Core77

Apple's latest Big Announcement Day was today, and those of you hoping for some new, revolutionary laptop might be disappointed; the new MacBooks and Macbook Pros don't look that different from their predecessors.

There are differences, of course, but they're of the type to perhaps excite us ID'ers more than the average Joe. The new "unibody" design is described thusly:

[The unibody design] creates its own set of challenges. When you have multiple parts that are fastened together, tolerances don't need to be perfect. You have wiggle room, both literally and figuratively. But when one part is responsible for many functions, it's critical to manufacture that part with absolute precision, down to the micron... There was only one way to achieve this level of precision: mill the unibody from a solid block of aluminum using computer numerical control, or CNC, machines....

Other than that we've got LED screens that burn less juice, separated keys that you'll either love or hate, a black bezel under the glass screen, and a new big-ass glass trackpad (with no button, as it's tap-able) that understands Multitouch gestures.

One piece of very good news is that access to the hard drive has been redesigned; there's now an access door that just pops off. I replaced the hard drive on my current-gen MacBook Pro, and the instructions for how to do that looked like the instructions for how to build a missile. I mean MacGyver would have had trouble doing it. At least, MacGruber would have.

More details here.