OS X Leopord

Should I wait for Leopord to come out before I get my Macbook Pro? That's like another month and a half or so...

 

No harm in waiting, but you know by that time santa rosa will be around the corner and if you wait for santa rosa then the next core duos(or maybe quads) will be out soon. You get my jist?
Anyway if you don't need a notebook right away and can wait a couple months technology is only getting better.

 

How much is upgrading to Leopard going to cost? I need a new laptop, like I need to order it within the next week or two so I can't wait until Leopard comes out.

 

I actually called Apple up and asked that question. The response was that they were not sure but since the tiger cost around $130 it was reasonable to expect Leopard to cost as much.

 

You can buy a MB or MBP C2D, 64 bit already, now and just install Leopard when it is released. Does not cost as much as Vista, that I know.

 

I'm under the undrstanding that Leopard wont' be out for a bit longer, probably around the time Santa Rose comes out.
So probably end of Q1 or so.
I'm also under the understanding that Leopard will only be around $50 for an upgrade if you have Tiger. A friend of mine,who is a long time mac user said he was able to upgrade to tiger for $50 during the first few months of its release.

but hey, if you can wait till it comes out, you may be able to get a santa rose based MBP instead.

 

Get it now. Leopard is not due until the end of Q1, which would be the end of March. That is 4 months away. As everyone else stated, when you start waiting for one thing, you will wait for everything. The upgrades cost 129 for normal people and around 99 for students for Tiger, Leopard should be the same.

 

If you are a student, you can benefit from Education Discount when Leopard comes out, making it much cheaper. If you are not, just get someone you know that is a student to get an upgrade for you when it comes out.

 

I guess I don't actually really need it until summer of 2007 :\ I mean right now I'm using a 7 year old computer running PIII. I hopped over the the apple store yesterday to try out the MBP and it is like 20x faster than this thing.

Meh, I don't know if I can wait that lonngggggg!

But would it be worth it to wait? Will the new line cost as much as the current line?

Edit: right now the only problem I can see with waiting and getting the Santa Rosa MBP is that it might end up like what happened when the MBP just came out. There was the whole heat problem, thermal paste screw up and etc. The current C2D line of MBP are stable and good. There's nothing wrong with them. They're top of the line and can handle just about anything for the next 3 or 4 years (I don't plan to game a lot, just old games really).
A couple months after Apple releases the first generation Santa Rosa MBP, they will release a second line that has everything fixed and all that.

 

Hrm, using a p3 laptop eh? I'd throw linux on there
The line up of macs generally cost the same. I doubt there will be any price fluctuation (or very little). The C2D MBP cost the same as the CD MBP AND had an impressive list of upgrades (double the ram and a larger hard drive) compared to the CD mbp.

You won't see quad cores in laptops. The energy requirements are more than double that of a dual core. The major advantage of Santa Rose is that it has a faster FSB that allows the C2D to run at it's real speed. Both the CD and C2D are a bit gimped on laptops right now, as the FSB is slow.

Yes... the great question... to play the waiting game longer, or to go ahead and jump in now.

 

If you do play the waiting game, I should warn you that Santa Rosa is actually supposed to be launched in Q2. It's only recently there's been talk of moving it up to late Q1 to try to get it in closer to Vista and DX10 mobile GPUs. Now this is launched BTW, not available. We saw there was several months delay between when Merom was officially launched and when the C2D MBP came out so you can expect similar for Santa Rosa. This could easily mean that a late Q1 launch turns into a late Q2 purchase. Further complications include heat as you mentioned for the 800MHz FSB, heat for the first DX10 GPUs, and design flaws if Apple decides to come up with a new chassis design, which is quite likely given the similarity between the current MBP and PB.

The funny thing about waiting for Q2 for Santa Rosa is that Penryn, the 45nm refresh is supposed to be out by the end of the year to correct any heat issues and improve upon the current Core 2 architecture. Now that is quite tempting, which means more waiting.

Personally, I've set 64-bit support as the requirement for sufficient future-proofing which allowed me to justify waiting for Core 2 and skipping all the initial CD MBP problems. So even with Santa Rosa and DX10 GPUs around the corner, I'm pretty sure I'm going to put my foot down and get a laptop this holiday. From my perspective, Santa Rosa doesn't bring anything huge since the current C2D MBP seem to have draft-802.11n WiFi cards anyways, I can always slap a hybrid HDD in which isn't quite the same as Robson cache, but can compensate, and the 800MHz FSB shouldn't be particularly earth-shattering performance-wise since Apple had the grace to use 4MB L2 cache CPUs, which largely offsets dependence on the FSB. DX10 GPUs are tempting, but nVidia isn't set to launch mainstream desktop DX10 GPUs until February and ATI will probably be a month behind, which puts mainstream mobile DX10 GPUs even farther behind and that's too long for me.

 

Good luck trying to change out that HDD mate. I'd love to be able to do that to upgrade, but I don't want to almost completely disasemble the notebook.
When I talked to an engineer the other week, he said they're going to try to make one of the next versions have user upgradable hdd.

 

It's really that hard to change HDD? Well, I guess it's good that Apple raised the RAM limit so I'll just upgrade to 3GB when I need it and the prices drop. More RAM should have about the same effect as Robson cache or hybrid HDDs anyways.

 

Um yeah, it's not impossible, but it's:
a) very difficult to even get to the HDD, you have to take it almost all the way apart and
b)it voids the MBP warranty.

 

what is leopard, santa rose, and tiger?

 

Leopard is the next version of OS X, 10.5. Tiger is the current version, Apple uses cat names for there OS's. Santa Rosa is the next platform for Intel. The codename for the current platform is Napa. Search Wikipedia for an in depth explanation.

 

Good idea.