Late last year Apple revamped their MacBook and MacBook Pro lines. This give them a precision made aluminum unibody design, and more importantly, added a nVidia 9400m to the MacBook, and the MacBook Pro had its 8600m pumped up to a 9400m AND a 9600mGT, making the graphics power in these notebooks a worthy opponent to the PC alternatives.  Older MacBooks severely lacked graphics power. Later on, Apple would continue to spread the 9400m and other nVidia chipsets across their lines, putting them in every Mac, even adding it to the older white MacBooks, which would be revealed to be the only standing MacBooks at WWDC. The unibody models where renamed the 13inch MacBook Pro.

It’s slightly obvious why Apple was adding GPU power to each of their Macs. 10.6 or Snow Leopard is coming with a feature called OpenCL or Open Computing Library. This feature allows the awesome power of a GPU to help out with the normal processing that the CPU does, making things alot faster. Many people have speculated about whether going to NVidia for this was the best idea. The 9400m and 9600GT, as example, have been rumoured to have been made cheaply, thus having issues, the main one being overheating.

I got a 2Ghz unibody MacBook, courtesy of Apple (after my white macbook fried while doing my art exam). My previous MacBook refused to boot OS X, but would boot Ubuntu fine. I tried reinstalling the disk, but wouldn’t format. I thought I’d scarred some sectors on my disk and that they would replace it, again. Then I would have my same old, arguementative fail-prone, MacBook back. To my surprise, The Genius said it was the logic board. This caused some irony, as I had been there about a bad Logicboard and saw the exact same guy. He argued it was the hard drive way back, and wierdly now I said it was the drive, and he said it was the logic board. Turns out, he was right and i’d gunned out the S-ATA controller, and the GMA and slightly cooked the Proc. Not that I cared. I saw it boot up one last time, though when I picked up the aluminum replacement they offered me. I was hardly going to say no. The 9400m is fine for me until it gets warm, then my screen freaks out and i get graphical artifacts. A friend of mine, Aaron Bareford, bought a MacBook Pro shortly after my recommendation of the unibody line. Just a week ago he had his 9600GT / 9400m fry to the point that his laptop wouldn’t boot. Which didn’t exactly impress him, as he’s one of the most hardcore ATi / AMD fans you could come across. Apple fixed it, but something has got to give at some point, how many chips can they replace before change is needed ?

Well just about as many as they’re getting apparently. According to this article from Electronista, Apple is thinking about dropping NVidia. While they could go back to GMAs, I don’t think this is the best idea for the features coming in 10.6 will benefit from a GPU, so where does this point ? ATi? I’ve used a few ATi chipsets, and my current main workhorse has an Asus V-Cool Radeon HD 3650 in it, and I must say for the age of the card, it’s fantastic in comparison to my NVidia 6800 / 7300GS, which I had previously used in my system.

So is a change to ATi a good idea? I think so. I hate having to restart my laptop every few hours to make my screen look right, and so far while it’s not been as bad as other people’s experiences, is it only a matter of time? My 7300GS burnt out while in use in my parents machine, after I retired it in favor of my 3650. Is NVidia just going down a really bad path that high class companies that Apple doesn’t want to get involved with? Post your thoughts in the comment below.