geekosystem

I'm going to say up front: I'm a bit of an Apple fanboy. I've never owned a non-Apple computer or smartphone. While I am a fan of Apple's products, I totally understand people are who get angry about their holier-than-thou fan club. The cult of Jobs is real people having a conversation with one of company's supporter can sometimes feel like a debate with a brick wall... or a Scientologist.

Today is Steve Jobs' birthday, and as expected, Apple has celebrated the event by rolling out the new generation of MacBook Pro laptops. As is underscored by the fact that Apple introduced these in a relatively low-key way without much fanfare, the new MacBook Pros mark an evolutionary rather than revolutionary change to the MBP lineup: Faster processors are available across the board, yes, and "Thunderbolt" (formerly known as Light Peak) has been unveiled, promising data transfer at speeds of up to 10 GB per second. Apple says that "the Thunderbolt pipeline is more than 12 times faster than FireWire 800 and up to 20 times faster than USB 2.0, and it offers unprecedented expansion capabilities," with new peripherals on the way. But the new MacBook Pros do not bring the rumored operating system on an SSD that we heard about earlier this week: More broadly, they haven't morphed into the iPad-laptop hybrids that many envisioned with the launch of the MacBook Air, though today Apple released to developers a preview of Mac OS X Lion, which is expected to bridge the gap somewhat between iOS and previous builds of OS X.  This is an incremental upgrade, and while the laptops may be worth getting if you're in need of a new computer anyway, it may be worth waiting until either this fall's likely MacBook Air update or next spring's likely MacBook Pro update to see if Apple whips up something that's dramatically different from MacBook Pros to date. Specs and prices below: