Mac Book Mini

So, after the record breaking day yesterday, as the expression goes, when you’re on top, you’ve got nowhere to go, but down. Before we get to the recon, wanted to say one more time, THANK YOU for Digging us, posting, writing, and so forth. The more exposure we get, the more tips we get, and the more news and recon we can provide to everyone!

Okay, on to the good stuff…we’re going to focus on the Mac Book, or more specifically, the Mac Book Pro 12″/Mini/Duo/whatever you want to call it. We have gotten an overwhelming number of comments and tips about this un-announced device, and so here’s what we know to be true with the current prototypes floating around the Apple design team (yes, that is where the prototypes go, as design and engineering are done hand in hand at Apple).

Display: Confirmed use LED backlighting (to conserve battery life), and will be a 12″ Widescreen, same resolution as Mac Book, 1280×800. Only possible wrench in this plan is getting enough screens to meet Apple’s demands, but all indications as of today’s prototypes is that this is the plan going forward.

CPU: 2GHz Core 2 Duo, sorry to say it won’t be faster, but to be small, you gotta use less watts and generate less heat…especially with the graphics card that this beast has been spotted with. Still, considering that the top end will be 2.33 – 2.5 GHz, that’s really not that bad.

RAM: 1GB standard, 3GB BTO.

Storage, Video and LOTS more after the jump…HDD: Confirmed use of Flash-assisted storage (via an un-released Intel chipset, not using Samsung or similar drives). The flash will be a part of the motherboard, not the HDD, but will be used as a large (256-512MB) cache (imagine how the memory works on the HDD-based iPods, clearly you aren’t streaming the files off the HDD with every beat of the music…Apple has lots of expertise in this area already, because of the iPod). Standard HDD size should be 80GB. Up to 200GB BTO.

Video: ATI Radeon X1900 with 256MB. No compromises here.

Battery Life: 6 hours, using lithium polymer technology just like the iPods and Mac Books already do. No miracles here, sorry to everyone hoping for 8+ hours, some things just aren’t doable, even by Apple.
Optical Drive: (yes, it will have one) slot loading SuperDrive, dual-layer, the usual.

GPS: as much as we desperately want it, no one has seen a prototype with this enabled…of course, since you basically need a line of sight to the sky to use GPS, and Apple prototypes rarely see the light of day before they are announced, this could be a sleeper feature that is still on the way!

Weight: ~3.5lbs…even with battery and optical drive, if there is one thing that Apple is good at, and can beat ALL competitors at, it is industrial design.

Etc: All the rest of the usual extras, including iSight, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g/n, Firewire 400 and 800, USB2.0, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, audio in/out, mini-DVI, and so forth.

Price: $1799 for standard configuration (a couple hundred above the Mac Book, a couple hundred below the Mac Book Pro, slightly more toward the high side).

Release date: WWDC 2007, sorry to say…that’d be June.

Okay, so there’s absolutely everything we know, have gotten reports on, and have pieced together on the new Mac Book Mini/Thin/Duo/???. What do you know, what do you think, would you buy one, or two, or ten?? Shout out in the comments or drop us a line at applerecon@gmail.com.

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