has done a wonderful job of not updating it.
Third, Apple loves the AppleTV. Its cheap (half the price of the 'full-price' platform, works with more TVs then the mini with its component video, works with PCs or Macs, so you're not trying to force a 'switch' on people, and is less complicated to deal with then a full-fledged computer. Apple sees it (as can be seen from how they classify it) as an iPod/iTunes add-on. The mini is nowhere near that.
And as an Apple stockholder, are we supposed to just accept Steve spending millions on a 'hobby' and then just tossing it?
And these drivers mean nothing. It could be work they had done at some point for a potential product that was scrapped, or work for a product that may occur.
If you have a specific task that needs a computer, the mini is a great choice.