Yes, Virginia, you do have to log out to switch graphics cards on the MBP

anybody try relaunching the finder

that has worked for me in the past for stuff that needs re-logins

It would have been nice if you could set it to use integrated graphics when it's on battery. Perhaps they could have had the user put the laptop to sleep, pull the cord, and then wake it to change the rez.

Surely the point is that most ordinary users will fail to benefit from the power-saving/performance improvement because Apple has failed to make this seamless and invisible. It's just half-baked.

I'm a designer, primarily in print. But I'm curious:

How often will typical users really be switching? Not us geeks who read and write all of this crap, but real, live regular old folks who buy MBPs.

Just curious.

For the record, everything I have tried to flop back and forth one GPU and another has worked seamlessly for me in OS X. I have a Mac Pro with an 8800GT and a 2600XT in it attached to 2 monitors. All the built in apps move between either monitor without an issue. And I can even do the same for games, like World of Warcraft. No hitch, no interruption, just a smooth transition. Digging into it, OS X will move the OpenGL rendering tasks to the GPU that contains more then 50% of the pixels of the app. And this is noticeable on my system, as the framerate drops moving from the 8800 to the 2600.

If you want to buy a Macbook Pro 2.4 Ghz, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, drop me a line. :)

Thats' a PITA. Personally, I would set-and-forget in discrete graphics mode (and switch to integrated only for x-country flight w/o seat power).

Hopefully the software will catch up, as this does seem like a very 'un-Apple' solution.

i reckon the dual gfx card technology will be more interesting in the future. i'm surprised at the lack of hdmi love both on the laptops and the monitors. More connectivity optios on the monitor in the future larger sizes is a must.
i mean will the apple tv go display port only?

btw the 1st gen glitch thing i find is a bit of a fallacy when it comes to apple products. I have a first gen single cpu g5 and it had very few bugs which were corrected by sw anyway. The last gen of powerbooks are suffering hw failures due to nvidia cards...

if u can afford a new model, go for it.

regarding features they left out... i saw news items on engadget about laptops that feature 7 in 1 card readers and a business card reader! packing laptops with every feature is not apple's game nor is providing a multitude of configurations that will please everyone. They couple a good balance of features and power with judicious choice on what to include and remove when it come to new technologies with excellent design and OS.

Sorry, somehow missed Josh's comment there... that would make sense, then in that case Apple would have to adjust the OS in order to support the feature.

I think logout is annoying, though. Imagine you've got work open and forgot to switch, etc. I mean, it's not a deal breaker, just not fun, and the design of these chips was supposed to avoid just that.

I'm also annoyed that Apple, as they've tended to do lately, implied a standard PC technology that they implemented last was something they did uniquely / first. The upshot seems to be that they've muddied the waters about what this is and what it means for users. They could have shown, for instance, what this means in software like Final Cut Studio -- something I'd be very eager to know, unless Apple decides this is a non-Pro machine and doesn't support it.

Wait a minute, we're conflating issues. The whole POINT of this graphics card is to be able to intelligently switch between the integrated chip and the discrete chip, so you can conserve battery life on the road (integrated) and get better performance when you're plugged in (discrete).

Now, you need *driver* (not OS, per se) support for making that happen. It sounds like either Apple hasn't done that, or they chose the version of this card that doesn't support it.

My understanding is that this card isn't designed to use both at the same time, which means Snow Leopard really has nothing to do with anything.

And, incidentally, this card is already capable of GPGPU tasks, via NVIDIA's own CUDA. In fact, it's not even Snow Leopard we're waiting on for processing on the GPU, it's the OpenCL spec, which has as much to do with the graphics makers as it does Apple (though my hope is Apple will push NVIDIA to properly support OpenCL)

I still have more questions here. Can you fire up both chips at the same time? Did Apple use the 9300M GS variation that allows HybridSLI? Will Apple support that?

But Hyperlasia is absolutely right. There are PCs that support this already. (Incidentally, I believe ATI's version is capable of using both integrated and discrete simultaneously, which NVIDIA may have chosen not to do.)