White Macbook updated with Nvidia 9400, still $999

Just a quick fyi
http://www.apple.com/macbook/white/
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just saw this. very nice.

 

Oh wow nice!

 

so the whitebook is now as powerful as the aluminum (except for the 120gb HD VS the 160gb HD), but for less right?

 

it still has ddr2 memory.

 

Is the aluminum the better deal if you want to be future proof?

 

It's better built, so it will last longer than the white one.

 

also,alu has LED screen but this is a good news!

 

NB: memory on the white mb is still ddr2 and thus the FBS is also slower... so you will see a small (albeit very small) decrease in performace vs the alu mb.
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but the ram can be upgraded to 4gb on the cheap.

 

The White also has a worse screen, and such.

 

It's probably better to stick with the aluminum just for the built quality alone.

 

This is definitely very good news for people, especially students, on a very tight budget. Now more people are going to be able to afford a MacBook. Thumbs up to Apple for this nice gesture of offering such a decent config at a great price in the current economic circumstances.

 

They should probably price the white one at $799, and the crappo unibody version at $1100, and the other one at $1400.

 

Yeah you can upgrade the ram, but not to the ddr3 1066mhz variety, the front-side bus on the older macbook only had a 800mhz bus. This won't only cause a minor slowdown in everyday apps, but I think the meaningful performance hit will be related to the 9400m video board, which will suffer from using the slower system memory.

Still, outstanding upgrade without a change in price. Thanks Apple.

 

Hey for the folks that wanted firewire 400 now can get it and with a free upgraded cpu + its cheaper than the lowest end unibody.

 

Hah, that's true! Now no more complaining to Apple.

 

winterymix - I just checked the Apple site and they say the new White MacBook has a 1066-FSB. So, it looks like it might support DDR3 - what I have not been able to determine is whether or not DDR2 and DDR3 are physically interchangeable from a slot standpoint.

 

That's the confusing part. The DDR3 memory in the aluminum MacBook is a differnet pin configuration than the DDR2 memory in the White MacBook. I thought nVIDIA's Ion platform only used 204 pin memory while DDR2 is only 200 pin. So either Apple's website is wrong about the memeory, wrong about the chipset, or nVIDIA has released a lower end chipset that supports the 9400M and 200 pin DDR2 memory.

It'll be interesting to see someone actually get a white MacBook and check all this out.

 

Paul - YThank-you for the info and yes it will be interesting - I waited as long as I could before ordering the Toshiba U405. I was spoiled by the new alu MacBook's when I ordered one for my daughter, installed XP via Bootcamp, then sent it to her for her to use in school. I can't afford another $1200+ - so I ordered the Toshiba. Just my luck...

 

Wow, glad I got my macbook when I did. Still, that's a very surprising move, I never expected they'd update the white macbook with the same specs as the aluminum.

 

I wonder if they underclocked the 9400M in the White MacBook like in the MBA. The MBA underclocks and undervolts to save power and heat, but nVidia would no doubt offer a discount on lower clocked reject 9400M that couldn't make the higher bin of the other models, and it would definitely help Apple's margins at the $999 price point. With the 9400M in the White MacBook being memory starved with DDR2 667 a reduction in clock speed really wouldn't be noticeable anyways.

On the DDR2-667 issue, I can understand Apple not going with DDR3, but no going with DDR2-800 is a strange choice. The price difference is minimal and DDR2-800 is already used in the iMacs so the supply chain is in place. The only other model that still uses DDR2-667 is the Mac Mini, which really points to any upcoming Mac Mini refreshes having similar specs to the White MacBook, namely a 9400M with DDR2-667. At least they were nice enough to include 2GB of RAM, which is pretty much the minimum nowadays.

 

Ya so now all those people that want to use something slower then USB can't complain anymore

 

I think with firewire 400 still in the white macbook with a free CPU upgrade, its the best bang for buck machine in the macbook lineup!

Somebody's watchin mE~~!

 

Sure the DDR2-667 is slower, but people are forgetting that the 9400m is a lot faster for 3D than the intel x3100, DDR2 or not.

Still, I am kind of ticked about this update since I just got my new white macbook just 2 months ago...

 

You'd think Apple is finally listening to the complaints regarding the fire wire issue.
I'm very glad Apple has boosted the White Macbook up to current standards. Although memory is still the DDR2, Navidia GPU, front side bus speeds,HDD bump & price point make this a good value !!!

Maybe the Whitebook will be around for awhile now ?

 

The only thing firewire 400 is good for is if you have something that only uses firewire. otherwise you might a well us USB, Apple knows this that is why they took it out of the alum MB.

 

Why are people calling the 9400M the "Ion platform"?

The Ion platform consists of the 9400M combined with an Intel Atom processor.

Anyway, the 9400M supports both DDR2 and DDR3. However, the pin configurations and voltages are different. So you can't put DDR3 in the new white MacBook.

Another thing to consider is that, while the new white MacBook has a 1066MHz FSB, it still only ships with DDR2 667.

So compared to the unibody Macs, memory bandwidth will be anywhere up to 40% less based on both clock speed of the RAM as well as technology improvements. And as a poster over at MacRumors pointed out:

So while the new MacBook white is a huge step up from the previous model, it's still well behind the unibody MacBook.

The UniBody MacBook provides a few significant upgrades: considerably more memory bandwidth, higher quality LED backlit display, glass trackpad, MUCH MUCH MUCH better build quality (don't even try to argue against this with me, I know from experience and multiple repairs), it's lighter and it's thinner. Supposedly has better battery life too.

 

Let me guess, you haven't used firewire before...
Not only is it typically faster (I don't care what the USB people say, it does not run anywhere close to 480Mb), but you can also do nifty things such as target disk mode and also transferring the files, settings, and applications from one mac to another is a snap.

 

And I don't care what the Firewire people say, USB has a proven sustained transfer rate of 35-40MB/sec, while Firewire 400 (on Macs no less) has a proven sustained transfer rate of around 35MB/sec.

Firewire is dead and people need to accept it.

Edit: Only on OS X is USB slower than Firewire Compare a Windows system to a Mac and transfer files and you'll see a very significant difference in speed. I know it takes about 50% longer to sync my iPods on my aluminum MacBook than it does on my Vista notebook PC (dv6500t).

 

Yes I do use firewire 800.

 

So then why do you think that USB > firewire?

 

Read what I said.

 

Well as I previously stated, from personal experience I have found that in practice FW400 provides greater throughput than USB 2.0 even though USB 2.0 in theory should have an 80 mb advantage. Since firewire also allows a you to do things such as target disk mode, I'm still confused why you would use USB 2.0 over FW400 given the option. In your opinion, what does USB2.0 have over FW400 other than being the ubiquitous standard?

 

Another advantage of Firewire is that it can supply significantly more power than USB. Firewire can bus-power 3.5" HDDs while even some 2.5" HDD enclosures need separate power support when using USB.

 

As much as I hate to say it, fw400 is probably dead for most consumers (has it ever really been successful other then dv?)

Though firewire is pretty much the better of the two standards, id still use it if it wasnt so hard to get external enclosures with it (usually cost a lot)

 

That is a pretty good deal. If they could get the unibody MacBook down to $1k I'm sure that they'd sell a lot more Macs.

 

I know you're replying to the other poster, but I want to chime in.

If you've only ever used a Mac, then what you say about Firewire being faster is true. On a Mac, USB 2.0 support is bad. There are a number of benchmarks out there that prove this. Way back when USB 2.0 was first introduced into Macs, it could barely push 15MB/sec over the bus while PCs were pushing roughly the same as Firewire. Over the last few years, USB 2.0 has proven to have a sustained transfer rate of ~40MB/sec while Firewire 400 still has that same ~30MB/sec transfer rate. However, on a Mac, again, USB 2.0 seems to be deliberately slower. I know for a fact that files and such transfer slower over USB 2.0 to my 80GB 5.5G iPod on my Mac compared to my PC.

In the real world, USB 2.0 is at least EQUAL to Firewire in performance.

Target Disk Mode isn't necessarily anything special anyway, as nearly all people will never use or even know what it is.

 

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2026908,00.asp

I agree that in the real world the speed difference isn't that big between Firewire 400 and USB2.0 and that Apple's implementation of USB2.0 isn't that good. Still tests still generally show Firewire 400 having a slight advantage. Probably around 10% realistically.

Besides target disk mode and Firewire supplying a lot more power than USB2.0, Firewire also uses less CPU time. This is because Firewire has a dedicated controller while USB2.0 relies on the CPU for processing. Admittedly, with multicore processors, pegging one for a few minutes while doing a USB transfer isn't that big a deal, although there is power consumption implications. Relying on the CPU and soft-controllers is also why USB2.0 performance can be great if done properly or poor if not while Firewire is more consistent, if only because there are fewer companies making the dedicated hardware controllers.

 

Oh there's a huge real world difference between firewire 400 and usb 2.0.

I tried to copy a 97gb worth of files from my macbook pro to my external 1TB hdd via usb 2.0 which took 1 hour and 27 minutes and that same 97gb file took firewire 400 36 minutes! Thats a HUGE difference.

I've also tried to same 97gb on my brothers dell inspiron via usb 2.0 which took roughly 1 hour and 27 minutes.

 

Have any real world benchmarks? Synthetic benchmarks don't mean anything.

http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm "Additional notes from Alex Esquenet - our engineer friend based in Belgium: "A fast usb host can achieve 40 MBytes/sec."

"As far as we know, effective rate reaches at 40MBps or 320Mbps for bulk transfer on a USB 2.0 hard drive with no one else is sharing the bus. Flash Drives seem to be catching up too with the some hitting 30MB/s milestone."

The CPU issue is only an issue under OS X. I transfer files to external drives in Windows Vista and I see absolutely no change in CPU use. It hovers around 0-2% like always. The same task in OS X will generally result in as much as a 20% spike in overall CPU use.

97GB is roughly 99,328MB. 36 minutes is 2,160 seconds. That means you had to have a sustained transfer rate of about 46MB/sec.

So you want us to believe that you had a sustained transfer rate of 46MB/sec, which is faster than every real world Firewire 400 benchmark out there, and faster than nearly all external HDD's are capable of or even claim to be capable of? You also want us to believe that USB speed was roughly half of its proven capable sustained transfer rate?

*If* your USB transfer was that slow, that is the fault of your drive and the controller chipset contained within and not the bus itself.

 

All I can say is, test it out yourself and you shall see.

 

Guys, I thinking of taking the plunge, i can save a lot compared to getting the alubook, and i would sell off the ipod nano that i can get (australia's back to school deal).

I am only concerned about build quality, i dont want to be facing cracking casing in the near future. i think as far as the internals go, its not a problem, i am only worried about the casing. should i go for it? i can save a considerable amount of money which I need.

 

if you need the money, then the choice should be obvious...

 

I have. In a real world situation in Windows, Firewire and USB are equal. Firewire and USB on OS X will have USB coming out on top in every situation. USB on Windows compared to OS X is also considerably faster than USB on OS X.

 

this is good news, and bad at the same time. I figure this will prolong the life of the white macbook on apples sales site, which is bad for pricing on the new Unibodies.

I have had two MBs in the past, both of which had major cracking issues. Just bought a new Uni-MBP and I can attest to the strength of the new design. I looked at the uni-MBs and they were just "ehhh", but by far more solid than the old Whites.

 

Firewire has less latency than usb. that's about it.

 

Try moving a 4.37GB file right now, mine takes about a minute via fw800 to do so.(keep in mind though I have an intel x25-m ssd drive though for this test so its faster than other users with a regular hdd, which should take much longer than my test).

on this to get to 722mb via firewire 800 it took me roughly 8 seconds for it to reach 722mb for me to snap the shot and took just a little over 1 minute for the whole thing to fully transfer.

and here is usb 2.0 with the exact same file, it took me 20 seconds for usb 2.0 to reach 712mb for me to snap that shot (which really took total of 3min to fully transfer the file.

last example copying 42.12gb worth (sorry I cant go higher than this since my intel x25-m only has 44gb left) with nine items via USB 2.0 which takes roughly 21 minutes.

And the exact same 9 files of 42.12gb and same 1tb hdd and my intel x25-m via firewire 800 taking roughly 13 minutes.

Imagine 100GB and up how much time it could save. Just try it and not make up stuff like oh yea I have and usb 2.0 is better or the same because I said so.

Trust me, I transfer files that are anywhere from 4gb-100gb daily back and forth from my external 1TB hdd to my mbp and it would take FOREVER with USB 2.0.

And dont forget to keep in mind this is a test done with an intel x25-m which is installed in my mbp and is insanely fast for transfers, if instead would use a hitachi travelstar 7k200 (which I used to have in this mbp) the transfer speed took much longer on both USB 2.0 and firewire 800).

In conclusion USB 2.0 and Firewire are NOT the same and firewire 400/800 trumphs the USB 2.0 in real world usages. The estimated time gives you an idea of the difference in transfer speed and trust me the latency on the firewire is much much better and it transfers a whole lot faster in real world usages than usb 2.0.

 

You are wrong. It has DD3.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10146979-1.html

 

lol. no im not.

http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MB881LL/A?mco=MzE2NjMyOA

fail on your part.