With today’s announcement of the new Macbook Pro line, the 15-inch and 17-inch models now either sport new Core i5 or Core i7 processors, but the Macbook Pro 13-inch, which is in fact the most popular Mac sold by Apple is still sticking to a 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo. You might be asking yourself, “Why”? After speaking to Tim Bajarin from Creative Strategies at Apple, we have the full scoop as to how it’s excluded from the new Macbook Pro, as well as how Apple engineers could actually do it in the future. Read on past the break!
The Reason? Battery Life And Heat
According to Tim, Apple’s designers and engineers couldn’t possibly find a way to to squeeze a Core i5, Core i7, and even a core i3 chip into the Macbook Pro 13′s smaller chassis, which calls for smaller motherboards and smaller chipsets. In the design process, a Core i5 chip needs an adequate amount of cooling and space, and if by some chance it were added to the new Macbook Pro, there would be uncomfortable amounts of heat (remember the entire unibody construction is aluminum). And there’s more…
Even if you were able to add the new processor, you’d be getting toasted by your new Macbook Pro, and there would be another issue: low amounts of battery life. Tim mainly calls it an “engineering issue” which pretty much falls into what exactly it is. But there is hope:
He said that “current technologies can’t support Core i3/i5/i7 chips in a smaller chassis” (which is by Apple’s design standards) but what he didn’t say there would never be a Core i5 in the 13-inch Macbook Pro. Essentially what he said in our little chat over the phone is that at this point, Apple and Intel engineers have yet to make the new Intel Core line battery power-friendly. He also acknowledged that while the 2.4 GHz Core 2 duo isn’t to be messed around with, it’s no where on par with the newer chipsets found in the bigger, heavier, but faster 15 and 17-inch models.
Basically, that settles that. You’ll get the Core i5 CPU in a new Macbook Pro 13, but just not yet. Ah, the waiting game, a favourite pastime of Apple’s.
There you have it folks.
