I bought a brand new Macbook Pro, 15″, one of the mid 2009 models.  I’m using the 7200 RPM hard drive I bought for my 13″ Macbook, so I already had Windows 7 installed.

Everything works great except I had issues with the audio.  The Macbook, as well as I presume the 2008 Macbook Pros, used a Realtek audio chip.  I installed and reinstalled several versions of the Realtek High Definition Audio drivers from their website on my new Macbook Pro and had no luck.  If you go searching for solutions for this you mostly get people telling you to reinstall Realtek drivers, use “RealtekSetup.exe” from the Leopard install DVD, and so on.  I began to wonder if Apple switched audio chip suppliers, so I started looking at the PCI device.

The PCI ID for the sound chip has vendor id 1014 which comes up as Cirrus Logic.  I then went looking on the Mac OS X Leopard install DVD which has a folder for Boot Camp drivers.  There’s an Audio directory and what do you know, there’s a driver called “CirrusVista64.exe”.  That turned out to be the right driver; I now have a Cirrus Logic CS4206A sound chip in Device Manager.

So apparently Apple has switched sound chips in the 2009 Macbook Pros.  I haven’t seen this ANYWHERE so hopefully this helps out anyone else in my situation.  Now if they’d only fix the trackpad issues…

edit (5 Sept 2009): Since I posted this, new Boot Camp drivers (version 3.0) have been released with Snow Leopard, which have fixed any issues I’ve encountered under Windows XP and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit).  Even right-click on the trackpad is working.

I use Thunderbird as my main email client (on both Mac and Windows) and started looking for ways to sync it up with Google.  For calendars there is the Lightning extension, which can sync with Google Calendar using the Provider for Google Calendar extension.  (Update: Google Calendar now supports CalDav which means you can edit calendars directly from Sunbird/Lightning.) There’s also the Google Contacts extension which syncs Thunderbird’s address book to Google.  Finally, Thunderbird can, of course, access GMail and pobox.com using IMAP.

Once I got my workstation and laptop syncing to Google I moved on to my iPhone.  The iPhone itself can only access GMail via IMAP.  The phone can sync contacts and calendars with MobileMe, a pretty clear competitor to Google’s offerings, as well as Exchange servers using ActiveSync.   MobileMe is not free however so I started looking at other solutions.  At first I had to rely on Google’s iPhone enabled webpages for Calendar and iTunes’ ability to sync to Google Contacts.  I was also using Google Calendar Sync to sync between Outlook and Google, and then using iTunes on Windows to sync between Outlook and the iPhone, but this was kind of clunky.  However, yesterday Google trumped Apple by enabling Contacts and Calendar to use the Exchange ActiveSync protocol to sync with the iPhone directly.  With this I now have a direct link between the iPhone and Google Contacts and Calendar, and can avoid the whole iTunes intermediary thing or using the Google mobile webpages.  Another good part is that the iPhone’s Exchange support utilizes push, so updates made on one computer are instantly reflected on the phone.

Finally, I discovered calaboration which allows iCal 3.x to sync directly with Google Calendar.

With all these pieces together, I have a fairly complete mail/contacts/calendar solution that works across multiple computers and my iPhone.  The only glaring hole is task management, which can be handled in part on the iPhone with Things, but not across platforms.  There is hope on the horizon with GMail Tasks, but that just came out and there isn’t any sync support for it yet.  Otherwise, the Google-Thunderbird-Lightning-iCal-iPhone sync system seems to be working pretty well so far.