Two reasons why Apple is hiring all them hardware experts

Everyone was wondering what Apple was doing with all them hardware engineers they were hiring from AMD and IBM. Two recent examples of what’s going on:

iPhone 3G S design:

Aaron Vronko, co-founder of Rapid Repair, an online repair shop for portable electronics based in Kalamazoo, Mich., flew to Paris to find out.

“The construction of it is almost exactly the same as the iPhone 3G, so it feels the same in your hands,” he said. “But more than half of the actual components inside the phone have been tweaked or changed.”

.. the iPhone 3G S is outfitted with an amped-up processor running at 600 megahertz. That and other upgrades allow the phone to work twice as fast as previous models. Applications that normally take 10 or 12 seconds to open on older phones were up and running in half the time.

Another big hardware improvement, Mr. Vronko said, is the system memory (not to be confused with the storage space for things like music files). The 3G S was upgraded from 128 megabytes to 256 megabytes, which allows the phone to manage more of everything at the same time.

The New MacBook Pro: Apple’s 2009 MacBook Pro: Battery Life to Die For:

Apple did some clever work on its own here. Standard lithium ion batteries are made up of cylindrical cells, similar to AA batteries. The problem with these batteries is that they waste a lot of space within a notebook (try cramming a lot of cylinders into a box, you end up with wasted space). This wasted space translates into larger batteries than are necessary, which makes for larger notebooks.

In order to continue to drive laptop thinness down, Apple started experimenting with using custom lithium polymer batteries instead of the industry standard lithium ion parts. Lithium polymer cells aren’t made of cylindrical cells (they’re rectangular), so there’s no wasted space. Not only does this make the batteries more compact, but it also gives you greater capacity since you’re using all available chassis volume for the battery.

There’s no other way to say this. If you care about battery life and portability at all, buy the new MacBook Pro. Go to the Apple store and buy one. While I only tested the 15” model, I’m guessing the 13” model should leave a similar lasting impression.

Today I am more than comfortable saying that this is the best Apple notebook I’ve ever laid my hands on. The build quality is excellent, the base specs are solid and of course, the battery life. There’s no doubt that it could be better; toss in an SSD or drop the price even further, but as it stands the new MBP is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a Mac laptop.

Obviously, you can attain the same battery life with a cheaper notebook and one or two spare batteries. But there’s something to be said for increasing battery life by at least 50% without increasing the bulk or weight of the system.

I’m not sure there’s much else I can add other than Good Job, Apple.

This is obviously the hard way to do it. Apple can always go the cheap route with off-the-shelf components, package it just as well, name it Adamo and market the shit out of it. But hiring experts and re-engineering the innards to out leap anything out there is hard work. And that is the difference between Apple products and the rest of the crowd.

Of course, there will always be folks who choose a $200 computer with Intel and Windows stickers (that subsidize the cost of the machine by $500) and wade through bloat and crap but that market can’t be allowed to define the computing experience for others.