My new MacBook Pro arrived the day after Thanksgiving. Amazing - I got my laptop all the way from Shanghai to my house in just over 2 days. The good news is that the new one appears to be working perfectly. However, there appears to be a single dead pixel near the top. Either I’m having bad luck or Apple’s quality is sliding.
Specs
- MacBook Pro
- Intel Core Duo 2 dual-core 2.33 GHz
- 15″ LCD display (matte)
- SuperDrive
- ATI Radeon Mobile X1600 256 MB
- 3 GB RAM
- 160 GB Hard Drive
- Airport, Bluetooth 2.0, Firewire 400/800, USB 2.0
Good
Where to begin? These are powerful machines. Performance is spectacular compared with my old Powerbook G4. I was unsure of picking the matte versus glossy display. I spent half an hour at the Apple store at UVillage looking at the glossy display. In the end, I found the glare to be too much and chose the matte display. Compared with the Powerbook, the display is both higher resolution and signficantly brighter. It is a huge improvement.
The keyboard has brighter backlighting and a better tactile feel. The TrackPad is amazing. I love the two finger scroll and the two finger right click. I’d find it very hard to go back to the old trackpad.
Heat is fine. The machine is quiet and I don’t think it is as hot as my G4. Battery drain is good - I can get nearly 3 hours of normal use. AirPort reception subjectively seems better. I get a better connection in areas of my house that I didn’t before. Rumor is that the chipset for the AirPort is 802.11n compatible. Here’s hoping that Leopard will bring a firmware upgrade and OS X support for the emerging wireless standard.
Graphics performance is excellent. I don’t do much heavy video or photo editing so my references are games like World of Warcraft. It ran full screen with playable framerates (and the bulk of the graphic effects turned on). It is comparable to my G5 with the X800. It is likely that it will fade relative to the desktops over time. But consoles are where I do most of my gaming these days anyways. I’m tired of chasing graphics performance.
I like the built-in iSight but not sure how much I’ll actually use it. The remote interface is a nice touch and it works with Keynote (something I will use). The mag safe power cord is another small innovation that seems so natural.
This is the first Intel based Mac that I’ve spent any significant time with. I have an Intel Core Solo Mini but it is exclusively used for FrontRow on my TV (and it will be gone when the iTV launches). I rarely have noticed I was running on Intel during normal OS X usage. Apple and open source software through MacPorts are all fine.
The Intel Macs may be the holy grail of computers. They can run anything - OS X, Linux, and Windows. Parallels is the killer app for Intel Mac. Running Windows full screen you would be hard pressed to ever know that this was running in a vm. Performance is astonishing (other than 3D graphics). Parallels has done a good job at integration (which will become a drop-dead amazing job with the next version). Running Linux/BSD/Solaris is also excellent. I loaded my machine up with the max RAM (3 GB) mostly so I could devote 1 GB to a concurrent vm. As John Gruber says, Windows is the new Classic.
Bad
Running software on Intel only has issues with third parties like Microsoft, Adobe, and Oracle. MS and Adobe will have universal versions. Oracle won’t say if they will port InstantClient to Intel. This is unfortunate since we use Rails and Oracle at work. Without a native instant client, it is nearly impossible since you need a PPC build of the whole Ruby on Rails stack. Yuck.
There are some nice MacBook enhancements missing from the pro version. I’d much rather have the magnet close for the screen instead of an actual moving lock. Also, the MBP doesn’t have the easy swapping of the hard drive that the MacBook has.
Not much else is wrong in my opinion. The Powerbook name was better.
Final Score
4.5 out of 5
The design and feature set is nearly perfect. Unfortunately, Apple’s quality control seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Despite the false start, I’m happy with the purchase. This is the ultimate developer tool.
Post a Comment