Macopinion

Snow Leopard, Nehalem, And Apple’s Notebook Product Release Roadmap

Apple chose not to enlighten us in the slightest at WWDC about its intentions regarding the next Mac notebook upgrades, or for that matter any of its computer platforms, and even the rumor mills have been relatively quiet lately on that topic after a flurry of speculation a month or two ago about an aluminum MacBook being in the offing - something I think will indeed materialize, but the question is when.

The MacBook Air is now six months in production, and I'm surprised that it hasn't received its first refreshment yet. That's testimony to a solid design and execution from the get-go, and I heard somewhere (unverified) that the Air has been the hottest-selling notebook for Apple over the past several months.

The latest revisions of the MacBook and MacBook Pro are also getting a bit long in the tooth, having been released at the end of February, and in the normal scheme of things that would make the next revision due by early-mid fall. The holdup for them may be availability of Intel's next-generation Core 2 Duo CPUs, which are delayed for release to OEMs until mid-late July or maybe even August - a topic I covered at some length here last week.

Picking up where I left off, Digitimes columnist Ricky Morris has made the observation that Apple's thus far sketchy description of where it's planning to go with OS 10.6 Snow Leopard does provide us with some clues from which we can interpret the Mac hardware upgrade roadmap somewhat more clearly, notably that some of the new features (yes, I know that Snow Leopard isn't supposed to be about new features, but if it quacks like a duck, has feathers like a duck, etc....) In 10.6 sound awfully like they are being specifically developed to take advantage of chip technology projected for Intel's next plus one generation Core Nehalem CPU microarchitecture, which is to appear in desktop/server versions (code-named Bloomfield and Gainestown) late this year, and in Core 2 Duo mobile versions (called Clarksfield and Auburndale) by the end of Q2, 2009, or interestingly about the same time Apple has penciled in for the Snow Leopard release.

That would suggest that it will be at least a year before we see Clarksfield-based MacBook Pros and Auburndale or Clarksfield-based MacBooks and MacBook Airs, although Montevina/Penryn II platforms will enter the product cycle before then of course. This is all of course speculative, and Intel still has to get the Montevina/Penryn II platform out the door, hopefully next month.

Ricky Morris's notes that the main optimization targeted for Snow Leopard is Grand Central, which Apple says will make all of OS X "multi-core aware" for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors, as well as easier for software developers to create programs taking advantage of what multi-core platforms have to offer.

This will dovetail nicely with Nehalem's simultaneous multi-threading technology (SMT) which will allow each core to execute two threads per clock cycle.

Another Snow Leopard technology will be OpenCL which Apple says makes it possible for developers to utilize unused capacity of the computer's graphics processing (GPU) to help perform computing workloads. This close integration with Intel CPU technology advancements is another reason it's looking less and less likely that Snow Leopard not support Power PC Macs.

So in practical terms, what does this portend in the context of Apple notebook upgrades? Well, as I said before, I think first on the agenda will likely be a MacBook Air upgrade to Penryn-based 45nm technology CPUs, and perhaps a few other tweaks and improvements, but nothing really major.

I'm virtually certain that we will see at least one more refresh of the MacBook and MacBook Pro before year-end - I would put the odds that about a 30 percent chance of a rollout in the late summer/early fall, and 70 percent chance of it being in the more traditional October/November time slot for Apple notebook refreshes.

The wild card in this conjecture is the rumored aluminum MacBook. As I said above, I think that's a matter of "when," rather than "if," and it seems like something Apple might want to launch strategically with some fanfare. Historically, that might have been at Macworld Expo Paris in September, but Apple isn't going to Macworld Paris this year, and the WWDC is over, so perhaps an Apple "special event" in the late summer or early fall, or will they hold off until Macworld Expo San Francisco in January, and go with a refresh of the current form factors when Montevina is ready? It's difficult to fathom, and I suspect that Intel's Montevina delay may well have upset the planned schedule a bit.

And while the rumor buzz has been mostly of an aluminum MacBook, presumably incorporating styling themes similar to the MacBook Air's, the MacBook Pro is actually a lot more overdue for a redo, with its basic design dating all the way back to the aluminum PowerBook introductions in January and September 2003. Five-plus years is an eternity in computer design terms, and the 17-inch version is now the longest-lived Apple notebook form factor ever, surpassing the previous record-holder, the dual USB iBook, by six months with the clock still running.

The thing is, Nehalem coming next year, it seems improbable, although certainly not in impossible, that Apple would not want to wait until the new CPU platform (and Snow Leopard) is ready for the rollout of a completely new MacBook Pro form factor, but what do I know?

For folks like me who are looking to upgrade their Mac notebook system in the near future, the extraordinarily uncertain product introduction road map leaves us guessing. We can be I assured that there will inevitably and eventually be new Apple 'Books, but deducing the timing is more difficult than usual right now.

If you really need a performance boost (and I'm beginning to enter that zone myself), the current offerings are nothing to be sniffed at, and have the advantage of being thoroughly debugged and mature products.

On the other hand, if you're smitten with the MacBook Air's sleek lines but need a larger computer with a more comprehensive feature set, and your current 'Book is still doing a reasonably good job of meeting your needs, it probably will be worthwhile to hold off for a bit, perhaps even until Macworld Expo, because the new models, when they come, are certain to be way cool design-wise and represent a substantial technology advance.

Nehalem (in conjunction with Snow Leopard) is shaping up to be a fairly revolutionary step forward in computing technology, but it's a year or so away, and by that time there's sure to be something else just over the horizon tantalizing us. It has been ever thus.


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cmoore@macopinion.com

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