Massive Apple Refresh

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I've been expecting this for some time, but Apple this morning released the new line of desktops, refreshing not only the Mac mini and the iMac, but the Mac Pro as well.

The new Mac minis start at $599 with a 2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, which is the same graphics chip in the latest revisions of the current line of laptops. Unlike the Pro laptops which also include a 9600M GT, spec-wise the Mac mini is technically very similar to Apple's MacBook line, the exception being that the Mac mini comes with far fewer accessories, yet includes a FireWire 800 port.

The iMacs have dropped in price, essentially the 24 inch iMac is now $300 less than it was yesterday, for more screen real estate as well as more RAM.

The MacPros have undergone what I believe is the most significant change, which is the upgrade to the Xeon verion of the Nehalem microarchitecture. Nehalem uses QPI - QuickPath Interconnect, which means a dedicated memory controller for each processor. Prior to this, processors not only shared memory controllers, but the memory controller was a bottleneck before feeding information to the I/O controller. With Nehalem, each processor is connected directly to the memory controller and the I/O controller, resulting in an overall speed boost, which Intel claims is almost twice as fast as the previous version.

Apple also released new Airport Extreme and new Time Capsule products, adding support for 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz dual-band networking and a Guest Network feature.

This is the update that I hoped would happen at MacWorld; I am a bit puzzled as to why this was done all at once rather than trickled out week by week, product by product. My laptop which I bought 3 years ago is officially old, by the way -- when the modern Mac mini is faster than your 1st generation MacBook Pro... it might be time to get anew computer.

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