The most significant difference between the June 2007 MBP and the February 2008 MBP was the Multitouch trackpad hardware. No matter what software people installed on their pre-multitouch MacBooks, they would never get Multitouch. The most significant difference between the Feb. 2008 and the October 2008 MBP (aside from case redesign) was the displayport interface. The difference between a upped-spec MBP bought in Jan. 2008 and a low-spec MBP bought in Mar. 2009 was the trackpad, displayport, and graphics card number (2.4GHz processor (different names), 256MB VRAM, 2GB RAM).
When it comes to Blu-Ray, one can play with a vanilla external drive attached, the other has to hack the drive, and at the end of the day can still play Blu-Ray. Most people who want Blu-Ray but want to stick with their 1-Year 2-Month old computer (that is if Blu-Ray was brought in today) will get a hacked drive. No point putting up the money for a to-all-purposes-exactly-the-same computer. The cost of legitimate use is just too great.
Now if we were talking Apple saying down the road only Quad-Core Macs could play Blu-Ray, the piracy movement might not take too much notice. But if the dual-core ones can play Blu-Ray, then people will think "Why can't my dual-core one do it? Oh wait, it can". The only barrier to playing HD on an older mac will be the user's willingness to be completely legitimate. Hacking a drive only voids a warranty. It does not broadcast an IP address, it does not download and upload data at the same time over the internet. Unless someone were to come and look at your computer, they would never suspect a thing. And eventually a friend would say "Could I have a copy?".
1. I would have to agree the spinning beachball is still annoying, but apparently it's to do with waiting on a process (often waiting on disk activity).
2. I hear Snow Leopard's memory requirements are going to be less... but still, it is good to be able to take advantage of older hardware.
3. The dock only wastes pixels if you don't have it on auto-hide. Which most people I know do. Loading bars are incorporated into dock icons by the programmers' workings (eg: handbrake, toast).
4. "When you move a document into a folder you can toggle between various keys to copy, create alias, or move." In the Finder: Cmd-Drag = Move, Option-Drag = Copy, Cmd-Option-Drag = Create Alias.
5. I use Marco Polo for this, but it would be nice to be system-implemented (although sometimes hazardous when the system decides to suddenly switch locations on you).
7 (6). Blu-Ray would be nice, but it does have that whole hideous DRM thing. Snow Leopard cannot have DRM support for some Macs and not others, or people will chuck fits. DRM has this ever so 'friendly' HDCP technology. The idea is that any path that copyrighted data follows must be designed to encrypt that data so that it is nigh impossible to copy. All Macs pre-displayport used DVI. These Macs are all relatively recent but have DVI ports. DVI isn't good enough. The video link is not encrypted and thus the copyrighted data could be copied without the rights. Anyone using a Firewire Blu-Ray drive would find that they couldn't play videos due to them having an unencrypted monitor out port.
Anyone wanting to use an old Cinema display to play videos would find that their 30 inch LCD is useless for HD goodness. The leap in Blu-Ray piracy would be astounding. As an example, iTunes is beginning to have this 'friendly' feature too ( http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/26/ituneshdcplarge540.jpg ). Apple won't be able to lie and say that when they finally bring out Blu-Ray for Macs that older models cannot play due to hardware lackings -> A Santa Rosa MBP can play HD ripped movies fine, but it will never be allowed to play them legally. Has anyone noticed the proliferation of PC laptops that have Blu-Ray integrated? They usually have two ports: VGA and HDMI. The adverts all say "Play your Blu-Ray movies onto an external monitor through the HDMI connection" Why do they say that? Because VGA is unencrypted.
For this point seven (six): Apple is not the problem here.
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