Mac Rumors says we may see an updated MacBook tomorrow.

Apple’s Leopard update, however, has revealed drivers for the newer Intel GMA X3100 integrated graphics chip. This is the successor to the Intel GMA 950 which currently resides in the existing MacBooks. This would suggest that the next MacBook will see an upgrade to the Santa Rosa chipset. This, however, remains speculative. The driver, however, appears functional and works when used on a PC laptop with the X3100 chipset.

The following by AppleSwitcher member Comandante was taken from the AppleSwitcher Mac Forum thread Hands-On-Leopard.

I’m going to look at this Pro migration path tomorrow from a web developer’s perspective: Coda, Firefox 2.0.0.8 w/ extensions, Parallels w/ XP, BBEdit etc.

As with any upgrade, take caution if you use your Mac for a living. I’ve installed 10.5 on an external drive, and will use that as a sandbox to test the applications I depend on.

I have installed 10.5 Leopard in my G5 Quad backup. So far I see a number of improvements and some minor slowdowns (Disk Utility takes longer to repair disk permissions, for instance). The Network control pane is vastly improved, allowing the setting of permissions of individual-designated users (a la AppleShare) for the first time. This is great news for schools and corporate outfits. Safari and Mail run much faster (actually like they were supposed to run since their creation), Spotlight runs orders of magnitudes faster doing searches but only after it has rebuilt its database, which could take, say up to an hour in a large hard drive (>400GB).

Printer SetUp Utility has disappeared from the Application/Utilities folder and is now located in the System Preferences as the control pane Print & Fax, as is Dock. Other new control panes include: Exposé & Spaces, Time Machine (a backup system-level system that I have not tried yet) and Widget Manager (allows to turn widgets on/off). Airport menu now shows locked (and thus unlocked visible networks) with a padlock next to the network SSID.

Warning: I have not tried to print to any of my three printers nor have I tried to use Aperture, Photoshop, Quark or any other elaborate environment that use calibrated ICC profiles for printing. This will come over the weekend when I can get round to futz with it.

So far the review is positive with the cautionary above.

OS X 10.5 “Leopard” hits shelves at 6pm Friday, and expectations are high.

See our Official Leopard Hands On thread where we’ll talk about first impressions.

Vote in the Will You Buy Leopard? poll.

I’m interested in what the community will see as its best feature. Time Machine? Spaces? Let us know what you think.

After Hours $184.10

Change: +9.74 +5.59%

Apple Inc. shares rose $9.06 to $183.42. The company reported fiscal fourth-quarter net earnings $904 million, or $1.01 a share, on revenue of $6.22 billion. Lat year, Apple earned $542 million, or 62 cents a share, on $4.84 billion in sales. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial forecast earnings of 86 cents a share on revenue of $6.07 billion. Among the quarter’s highlights were sales of 2.16 million Macintosh PCs and 1.11 million iPhones.

Things have pretty much stabilized. I need to get all the features back on the forum, and content on the Wordpress pages. I belive the domain has fully propogated over to the new host (asmallorange.com). I hope to get the rest of this catch up work done by end of day tomorrow. [new, 7:40 pm Pacific, Thursday]

The forum is here here [edited 2pm Pacific, Thursday].

Please use the appleswitcher.com domain now. We’re switched. Don’t use http://207.210.105.84… that can be subject to slowness. [new, 2pm Pacific, Thursday]

Don’t bookmark that, the domain will resolve here shortly. It’s live now.

Many things are not yet hooked up. Take a deep breath, please. If you write about this and that not working, chances are it will be in a few hours, and people will think you’re a little crazy, if they don’t already.

If you want to write about the new look and what’s broken anyway, go ahead, but don’t direct posts at me because I’m aware of what’s not working and what has no content. I’ll be addessing these issues later today.

Thank you.