As many of you may know, I am in the process of deploying a new set of laptops to our teachers at the orange schools! These computers are different than all other notebooks we have given to our staff in many ways. Yes they have fun features like a backlit keyboard and LED backlit screens, but most of all, they are an engineering achievement and a technological milestone in the notebook industry. The new line of MacBook Pro's break through the barriers that have always been in place when it comes to building a notebook computer. The biggest noteworthy items with these systems, come down to the trackpad, physical construct (known as the unibody), and battery technology.
The TrackPad
The first thing you might notice — or not notice — is the button. The entire trackpad is the button, so you can click anywhere. Without a separate button, the spacious trackpad gives your hands plenty of room to move on the large, silky glass surface. Use two fingers to scroll up and down a page. Pinch to zoom in and out. Rotate an image with your fingertips. Swipe with three fingers to flip through your photo libraries. Swipe with four fingers to show your desktop, view all open windows, or switch applications. If you’re coming from a right-click world, you can right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area on the trackpad. The more you use the Multi-Touch trackpad, the more you’ll wonder what you ever did without it.
The Unibody
Until now, all notebooks were designed the same way, by assembling multiple pieces to create a single enclosure. But once you include all the necessary parts, you add size, weight, complexity, and more opportunities for failure. Solving a problem like this re
quired more than an incremental change. It required a breakthrough. To create the MacBook Pro, the design and engineering teams devised a way to replace many parts with just one. That one part is called the unibody — a seamless enclosure carved from a single piece of aluminum.
The Battery
Built right into each of the new MacBook Pro notebooks is a breakthrough battery that lasts dramatically longer and does so without increasing the size or weight of MacBook Pro. On a single charge, the battery in the new MacBook Pro lasts up to 7 hours and can be recharged up to 1000 times. That’s compared with only 200 to 300 times for typical notebooks. Advanced chemistry and Adaptive Charging allows the battery to maintain charging capabilities longer and determines the optimal way to charge the battery’s cells. Because the battery lasts up to five years, MacBook Pro uses just one battery in the same time a typical notebook uses three. That makes for less waste. And that, in turn, makes for one environmentally friendly battery.