DigitalSandbox

It has been a while since Steve Jobs dropped his “A Greener Apple” initiative on the internet. In that essay he dropped a rare clue as to what we can expect from Apple in the near future in the way of LED backlit displays. That day is officially here with the release of the newly revamped MacBook Pros.

Aside from the LED backlit displays (15” model only), the update is more than just the small speed bump the MacBooks got a little while back. For starters, the big news is that the systems are all based on Intel’s new Santa Rose platform. I’m not going to get into what that means, but let’s just say that this a very good thing. The processors are now up to a tasty 2.4 GHz, and the standard RAM is up to 2 GB. 2 GB! And you can upgrade that to 4GB.

Besides the switch to the Santa Rosa platform, one of the major complaints about the MacBook Pro lineup was a lack of true HD displays. Well that too has been addressed. The 17” offers a custom configuration with a display with a whopping 1920 x 1200 resolution. That’s enough pixels to display 1080p video natively. And to help out on that task the graphics card have been bumped to the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with up to 256 MB of RAM.

The backlit display is nice too. For one thing, it eliminates all the harmful chemicals used by displays of old. And (Apple claims) it does it without any trade-offs. The LED displays offer the same brightness and should look identical to their old counterparts. All while using less power and speeding up the time from wake to full brightness. Now I wonder if these displays can show millions of colors.