For Apple to make any progress in selling Macs, it would need to figure out how to do retail itself. To get started, Apple took a few pointers from Dell. As Steve Jobs said: “We’re coming after you, buddy!”
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Contributed by: Daniel Eran, RDM

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Bare Feat’s resident mad scientist Rob-ART Morgan has conducted benchmarks of the new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (2.33) versus the Core Duo MBP (2.16) it replaces. Some of the results may surprise you. Add to this the fact that the MeBook (MeromBook) runs about 40 °F cooler than the Core Duo model and you’ve got a really compelling product.

Conclusions

The MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo’s advantage over the Core Duo version ranged from 9% to 75% depending on what app we ran. The faster core clock speed should provide an 8% advantage, so everything beyond that is “gravy.” Most surprising were the significant gains with Aperture 1.5 and Photoshop CS2…

We were hoping that the 15″ model would be the equal of the 17″ MacBook Pro in every way except the screen size. However, this is still not the case. The 17″ version has a faster SuperDrive (8X versus 6X). The faster 7200rpm 100GB drive is an option on the 17″ but not on the 15″

MacBook Pro – Core Duo versus Core 2 Duo

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PortalPlayerIf you’ve ever scrolled deep into the Legal menu on an iPod you’ve probably seen the logo pictured at right. PortalPlayer is most popular for providing the audio chips for the Apple iPod.
Until April 2006 PortalPlayer sold 90 percent of their chips to Apple for use in iPods. Apple switch suppliers in April and dropped PortalPlayer, reportedly because of product delays, causing PortalPlayer stock to drop over nine dollars in one day.
Read the rest of the story on my ZDNet Blog: The Apple Core.

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