Ars Techinca has reviewed Apple’s MacBook Pro in their usual comprehensive fashion. Some snippets:
“In addition to the keyboard backlight, OS X also has the option (enabled by default) to also adjust screen brightness automatically depending on ambient light conditions. This, at first, seemed equally as awesome as the automatic keyboard backlight adjustments, until I was sitting in bed last night typing up this review while cats and other resident humans were circling around me causing ever-so-slight shadows here and there—enough to have my screen brightness be automatically dimming and lighting again every few seconds. Needless to say, this got to be obnoxious rather quickly and I opted to turn it off in the System Preferences. It saddened me a bit, but it had to be done. I wish there was a sensitivity slider for the ambient light sensors so that such a subtle difference in lighting wouldn’t have my screen brightness going up and down like a speaker system display,” Jacqui Cheng writes for Ars Technica. “While on the topic of screens, the display on the MacBook Pro is nothing less than stellar. It’s extremely bright, crisp, and the colors look great while still staying true to the Mac color profile. Unfortunately, it has 60 fewer pixels of vertical resolution than its predecessor, running at 1440×900 instead of 1440×960. An quick test of Pixel Tester 2.11 made sure that I had no dead pixels, much to my delight! LCD nitpickers, I believe, will be pleased with the brightness of the screen; however for my sensitive eyes, I usually run it on the lowest or second-to-lowest brightness notch for the large majority of my everyday use.”
“I ran three battery life tests from full 100% charge down to 0% charge with constant use, no sleeping, at the second-dimmest (hey, that’s average use for me!) screen brightness, but with everything else set to default computer settings (AirPort on, Bluetooth on, etc.),” Cheng writes. “I have mixed feelings on the results. On one hand, an average time of 3 hours and 17 minutes is not necessarily bad (in fact, many of my PC-laptop-using friends were still jealous to hear even this number). However, it’s not as good as it could have been. I had been hoping for an average of 3:30 (even though I did hit that mark once), as I frequently got 3:30 or even up to 4 hours on my old 15″ PowerBook and my 12″ iBook.”
“OS X, as you can expect, feels extremely (X-TREMEly?) fast on the MacBook Pro—certainly much faster than I, as a longtime Mac user, am used to on a Mac. Most apps, such as Safari, Mail, and iTunes launch in between a half a bounce to one full bounce. System Profiler, which typically takes about 800 years to launch on a G4 machine, comes up instantaneously. iPhoto scrolls ridiculously fast, even with a library full of around 2,000 8MB photographs,” Cheng writes. “Spotlight certainly finds things much quicker than my dual G4 tower, and all is right with the world. The slowdown begins when you start trying to mess with Rosetta apps, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Photoshop is perfectly usable, but not in any way up to the speed it could be running at if it were in Universal Binary.”
“All in all, the MacBook Pro is an extremely solid machine that makes me happy to be back in the Apple Pro notebook world after a six month hiatus in 12″ iBook-land. The Intel switch has been an important step forward for Apple in general, but particularly for ensuring that its pro lines of hardware keep moving forward, technology-wise, and at a competitive rate. Unfortunately, however, most pro software is not yet available in Universal Binary and is not expected to be for a little while (Adobe is estimating sometime in 2007, for example), but Rosetta is usable enough to get by in the interim if you don’t mind the performance hit,” Cheng writes.
Full article, a must-read if you’re thinking about getting a new MacBook pro, here.
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Related MacDailyNews articles:
Mossberg: Apple’s MacBook Pro gives users a ‘much better OS with vastly better built-in software’ – March 02, 2006
New York Times’ Pogue: Apples MacBook Pro a ‘beautifully engineered, forward-thinking laptop’ – March 01, 2006
Apple MacBook Pro a ‘drop-dead gorgeous laptop’ – February 27, 2006
Macworld posts Apple MacBook Pro 2.0GHz first lab tests – February 22, 2006
Apple PowerBook G4 1.5GHz vs. MacBook Pro 2.0Ghz Adobe Photoshop benchmarks – February 22, 2006
Apple begins shipping MacBook Pro notebook computers with faster 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo processors – February 14, 2006
Adobe: no native Intel Mac support until 2007; Photoshop could be 14 months away – February 01, 2006
Computerworld: Apple’s MacBook Pro ‘fast, really fast – looks like a real winner’ – January 28, 2006
Analyst: Apple seeing strong sales of iMac Core Duo, MacBook Pro, 5th generation iPod – January 25, 2006
Apple: expect MacBook Pro shortages – January 19, 2006
Use the ExpressCard slot to add FireWire 800 to Apple’s new MacBook Pro – January 15, 2006
Apple MacBook Pro, ExpressCard and EVDO – January 14, 2006
Apple introduces MacBook Pro; up to four times faster than PowerBook G4 – January 10, 2006
I had a 1.67Ghz G4 PowerBook with 1GB RAM for a while, and it was pretty snappy. It worked well with Photoshop CS2, all the iApps, even a bit of game playing from time to time. It sucked big time working on large Java projects in Eclipse though – and it was not a memory problem. My Windows box at home and my Linux box at work (both Athlon64) absolutely demolished the PowerBook at Java application development in Eclipse. Scrolling complex web pages in Firefox sucked pretty bad on the PowerBook, and I recently tested the same sort of test on a 2.0Ghz MacBook Pro with Camino 1.0 (universal binary). It still is choppy at scrolling complex web pages, compared to Firefox on Windows.
Some things, like Mozilla/Firefox/Camino, SWT (Eclipse uses it), OpenGL (look at Cinebench and Doom3 benchmarks) and others, just don’t run as well on Macs. As universal binaries become more common, I’m sure we’ll see plenty of OS showdowns on the same Intel hardware. Hopefully Mac OS X will prove itself to be competitive with Windows and Linux on the same hardware…
Hopefully Mac OS X will prove itself to be competitive with Windows and Linux on the same hardware…
Unfortunatly not, Mac OS X is always steps ahead of anything else, that’s what sells hardware. With that stepping ahead comes more features, more eye candy and more bloat.
What we should be comparing Mac OS X :Tiger with now is with Vista, not XP.
Of course when Vista arrives Mac OS X will be on some other cat, a housecat by then. Garfield. Big fat, eats memory and slow.
Then of course it will be time to upgrade hardware again.
Don’t make me come over there…I’ll take off my shoe and tan your hide if you don’t start behaving!
Ohhh Kate, you can threaten me with a good time anytime.
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My mother is up for a good time antyime too! =)
MacDude,
Do you ever work? Do you have a job or do you just troll this site all day long?
Mac Realist = piss poor troll. really. that was the saddest attempt at picking a fight i’ve ever seen. *yawn*… try again.
my Mac isnt the newest, it isnt the fastest, i havent maxed out it’s memory and i’m still running 10.3.9 (got 10.4 sitting in a box) BUT…
i have not ever, ever received an internet borne virus, worm or Trojan in three years of being on both cable and DSL connection 24/7…
and for what’s it’s worth i can say the same for all the years i used OS 9…
my Mac does what i need it to do, has been reliable and plays the few computer games i have quite well. any other games i have i share with my son on his PS2 (Gran Turismo rules!) and we play around making music with GarageBand… which we cannot do with a PC.
i know only one, one, PC user that can claim to have never been compromised and he’s so paranoid he thinks twice before reading any email. even refused to install SP 2… but who can blame him?
so… after being a Mac user since ’98 and having never encountered a single piece of ‘net malware i say that if you dont like Macs, fine… dont buy one. but mine works for me and i like it just fine.
Tempus Fugit:
I’m right with you regarding “Mac Realist”. =)
I dig Macs a whole lot. I’ve had several PowerBooks. I’m saving up for a MacBook Pro.
I have used Windows on and off for several years, and I have never had a virus. I don’t use Outlook or IE. I didn’t use anti antivirus software for a year of computer use, finally installed the latest Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition and it found no viruses. I often leave my computer on for a few days to download bittorrents over my cable modem connection. I just use the firewall that Windows XP SP2 has built in.
I’m not a typical user – I’m a software developer and I used to manage a lab of Windows computers in a university computing lab. Still, the virus scene isn’t that bad on Windows these days if you use Firefox and Thunderbird. Mac OS X is definitely a nicer place to be for your average user, but Windows is fine if you know what you are doing and/or you are a bit of a computer geek. I’m not geeky enough to like Linux – man what a pain in the ass Linux is!
I have an idea. Everyone from now on will post as MacDude – that will all complaints.
See – I just did.
…that will STOP all complaints
That’s so immature, annoying, childish etc.
JUST LIKE I AM.
“See – I just did.”
Stop it already, or I might have to start using my other names.
“See – I just did.”
Ars Technica is advocating using hacked Mac OS to run on Dulls. Yay.