Last week the Inquirer asserted that NVIDIA had knowingly put faulty moble GPUs into the new MacBook Pros — a serious allegation. The 9600M the Inquirer’s well-informed friends examined had the same high-lead solder that failed in so many other laptops. NVIDIA hit back today, saying that although they had promised a “new materials set,” what they meant was that the solder would be better, if not a different compound.

So the new solder bumps are high-lead but are just “more robust” and hopefully won’t fail quite so easily. Well, we will soon find out as MBPs begin to drop like flies… or not.

Apple sent out new firmware yesterday that was suppose to fix a few items in the latest MacBook Pro. Early reports indicate that it doesn’t seem to fix the RAM issues though. James Kendrick, from jkOnTheRun, is indicating that his system still freezes and locks up with 4GB of RAM installed. Anyone else experiencing the same?

Unibody Macbooks and MacBook Pros, along with newer MacBook Airs, have gotten a firmware update from Apple, ostensibly addressing “stability issues.” I think they’re talking about that RAM thing because a firmware update isn’t going to change your 9600M’s faulty high-lead solder into eutectic.

Oh yes I went there!

This is exactly what I feared might happen when I heard Apple was moving to a full NVIDIA solution, complete with the faulty parts that caused so many other mobile setups to croak.

A very thorough article at the Inquirer, based on analysis of a new MacBook Pro teardown by parties who wish to remain anonymous, shows that the solder bumps used in at least their test MBP are in fact the infamous high-lead solder that overheated and cracked without fail. An NVIDIA spokesperson has stated that the 9600s in MBPs use the new eutectic solder, but the tests show otherwise. There are a number of explanations for the bad solder being in the new 9600s, but none of them are good for NVIDIA or Apple. There’s no way to tell if your MBP has the bad solder, but if it starts overheating and freaking out like crazy, be assured it isn’t your fault.

Both the MacBook and the MacBook Pros can now be had below MSRP thanks to a Best Buy sale. This extremely rare opportunity only comes by once every hundred years and isn’t limited to just the old MacBooks with the new all-aluminum models applicable as well, so take advantage of it. Word is that Apple Stores might start matching the Best Buy special pricing in the next few days, too. What a great Holiday sale season!

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Don’t bother using your MacBook or MacBook Pro without the battery installed unless you’re cool with a huge performance decrease. Gearlog notes that, in the process of doing the thankless task of RAM benchmarks, the MacBook’s performance, as rated using Cinebench, dropped some 37 percent without an installed battery. That is, when plugged into a power outlet without the battery installed—some people do this to extend the life of their battery, having it installed only when necessary—the MacBook suffers quite a bit.

Apple saysthis is a feature, not a bug. The idea is that the MacBook can detect wether or not there’s a battery installed. If not, performance drops in order to “prevent[s] the computer from shutting down if it demands more power than the A/C adapter alone can provide.”

So, unless you’re a glutton for punishment, keep the battery in there.

The above is a scan of some Windows Vista promotional material. But, is that an old MacBook Pro this perfect family is using? Now, Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on silver laptops chassis but wouldn’t it have been wiser to have something more distinctly PC?

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The kids at GearLog installed a beta copy of Windows 7 on their fresh new MacBook Pro and found that it wasn’t working quite as expected. Most of the functions were working but some of the little tweaks failed.

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A tip came in this weekend from someone with a fleet of new MacBooks. His complaint? Every 50 or so clicks and the trackpad freezes for 5 to 10 clicks and then wakes back up. The tipster writes:

So we’ve bought about 10 of them, all of them have awful problems recognizing clicks. The trackpad has a bug where it does not click about 60% of the time.

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That Apple eliminated FireWire 400 from the MacBook Pro wasn’t lost on Western Digital, which just original story titlereleased a FireWire 800 version of the My Passport Studio portable hard drive. The HDD, which tops out at 500GB, is designed for mobile professionals—photographers and videographers—who need to carry large files with them. It weighs less than seven ounces, not that the average person has any idea of how to conceptualize that.

Of course, the drive also works just fine over USB and FireWire 400, but that interface will be dead soon enough.

She costs $250 for the 500GB model and $230 for the 400GB model, which means you’d be a damn fool not to spring for the larger one.

Back when we announced ahead of time that Apple was switching to an NVIDIA chipset, you might have taken a look at what was then already suspected of being the new laptops’ GPU. Notice if it promises anything the MacBook Pro doesn’t have? Like say some major selling points like Hybrid SLI and on-the-fly switching between the two GPUs? That’s funny; other laptops can do it!

Apple has confirmed that the chipset and GPU are capable of working together, and of switching between modes without logging out, as well. They can’t yet, though, and no explanation was really given. Did it not work right but shipping time was upon them? That’s my guess, as a solution that requires the user to log out is incredibly annoying and very unlike Apple. Let’s hope they fix it with a firmware upgrade — you know, like they enabled my MacBook Pro’s H.264 hardware decoding.

How exciting! I’ve always been skeptical of the actual popularity of netbooks, but I think this makes them out to be actual successful products and not just industry darlings. I don’t think anybody is surprised at the new MacBooks being on the top 10 in computers and hardware, but I am surprised that the white ones and the last-generation MacBook Pros are still selling better. I expected a lot of opportunistic buying of the old models, but more than the new ones? I’ll list the top ten here, you know, just in case all our traffic takes Amazon down.
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It’s just tradition that when a new, hot gadget launches, someone has to tear the sucker apart thus producing what is affectionately called circuit board pr0n. Besides the pretty pictures though, sometimes hidden details are uncovered as is the case with these new Apple notebooks. 

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Steve Jobs rubbished Blu-ray yesterday, calling format a “bag of hurt,” no doubt putting a tear in the eye of message boarders everywhere. (How much do you want to bet that he’ll call the next revision of the iMac “epic”?) But is that a big deal, that Apple, apparently, has no interest in incorporating Blu-ray into its computers, especially when plenty of other manufacturers have already done so?

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Looks like it’s not just a matter of capping CPU usage and lowering fan speeds to keep that battery going now. That makes sense when you consider that the new GPU/CPU combo is doing a lot of dynamic load sharing, although it’s unclear how Apple is implementing the Hybrid GPU capabilities of the new GeForces.

You’ll have to log out after making the change, which suggests it’s changing some pretty deep processes, or possibly even loading a different driver. I hope this doesn’t make it difficult to switch profiles when you’re going from plug to battery and back.

Good ‘ol Apple. The company announced brand-spanking new MacBook Pro and MacBook options today, but limited the new models to a single screen size each. Chances are, different screen size options will be announced during January’s MacWorld conference. More than likely the MacBook Pro line will receive the desktop replacement option of a 17-inch model while the MacBook line will gain a 15.3-inch option. 

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