Apple Upgrades MacBook Pros to Intel’s Core 2 Duo

Without much fanfare — I was figuring this would be announced at a conference or such — Apple has upgraded its MacBook Pro line to Core 2 Duo chips.

The MacBook Pros’ Intel Core 2 Duo processor offers 4MB of shared L2 cache, which is up to 39 percent faster than the previous 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro and more than seven times faster than the 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 running industry standard benchmarks, Apple said. Additionally, it has enhanced Mac OS X to take advantage of the technology advances from Intel's Core 2 Duo processors, resulting in increased performance in professional applications like Aperture 1.5, Final Cut Pro 5 and Logic Pro 7.

An ideal fit for business and creative professionals, MacBook Pro delivers advanced performance including 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory expandable up to 3GB, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics with up to 256MB of dedicated GDDR3 graphics memory, and a double-layer SuperDrive for burning professional-quality DVDs. […]

In the same way that the 486 was the successor to the 386, so is the Core 2 the successor to the Core [1]. Apple purports that the Core 2 is up to “39 percent faster”, but that’s probably wishful thinking. Sure, the Core 2 is faster, but benchmarks indicate that the difference is closer to 15-20% percent, depending on which set of applications are tested.

Still, “faster” is a good thing ;). Speed aside, though, this new generation gets some hardware updates as well. They now come standard with a FireWire 800 port (in addition to a FireWire 400 port) and a 120 GB hard drive. On top of that, they can also accept up to 3 GB of RAM. Sooo tempting!