How often are they upgraded?

I would say major revisions happen every 6-8 months. Well, if you order it from Apple you can use a student discount. But, if you don't plan on customizing it, amazon has them too. I think I saw a total discount of $500+.

Check out the excel sheet here: http://www.mactelchat.com/showthread.php?t=38

Well, more now than ever, IMO it will benefit you IMMENSELY if you can wait until at least, say, Jan. of next year to buy a MBP. A lot of new stuff is coming out concurrently over the next year:

- Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). In addition to the standard new tweaks for an OS, like a smoother UI, touched up looks, more apps, ect, Leopard will probably include a version of Boot Camp integrated in the OS. Boot Camp, if you don't know yet, allows you to run Windows on an apple. Boot Camp is only in "Beta" now, and you must download and install it. Leopard is supposed to come out early next year.
- Windows Vista, the new Windows OS. Important because, naturally, if you want to run windows via bootcamp on your mac, it would make sense to run the latest version right? Supposed to come out around the same time as Leopard.

* So you see, if you plan on using both operating systems, you'll figure to save around $250 right off the bat by waiting till at least early next year for the new respective versions. Plus:

- Intel Merom dual-core processors, which will replace the current core-duos ('yonah', i believe) as the mobile intel processors. These meroms are supposed to be 20% faster than the highest end (2.16 Ghz) yonahs, yet they still have the same (or even less) power consumption. Also, they are fitted for 64 bit computing, which honestly won't help you much currently but it is indeed the future; it can't harm you cuz it's backwards compatible. Meroms are supposed to come out sometime this August.

- Universal Binary applications. Since apple switched to intel, some of their applications have to run through this emulator program called "rosetta". (google if you want more info) Universal binary software however, allows everything to run naturally and natively on a mac without slowing down performance like rosetta. A few major programs still aren't Univeral Binary-- notably, photoshop-- but probably all will be within a year.


In addition, you can expect some standard "bang for your buck" type upgrades on the specs of the MBP over the course of a year. For example, the base RAM may move from 512MB to 1GB, or at least the upgrades will be cheaper. Basic hard drive size may increase. The included video card may become faster or more efficient, or both. Problems like overheating will likely be completely eliminated, though they have already dropped in frequency over the last few months.

Hope this post helps, I think you should wait till for at least Leopard to come out if you don't go to college for another whole year...

The next true revision will most likely be in August—and which will most likely show the introduction of the Merom based processors.

Also, it's quite possible there will be silent revisions whenever Intel releases a faster version of the currently shipping processors.

10.5 should be out near the end of the year if they're still on track.

If you're not going to be getting one for almost two years, however; by that time there will have been lots more improvements. 10.6 might be out by that time and who knows what processors will be used by then. By the end of next year there should be at least three or four major revisions.

Honestly, of all the things I listed, I think the merom processors are the biggest improvement-- even though I said you can save $250 by waiting for Vista and Leopard, hey... you could always download pirated ones, and since vista may have bugs initially it may not hurt much to stick with xp for a while.

But merom is probably the only real big hardware improvement coming out over the next year, so if you really feel like getting your hands on one of these MBPs, waiting till August of this year would do you good. That's probably what I'll be doing-- I start college this September so it's perfect timing.

Kakaze: do you think apple Merom would be available on Aug and will apple merom have some problem in the first shipment? I need a computer before September.

All the speculation right now points to the fact that Merom based Macs will be out in August, however, there's no telling when in August. It's quite possible they will be released during the WWDC which is August 7th, I believe. Whether they'll be shipping on August 7th or not is up in the air.

I'd wait till the last minute before buying if I were you just to see what happens. Also, if they do release an update after you buy as long as it's within 14 days of purchase, you can return the machine you bought and buy a new one.

Apple has the rule of upgreadin its hardware every 180days.... they are pretty consistant with that but some exceptions can also be found
Kakaze - I got bad rep again .... I hate people sometimes

Everything gets bigger/better/faster with time. To be honest, unless you're a creative-type and need the horsepower in a portable, get a cheap laptop for your classes (refurb iBook?) and a good tower or iMac.

I use Mac and PC--the Powerbook goes with me to classes and the PC stays home as my game/horsepower machine.

This may be Mac-blasphemy, but the MBP is a little overpriced for what it is...even with education discounts (/ducks for cover/)

There are other notebooks that are priced around the same as the Intel PowerBook, so it's not just Apple.

Definitely a processor upgrade or two by January, but otherwise everything is completely up for speculation.

yeh, basically by wedding themselves to intel, apple has to do CPU revisions at their beck and call.

Apple had to with IBM as well. And since Intel releases new CPUs a hell of a lot quicker than IBM the question is whether or not Apple will upgrade their machines with each new release or will they do the upgrades on their normal cycle of every 6 months or so?