why does everyone seem to expect a major laptop overhaul of some type this fall? All of the laptops were updated this summer. They're mid-cycle right now. I'd not be surprised to see updates in January, but to expect them now seems a bit out-of-touch.
Now new Mac Pros, XServes, and Cinema Displays...that's a different matter entirely.
and as for whether to buy a macbook or a macbook pro, I'd recommend the bottom-end macbook. Definitely best bag for the buck in the mac world right now. The MBPs are good, but unless you need the graphics (which some people, especially those who don't have another computer, would legitimately need), the MB are a much better deal and have basically anything you could need. RAM goes to 3GB, hard drive can be easily replaced with a very big, very fast one, or even a SSD if you have the cash. The C2D processor is really not the slow point of any current mac system. Lack of RAM, slow graphics processing, and slow hard drives are the main culprits. A C2D at any available speed is really very fast in comparison to what we've been used to in the past. Very fast. The difference between a 1.83 ghz and a 2.2 ghz, however, is not really very noticeable in almost all situations. A 1.83 MB with a SSD replacement drive would be faster than the fastest MBP with everything except 3d graphics.
I do lots and lots of heavy lifting with photoshop, indesign, illustrator, lightroom, etc, and I can tell you that properly equipped (full RAM, hard drive upgraded), the 1.83 macbook is at least as fast as my dual 1.8 G5 tower was with most things, and that machine has a 10,000rpm SATA RAID 0 array and 6GB of RAM. The MB boots faster and processes things faster. The G5 reads and writes giant PSD files to disk faster, though. But then again, it had better, right?
Unless it's going to be your main machine, and you're a heavy lifter, so to speak, I'd go with the Macbook.
