We had some frost last night in the valley, so a lot of people are beginning to think of winter and making the annual preparations. Artie has been cutting wood on his property and I bought a few cords to supplement my heating system this year. I’ve got a wood/coal furnace as back-up to my oil furnace, but I need to clean it up and make sure it is ready for the winter by changing the filters, cleaning the chimney and making sure the controls work.
Maybe I’ll put that off another weekend, though, since there’s a Victory motorcycle gathering in the White Mountains and Saturday looks like a nice sunny day. I hope you have a great weekend and thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes!
Your Kibbles & Bytes Team,
Don, Kali and Ed
Some Fine points on display differences between a white Macbook and an Al-Macbook:
Backlighting:
The white macbook has an LCD display with flourescent panel backlighting. LCD’s are not light-generating devices; they modulate the passage of light from another source, be it flourescent panel, LED, or laser.
External displays:
The Al-Macbook Displayport does not directly support a composite TV-video out.
A 2-adapter approach, Displayport-to-DVI then DVI-to-video, may work.
Displayport supports a MUCH larger external display: 2560×1600 pixels, versus an old 1280×800 pixels on the white Macbook.
Displayport also imposes HDCP video DRM protection built in, limiting the use of “non-protected” displays, like projectors.
Thanks for the side-by-side listing, though; it is appreciated.
This is great info! We’ll include it on our weekly newsletter Kibbles!
What about WiFi reception ?… I have heard nothing
The Old Macbook is great in this regard
Powerbooks & MacBook Prows were always crap in compare to the iBook Mac book ..
The big reason I switched to the iBook from the Power book was airport reception
I am in the wait & see Camp … I have Loved my 13” Macbook
I do wish I could use larger external monitor but I can Live
If the Macbook had Firewire 400 or 800 I would have bought two the first day with out .. I like the 13 “ size especially when touting multiple computers on location
I am a photographer and Firewire flash card readers are multiple times faster then USB card reader in the tens of minutes for 2 Gig of raw files … This is a BIG deal When the Client is waiting
There are issues with the what ever the pc card slot is called this week on the Macbook Pros & was all ways slower ..
Mabe an eSATA card reader but do they even exist
Why there is compact flash & SD card readers built in to the MacBook laptops like on many I do not know
How do I get data in to Lightroom or another DAM to review photos on location ?
Not to mention All of my back up solutions are Firewire at the moment . As is multiple terabytes of photo data base
Time machine is cute but hardly a backup solution & USB is so slow with large chunks of data …
I am looking at Acer laptops for location work 12”-13” is fine size wise 15 is just a bit to large
The 8” Acer fits much better in the case .. and is only u$s 300 a third or more less then the macbook
If apple is going to muck with creative professionals like this I might just jump I never thought I would say that
The white MacBooks support all single DVI display resolutions, up to 1920×1200 at least. I’m running mine with the MiniDVI to DVI adapter on a 24” Westinghouse LCD monitor at 1920×1200 with no problems.
Note that the newest generation of MacBook white now sports the 9400M graphics chips and 2.0 GHz cpu, and the same memory bus as the MacBook Al. The white one still has a FW400 port, too.
In late Jan.2009, Apple upgraded the White Macbook by using the same NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics with 256MB of shared RAM that the is in the aluminum. I think the way people will chose which one to buy is their preference of a White or aluminum Macbook. Personally I really like the White Macbooks but I’m afriad that Apple might be phasing out the White Macbook and producing only the Uni-Body Alumunim Macbooks.
the unibody uses a SATA controller with 3 Gbit/s vs 1.5 Gbit/s in the white.