Apple’s Tuesday event came and went but for all the talk about low-cost 800$ laptops, we got nothing. Yes, the entry level MacBook (now called “MacBook White”) saw a token price-drop of 100$ but it is unlikely to amount to much in India given how low the Ruppee has hit against the dollar (practically speaking, you’ll get a rate of 49-50 Rs to a dollar).

The new aluminum Macbook and Macbook Pros are beautifully designed but there are some decisions that I find a little hard to digest:

Rise and shine: Apple has decided not to offer matte screen on any of their new models. As an owner of a MacBook and an iMac, I can vouch for the reflection on glossy screens as being distracting. Apple seems to suggest that the additional brightness of the LED backlit displays, will counter it to some extent. Or, as Mr. Schiller would like us to believe: “One of the great things about a notebook is you can turn it however you want!”. Then why did you ever offer it Apple? Just because you switched to glass and cannot do anything about it doesn’t make it a feature! While they are usable (the Macbook being borderline usable when outdoors on a bright day), it is not something I would have picked out of choice.

We did indeed start the Firewire (but now the flame is fading): Almost all the low mid-end camcorders available in India use Firewire to transfer video to computers. Considering that Macbooks – thanks to the new NVidia graphics adapter, are more capable of handling video editing chores than ever, this seems like a boneheaded move.

Two USB ports ought to be enough for anybody. Wrong. Most USB powered hard-disks come with a Y-USB cable for a good reason. They perform better when they can draw power from two USB ports. If I am using one, where do I put a mouse? Or my iPod? Or my Wacom tablet? Or the bazillion other devices that can be (and have to be) used simultaneously? Three is the absolute minimum that a machine these days must have. Two ports will make you miserable sooner or later.

No I am not bummed about DisplayPort – there are adapters that allow you to go from DisplayPort to VGA and DVI. So for that old projector in your office just make sure you keep this adapter handy.

I have mixed feeling about this generation of MacBooks and MacBook Pros giving Blue-Ray a miss. Put in Blue-Ray into a system and you increase the complexity of both software and hardware (thanks to the wonderful, consumer friendly standards like HDCP and HDMI). Blue-Ray discs have only 3 regions (as opposed to 6 for DVDs) and for a change, India and US share the region code (1, as opposed to 1 and 5 for US and India in the DVD world). This makes Blue Ray discs very attractive for Indian consumers; considering that you don’t have to worry about your drive’s region – whether you are picking up a DVD in India or US. Still, they are expensive (1800-2000 Rs a pop) and not very readily available. I can live without them for a year.

The big point for most of us in India will be their pricing. Considering where Rupee stands today, I expect the prices to be marked up by 30-35% over the dollar prices. A report already seems to suggest this, but we are not losing our hearts yet. As they say, we’ll cross the bridge when we get there and given how slowly iPods from the September event are trickling into the stores here, I’d say we are still far far away.

Update: Apple’s official price list for India is out. For us, It is by far the biggest letdown.

This entry was posted Thursday, October 16th, 2008 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Hardware, Mac. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.