Compared to my Mid-2007 Macbook Pro 17 Core2Duo, the new MacBook Pros are only THREE TIMES FASTER.

Thus, I need to wait one further model upgrade when the speed reaches FOUR TIME FASTER. This may occur in the Fall of 2011, when Mac OS X Lion is in full force and some kinks and bugs are worked out of the new operating system.

A new generation of computer occurs when it is FOUR TIMES FASTER than the old generation.

other topic: i have the 7200rpm 500GB drive on last year’s mac. i think i read flash prices will drop dramatically in a few months, and i am hoping larger flash are on the way so i’m trying to hold out for a “cheap “1TB flash drive. Does replacing the drive with flash make a big difference in performance (and battery) ? my mac performs reasonably well but seems to pause at times i think when accessing the drive.

That would be an epic fail; HP tried that last year with one of their Windows desktops and it pretty much sat on the shelves once people figured things out.

Try this: While you’re sitting at the keyboard, hold one hand up to your screen. Keep it there for the entire time you’re using the computer, moving it to random points every few seconds.

Feel how tired your arm gets after a few minutes? Feel how much effort it is to move your hand back and forth between the display and the keyboard, where your hand’s real work is done?

I trust Apple to know better than to go down this rabbit hole. Touch interfaces are great for handheld devices: my iPhone is dead-finger tech, as I expect my iPad 2 to be. But as I sit here, hammering away on a keyboard as I have for the last 35 years, I’m thankful that I don’t have to constantly manipulate the display. Heck, I put a lot of effort into minimising my mouse use.

All MPBs (which essentially means all Apple laptops meant to replace a desktop system) now have double the number of cores on one chip. Lesser clock speed does not mean slower–more cores in a Mac means much better performance–even for everyday use in OS X SL. The new Intel chips have h.264 encoding and decoding on the chip when the software takes advantage. The clock speed of the RAM is now 33% faster at 1333MHz–this is top of the consumer line–and it’s in the low end MBP! At this time, beside the HD speed being the bottle neck, the RAM speed is what people notice next–even if they don’t realize the source of the performance. Oh, and Thunderolt. Come on people!