Nice to have i5/i7 but the NVidia GPU is somewhat terrible. An ATI 5xxx series is not only more power efficient which Apple cares about, but much more powerful. No IPS screen or USB 3.0 which you sorta want given the premium status of mbps. Jobs commented that MBP would go to a "new level" this year-- this isn't quite new level so I would guess another update in the fall. SSD upgrades also not as useful since no TRIM support. Still the sexiest laptop out there tho so what can ya do but give Steve your money?
One reason I like my nVidia chip is that the Adobe creative suite (Photoshop CS4, and I'd assume CS5) takes advantage of the GPU to take load off the CPU. I'm not a gamer though, so I don't have anything to share in that department.
Yeah but they could have at least done more memory on the GPU if they were gonna do a 330m. And if you are gonna stick with Nvidia why not do a NVidia 335 which has been out a while now.
I agree. Personally the major issue I have with my current MacBook is the lousy screen, and it doesn't look like it has improved much with these new MacBook Pros. So sad.
So in other words, the one update since then, 10.6, which was most significantly an en masse upgrade of the OS and core apps to 64-bit, was disappointing? I'm thinking wait for 10.7 before passing judgement.
It's not just that 10.6 was low on features but that it also took a long time. And now there's a rumor that 10.7 has been delayed. Having to wait 4-5 years (from 10.5 to 10.7) to get new features is downright Vista-like.
Maybe the build quality of the thinkpads used to compair but the mbp is much better now and the lenovo's worse. I own a last gen mbp and have also placed 20-30 lenovo's at clients in the past. The are not even close these days.
Dell Studio XPS or HP Envy line are good alternatives, depending on what you need. Both are available with higher-res screens and faster (quad core i7) cpus than the mbp, for instance.
The major caveats on the Envy are that it has serious, deep issues preventing Linux from running on it, and it has no displayport or dvi out for driving a 30" monitor.
Slight reality check here - I've got an i5 Envy 15 that I bought a month ago, and although it had some problems with Linux for a while, I have no difficulty running it now with Ubuntu 10.04 beta. The issues I'm aware of were:
- Touchpad click buttons don't work, forcing you to double-tap to click
- Weird BIOS caused both TurboBoost (the Intel extension that powers down cores and speeds up others) and ACPI to fuck up, leading to no TB and no heat management, fans ran constantly, very bad news
- Buggy sleep/resume
Points 2 and 3 are fixed in 2.6.33+. Point 1 can be fixed via a patch to the synaptics module, but I just use an external mouse all the time anyway.
I just received my Envy 15 last night. It's a beautifully designed machine but has 2 glaring flaws:
1. The screen only tilts to ~105-110 degrees. This makes it tough to use on your lap or on a short table (commonly found in coffee shops sadly).
2. The AC-DC power supply is bulky. The plug has 3 pins too. Earth is not needed for laptop power supplies! There is no electric shock risk for a laptop user! I was dismayed to find such a hideous power supply bundled with this laptop.
I have the 'first gen' Envy 15 and absolutely love it. If I were to buy a new laptop now I'd go with the new 15" MBP though. The big thing is in the battery life. Sure you have 5-6 hours on the Envy but that's with the big and heavy battery slice attached. The MBP will I'm sure go over 7 hours stock.
Still, I bought my Envy about 6 months ago, so I'm not upset (at least that's what I'll tell myself).
I owned a Studio XPS 1645 (the Core i7 model). The construction was pretty good for Dell, and the RGBLED screen was gorgeous. However, they clearly rushed the Core i7 version to market without testing power consumption effectively. The supplied power supply was 90W, and the machine drew something like 110W under load. I returned mine, but from what I hear, Dell replaced all of the power supplies. Not sure if that fixed the issue.
Although they made it right, that's the last time I'm going to buy a Dell -- particularly one built on the newest tech. I don't think the QA is there.
I've been using Apple gear since '90 or so, and my current (2008) MBP seems to be the lemon of the set. So far: blew a fan, DVD drive and shorted out the battery. Thought the Airport card was toast this morning, but it seems to have come back.
Yeah, it's just a single data point, but when a 12" Powerbook is still going strong (albeit slowly), the series of fails in my latest laptop is depressing. I really, really hope it's a one-off.
Interesting - I have the same anecdote - I have purchased _three_ generations of Macintosh Laptops - 2008, 2005, 2002 - And the last two, unfortunately, have been lemons.
Interesting failure pattern - overheating resulting in CPU stalling resulting in persistent Spinning-beach-ball of Death. The 2008 Airport dies, sporadically, but it has had a good run for the last 3-4 months, so I no longer carry my USB-WiFi dongle (Amazing that they even make one for Macs)
On the flip side, I'm telling myself that the last five years of misery will be worth it when it feels so good to upgrade to a laptop that is flawless (fingers crossed) - think of how amazingly good it will feel to have applications launch, consistently, within 30 seconds. :-)
(Regardless, even with the weird pain, I've never even considered switching back to Windows Laptops. CMD+Space, terminal, Enter is just too perfect to consider doing so.)
But it looks like 1680x1050 is $100 more. 1440x900 is still the default configuration. The 1680x1050 screen is offered in both "Glossy" and "Antiglare", though.
(PS: Is "Antiglare" just Apple's marketing term for matte?)
I'm surprised Apple's marketing team uses the name anti-glare as it makes the default configuration seem like the glare version. Matte doesn't have that connotation.
However, implying that "anti-glare" is better makes it easier to justify charging an extra $50 (for something that used to come standard on all devices... grr).
This makes me think I'll be long dead before they offer 15" 1920x1200 wuxga.
Does anyone know why Apple lags in offering the higher screen rez? I got used to this rez some years back on my 12" Toshiba Portege, and have had it on my 15" Dell Latitudes since then. But have never seen the same for a MacBook
I had a 15" thinkpad at 1680x1050 and it was a huge eye strain for me. Weird because just 5 years ago I was using a 1600x1200 15" screen (HP) that I was fine with. Damn I'm getting old.
I bought a new laptop recently: i5 Toshiba, 4GB, 0.5 TB. Also plays blu-rays. It cost just under $800. There is no near match with Apple's new lineup, but roughly the Apple tax is about 50% and for those of us who mostly boot Linux the price difference is just not worth it. I must say though, that for developers who live in OS X, the new i7 MBP 15" does look great.
There's also the issue of depreciation. In 3 years, you'll be able to get about $10 for your Toshiba, whereas a 15" MBP will probably sell for $700-1200 depending on the model. The cost of ownership is much closer than the price tag would indicate.
Good point, but I keep laptops until they die. Never have sold one. Do used Macs really keep that much of their value? I can't imagine spending that much on any 3 year old box (laptop or desktop).
Unless you had a MBP from the generation right before uni-body. I know a lot of people (myself included) who've had the logic board burn out right around the 2 year mark.
I bought one of the first 15" LED backlit MacBook Pros in 2007 for ~$2000 and sold it for $1000 a few months ago. That might not sound amazing until you learn that my wife dropped it down our staircase and it had a giant dent in the side. You can sell Macs like that - I don't hear of people buying smashed up PC notebooks for anywhere near premium prices :-)
I have a Studio XPS 16 on the way (RGBLCD @1920x1080). It was about $1500 after coupons and it blows these MacBook Pros out of the water (a lesser configured MBP runs about $2300). Apple's actions last week had me ordering the Dell Friday morning.
Just looked at the Studio XPS 16 - sweet. A bit off topic, but Windows 7 is actually OK. For work using platform agnostic IDEs (for me, this is IntelliJ for Java/Scala/Clojure/JRuby), the choice of OS does not matter much, so at least for my work load I don't even have to boot to Ubuntu all of the time.
If I can get 3-4 hours I'll be happy. It will be my new mobile workstation that I can use at the office, home and sometimes while travelling. I have a Vaio i3 14" if I need to do extended work, but the lack of resolution and smaller keyboard on the Vaio doesn't lend itself to long coding sessions.
My last hacking laptop was a Vostro 1500 with a 1680x1050 resolution. The 9 cell battery lasted about 4 hours while coding, so I carried two of them. I may do the same with the Studio XPS 16.
Something to do with the boot BIOS. I don't have the external HD and could not boot off of bootable usb sticks, or the internal compact flash. Wubi wouldn't even work. Some people have been able to install but I think all of them have the external dvd which I think is ESATA? Just google envy15 linux and you will find people with a whole host of issues trying to install linux on this thing.
But will these new Macbooks play flash without overheating and making the fan spin up to max? Can't even watch a 2 minute Youtube video on mine without it going mental.
Have you tried the new 10.1 beta? http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ apparently it's meant to solve a few performance problems for Mac users... would be interesting to hear any feedback from a Mac user.
Edit: Forget this comment, didn't realize until now that hardware acceleration for video decoding was not coming to the Mac, just the PC. That sucks.
I tried the beta about a month ago. Made no difference to the fan problem, but it did leave a string of text in the middle of every video. I can't remember what it says as I've not got my macbook to hand but it normally disappears a few seconds after a video starts in the non-beta version.
Symptoms are a very loud click, and then no audio plays until the computer's audio is reset -- do this by plugging in and removing an external device. It happened to my MBP and I thought I'd broken the hardware, it was that loud.
Thanks for posting this, I couldn't find the proper search terms to see if this was a widespread problem. On my system only a reboot fixes the sound system for some reason though.
Any way to find out what "solid state drive" they've got? Is it Intel's X2? That'd make a big difference in how much I'd want to spend/how much time I'd want to spend installing my own.
This is incorrect; at least with the MBPs they were shipping until today it was a bit of a toss-up as to whether you'd get a Samsung or Toshiba SSD, and the only way to know what you got is to boot up the system and look at the drive's model number in System Profiler.
FWIW, the one that came in my MBP is Toshiba, and is still awfully zippy after eight months of heavy use (during which I'm quite certain I've written enough to the drive to start noticing any real degradation).
Not only that. I've been a Mac user for almost 10 years now but I'm waiting for them to add TRIM support to OS X before taking the SSD plunge. Everybody using an SSD on OS X should understand that its performance will degrade more quickly than on another modern OS. It's quite disappointing to me.
To clarify: There are two writing speeds of an SSD, one when the block is empty and one when the block already has data, the latter is slower and TRIM support from the OS will allow the SSD to know about “dead data” so that it can reorganize data to optimize free blocks.
I am using the first generation Intel SSD which doesn’t actually support such reorganization and isn’t noticeable affected by “being full” (as opposed to writing to the factory default empty state).
I am also using Crucial SSD (with OS X) and that as well is magnitudes faster than my previous mechanical disk.
So all in all, this degraded performance is blown a bit out of proportion and you are doing yourself a great disservice by holding out for TRIM support — to echo others: SSD was the best upgrade I added to my system.
Edit: I am btw using SSDs with a desktop system. So I compare them with my previous 7200 RPM drives. For a laptop there is absolutely no doubt that you should go with an SSD (if you can afford it), TRIM support or not. For a desktop, I would still highly recommend it.
I totally agree if it's a choice between somewhat decent SSD (e.g., I'd probably avoid the Samsungs that Apple actually offers) or hard disk, go for SSD. I'm just disappointed that Apple hasn't yet enabled TRIM support. They apparently laid the groundwork for it in the kernel but haven't actually finished off the work. Every time they roll out new models, I check to see if they've actually enabled TRIM support in a point update of OS X but they haven't. They'll eventually have to as it's being rolled into the ATA specification.
Just had to look that up myself. Shocking that OS X doesn't support it natively, although the article suggests there may be utilities that can replace that functionality.
Deleted my previous ignorant comment - I had it backwards.
The idea behind TRIM is so the OS can tell the drive when a block is free, so the SSD can pro-actively erase it, which is something that otherwise slows down the write cycle if you are writing to a block that wasn't already clean. That's not something you can just magic into a drive.....
Unfortunately while there are strategies to mitigate the problem in hardware, proper TRIM support is still best. You might be getting confused by the TRIM enabled firmware that was released in December '09 for that SSD? It just means that the Intel drive will obey TRIM commands from the OS. But if the OS doesn't send any commands, which OS X won't, then you're not taking advantage of TRIM. For what it's worth, if you were going to choose a drive that would degrade the least in performance without the use of TRIM, you probably chose best with the Intel X-25M. But it would still perform better over time in Linux or Windows 7.
The drive does not know when data stored on the drive is “deleted”. This is what TRIM is for, i.e. when you delete a file you just unlink the inode. You need to tell the drive that the blocks that the file occupied are no longer needed, so the disk can ignore that data when reorganizing or later rewriting part of the block.
I don't know about that. I've had this SSD-based 15" MBP since last fall, using it full-time, and it certainly hasn't fallen off any performance cliffs.
So maybe this is more of a theoretical problem than a practical one?
It depends on your usage patterns. Performance begins to degrade as soon as you've written an amount of data roughly equal to the SSD's total capacity. If you're not writing much data to the drive on a regular basis, then it'll take a while to hit that wall. But once you do, it's a significant drop in performance for most SSDs. And at that point, the only "fix" is to format the drive.
as soon as you've written an amount of data roughly equal to the SSD's total capacity
After eight months of heavy daily use, in which I'm quite certain I've achieved more than 256GB of total writes, I've seen... no change in performance. Still zippy and happy and writing just fine.
Time for misguided hype based on anandtech's articles to go away now.
As I said, it depends on usage patterns. (I also oversimplified the problem description. My apologies.)
If you're only using a small fraction of the total capacity, chances are you won't see much performance degradation for a long while no matter how much you write to the drive because of minimal fragmentation at the block level. But given enough time, you'd still hit that wall at some point.
But if you're using a large fraction of the total capacity, then you're going to have much more fragmentation, which means pages that can't be erased without having to rewrite significant numbers of blocks in those pages. Those ephemeral writes will start taking a real performance hit.
Many newer SSDs now include logic in their controllers to help mitigate this problem, with varying degrees of success. But full TRIM support on the drive and in the OS make a significantly larger difference than anything done by the drive alone. (Even with TRIM, though, the problem doesn't go away completely.)
And this isn't just some kind of spin from Anandtech--TRIM exists for a reason. It's a well-tested property of MLC SSDs. The combination of wear leveling and write combining can cause serious performance issues without TRIM. This article describes it pretty well: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&...
If you're only using a small fraction of the total capacity
At any given moment I'm using about half the total capacity. I'm not regularly doing huge writes, but as someone who works with a ton of remote and local repositories, pulling/merging/etc. many times a day, I do end up doing a huge number of small writes nearly continuously; I'd be surprised if I haven't hit every bit of that drive at least once by now. And I haven't seen any dramatic, or even noticeable, degradation.
And this isn't just some kind of spin from Anandtech
It's more that a bunch of people skimmed the anandtech articles, then started spouting a lot of gratuitous "X25-M is the One True SSD, everything else is shit" hype, which later morphed into "never use an SSD in an OS that doesn't do TRIM" hype. Of course, the hype doesn't quite match the reality...
Well, it's not so much which parts of the SSD have been touched, it's more about which pages have currently-in-use blocks stored in them. If you're using half the capacity of the drive, then it's likely you have a considerable number of empty (or at least erasable-without-needing-extra-writes) pages--especially if your drive's controller does some basic defragmentation.
And no, SSDs aren't worthless without TRIM. But if you're likely to use the majority of the storage space on the drive and do a lot of writes besides, it could be the difference between "fast" and "really damn fast." Either way it'll still beat the pants off most rotational disk drives.
I think the takeaway, though, is that if you've spent potentially-obscene amounts of money on an SSD, wouldn't you prefer that your OS take full advantage of its capabilities to consistently deliver top performance?
(And no, that's not a dig at OS X. I'd recommend that Windows XP users upgrade to Win7 if they're considering upgrading to an SSD simply for the TRIM support. It can make that much of a difference depending on the user.)
As another datapoint, I had a laptop with a first-gen SSD and no TRIM or GC support. The performance hit a literal cliff; writes were fast one day, and the next day they were literally 300KiB/s. Download speeds were limited by disk write bandwidth, not network bandwidth! New SSD, writes are back up to 50MiB/s.
(The divide might not be at the capacity of the disk; this was a 16GiB SSD with probably 20x that in writes.)
Well, after 6-7 months of heavy use on my MBP (easily past 128GB worth of writing, many times), Xbench says I'm getting 100MB/sec for just about all disk activity with 256K blocks.
The question now is - how difficult is it to replace a regular hd in this generation of Macbooks? In my 3yr old laptop it was a manageable, although a bit stressful, to pull out the hd and replace with an SSD.
The Torx has always been required. At least with the unibody MacBooks they made it far easier to replace the hard drive. I just did a pre-unibody MacBook Pro yesterday, you have to pull the entire top part with keyboard.
Samsung's rotating disks are the worst disks I have ever owned. I bought 2 and then 1 more, and all 3 need to be RMA'd. To keep my RAID array alive, I am doing them 1 at a time, and they are not fast.
The best strategy with Apple is to skimp on everything and upgrade it yourself. The price difference will cover a second laptop if you fuck the first one up.
The 8Gb RAM upgrade now is $400 - same price if you buy it on newegg.
You could argue that you will still have 4Gb laying around, but I personally have no use for that and can't be bothered to sell it.
This is what I've always done. I managed to keep my first Mac (a TiBook) feeling fresh for 6 years, and my second (a MacBook) still seems basically new at 2 years.
But can you do this with the unibody MBPs? The battery's not user replaceable, right? What about the HD and RAM?
Any way to find out what "solid state drive" they've got?
In advance, no, they don't tell you.
However, up until now every SSD Apple has shipped has been either Samsung or Toshiba, and you can find out which it is by opening OS X's System Profiler. Look under "Serial ATA" and you'll see the drive's description, which will be in the format "APPLE SSD (manufacturer code)(capacity)".
Toshiba drives will have a manufacturer code of "TS" (so my 256GB Toshiba SSD shows up as "APPLE SSD TS256A", for example). Samsung drives will have "SM". When I was shopping around last year trying to find out about this, it seemed that most of the 128GB drives were Samsung, most of the 256GB drives were Toshiba. What they're using for the 512GB drives is anybody's guess, but System Profiler will be the way to find out.
The time you spend putting a new drive in and putting OS X on it is less than 30 minutes (unless you were born with your thumb in the middle of your palm, that is :)
The money is roughly the half, and as a bonus you also get to keep the drive that came with the computer and use that as backup or additional, external storage, or even sell it to someone to get a few bucks back.
A simple rule of thumb for the Apple customer - NEVER get upgrades along with the order. It's just a waste of your money. You really don't have to be much of a "DIY" to replace memory or storage in a MacBook - they are all much, much more user friendly than your average HP/Dell/Whatever laptop.
No, RAM and hard drive installs are almost always considered user-replaceable parts. I believe the exception to this is replacing the HD in iMacs, where you have to take the screen off.
Nope. Replacing drive and RAM is not a warranty issue. Apple clearly details how to perform it in the user's manual, labelling it all as "user-servicable".
So, I priced my MBP out to around $2500 bucks, and a somewhat similar Lenovo T510 to $1869.
I was thinking about getting a mac really just to have the option to do mac desktop application development. Would I be better off with a hackintosh setup instead?
I don't have hackintosh experience but here are my thoughts.
- The trackpad. You won't be able to use gestures and multi-touch features. Especially if you use some software that lets you add custom multi-touch gestures, it's really nice to have a huge trackpad with gestures.
- Battery life (and longevity) will almost certainly be significantly better on a MacBook Pro.
- Apple's support is pretty great. If you have any hardware issues Apple will take good care of you. Sometimes you have to push for it, but I've had a 2 year old computer replaced with a new one because they couldn't fix a relatively minor WiFi issue.
- The MacBook Pro displays are really good and viewing angles are much better than most PC displays I've seen. You can optionally bump up the resolution of the 15" MBP to 1680x1050 for $100.
- Backlit keyboard — I thought I wouldn't really care about it, I type in Dvorak anyway so I don't need to see my QWERTY keyboard, but this is actually really nice in low-light situations.
- I've also read that there's a lot more that makes Mac hardware fast than just the tech specs. The hardware is well tuned.
A lot of these are little things, but they add up and make for a really good experience.
"it's really nice to have a huge trackpad with gestures."
This is one of the most important usability features on my 13in. MBP. It's the first track pad I've used that I prefer to a mouse. I think it's mostly because you don't have to keep picking your finger up to scroll a long distance on the screen. Also, multi-touch gestures have become second nature, especially in Safari (3-finger swipe for forward/back is even better than keyboard shortcuts).
These are all excellent points. I really underestimated how much I would use the trackpad. I've got a slightly modified version of Middle Click (here's the original http://github.com/cl3m/MiddleClick) that lets me open links in new tabs with 3 finger tap and do per application expose with 4 finger tap.
Adding to the list:
- Magsafe - has certainly saved my computer at least 3 times now (that's the magnetic power connector)
- Apple Stores: If you live near one you can drop in and get your computer looked at/fixed. If you're in desperate need they can usually turn a machine around very quickly, too...
Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll go see a macbook pro in stores tomorrow, and carry a couple of dell laptops with me for comparison. I really like the form factor of 14" (1440x900) matte screen laptops my work has. I'm looking for something with a similar feel, and hopefully something with good audio quality (all my dells have had noisy outputs, I end up using my iphone more for music these days because of it).
You may want to consider running Snow Leopard inside of VMWare , especially if you already have a decent machine to use for virtualization. I've been running 10.6.2 for several months in VMWare on a Windows 7 host with absolutely zero issues.
With no issues? really? I have an i7 920 at home, 6GB ram, etc, and when I tried to run Snow Leopard in vmware, it just never felt quite right. It worked, sure, but not to the point I'd be happy using it everyday.
Yep, I've used it as my sole development platform for 3 iPhone apps so far. I could never get 10.5 to run perfectly for me, but 10.6 seems to be issue free. (Well, the single issue I've had is Dropbox, for some reason it causes the kernel to crash, but I haven't bothered to look into it at all, yet.)
I already have a Mac (cf. other reply), but wouldn't mind a sacrificial VM to try stupid things. However, I couldn't even get my Linux box to image one of the two original OSX 10.6.2 discs for backup to HD (shrugged it off, didn't insist - I'm not obsessed with copies of driver discs anymore ;-).
Any pointers to good guides ? (Ubuntu, VirtualBox preferred. 8GB quad-core AMD PhenomII.)
It's all pretty much straight forward, but I found it most stable when I: use the darwin_snow.iso provided as your boot device (it emulates the bootloader used by Macs), use all SCSI devices, and in the config file, set guestOS = "darwin10-64"
The machine I'm running it on now is a i5 750 with 12 gb of mem; I have a single core and 2gb of mem dedicated to the VM. Feel free to email me if you need any help, I spent quite awhile playing with various methods of virtualizing Snow Leopard, so I can probably answer a majority of questions about issues that arise.
edit: As far as VirtualBox, I'm not aware of anyone getting 10.6.2 to run stable in it. I believe 10.4 will run okay. You may want to just use VMWare player, though. Also, you will have issues with the AMD processor, Apple was 'thoughtful' enough to include code to ensure Mac OS will only run on Intel processors. There are several distributions of 10.5 that have been modified to run on AMD processors, but I haven't really played with them - I think google can assist there, though.
Thanks for the details and the offer of help - much appreciated. I probably won't be bothering you, this was a "would be nice" thing.
I picked an AMD CPU partly because a sort-of-server box should have ECC RAM [1], which AMD does support 'for free' (and also toss in sufficient graphics in the chipset); it seems that with Intel CPUs one needs to go to very expensive MBs or the Xeon line for that.
P.S. Unfortunately, D.J.Bernstein refers to RAID-5 as "an easy-to-use automatic backup mechanism" (if a drive dies); he either didn't get the "RAID is not backup" memo, or does not believe it (until the day he accidentally wipes data ;-).
For that, consider buying the cheapest white plastic MacBook with 4GB RAM. I got off for 1k euro (around Christmas, the local FNAC retailer was selling them preloaded with 4GB instead of 2 - just pick up the box and pay).
I had thought of a MacMini, since I'm using an external 24" screen, keyboard, etc. - but the little extra money buys occasional mobility and 'close-lid-to-suspend' ...
(Ouch for 30 euro mini-DisplayPort to DVI adapter)
I was wondering that myself. I have been holding off upgrading my 13" MB for the new line MBP. Now I'm thinking I should just bite the bullet and shell out the extra couple hundred for a 15".
I think the point is Apple prefers the 13" Macbook pro having the more powerful NVIDIA integrated GPU over the iX Intel Core CPUs's Intel HD integrate GPU.
"We chose killer graphics plus 10 hour battery life over a very small CPU speed increase. Users will see far more performance boost from the speedy graphics" (Steve Jobs).
As of the update today the MBP is more desirable: significantly better better life, twice the RAM, slightly faster CPU and that slick unibody case which is thinner and lighter.
Before the refresh the MB was the best bang for buck.
The macbook pro 13" is worth the money for the unibody alone. I own a 13MB and the white plastic case is cracking in more places then I care to mention. I got them to fix it once, and only because it was their fault. They just don't hold up build quality wise. The only negative part about the unibody is my wife doesn't like the feel of the metal, it gives her the willies, but I can't fault Apple for that one.
Really? I have a black MB that just passed the 2 year mark and it looks pristine. I carry it in my backpack every day, I took it with me on a three month trip through South America, and yet it has no scratches, cracks, or other signs of damage.
Nothing too much performance-wise. The new plastic one is even, at least in name, unibody. But it has a glossy keyboard area which you can scratch up pretty easily with a watch strap (I tried this at the store).
Looks like they put in a new battery in the Pro, and it has a fancier graphics card, SD card reader, and Firewire.
To me, the Al casing is worth a bit more money and wouldn't mind an SD reader, so I'd watch the Apple refurb store for last-gen Pros (which is what I did in January).
One thing I really wish they would change is the clicking on the trackpad - instead of a heavy hinge at the top, it should be equally and easily depressable everywhere (for example, like the BB Storm2 screen). I don't know if I could use my macbook without turning on touch-to-click.
i think the hinging probably increases the overall expected lifetime as the pad, 'cause then theres fewer degrees of freedom where friction wear needs to be accounted for, but this is only personal speculation/experience
Not Apple's fault, but I have troubles with the naming schemes of the new Intel CPUs. Somehow if a CPU is called Core i5 or Core i7, I expect it to have 5 or 7 cores respectively. I take it that isn't the case?
This is a combination of Apple and Intel craziness. Intel decided to have let the names i3/i5/i7 be independent of number of cores, and Apple don't mention the exact processor name, which would tell you. Just the clock speed.
There isn't a 4 core mobile i5. The i5 should mean mainstream and i7 enthusiast performance. So you have i5-520M, i5-540M and i7-620M dual cores and i7-720QM, i7-820QM and i7-920QM quad cores. And their TDP is 35W for dual cores and 45W for quad cores.
Nope, from what I've read they are both dual core with hyper-threading.
In fact, I can't find any sources that show any real difference between them other than clock speed. Maybe someone with more CPU expertise could enlighten me - do the model numbers in Intel's mobile processors now simply denote clock speed differences?
There isn't much difference between the cpus apple is offering. The i7 has 4mb of cache instead of 3mb, higher base clock speed, and higher turbo clock speed.
Yeah, it's basically just clock speed in the mobile CPUs, and of course the higher end i7s have 4 cores (and no on-chip graphics). Some desktop versions also omit hyper-threading and/or turbo boost.
In fact, there are only two Core i* processors that don't have HyperThreading support, and they're both variants of the same quad-core Core i5 desktop processor (Core i5 750 and Core i5 750S):
In my experience, the i7 is ungodly fast. A linux recompile is about 20 seconds on my box.
Unfortunately, it's the i5 that has crypto acceleration. The i7 does about 80MB/s/core, and the i5 does something like 2000MB/s. But is slower otherwise.
On the media apps, the i5 beats the equivalently clocked i7 on most of the benches. On the productivity section, the i5 is equal to the i7 on 2 of the 5, and beaten by 10-20% on the others (those that seem to feed heavily on the hyperthreading and extra cache of the i7). Notably, though, the i5 and i7 are a wash in the Photoshop test (a key benchmark for the sort of things I do).
When you remove the constraint that the battery has to be user-removable and user-replacable, you get to choose battery sizes and shapes that are a lot more impressive.
Also, Apple is putting a fair bit of fundamental R&D into battery technology, pushing existing technology as far as they can, and, presumably, investigating future.
They're clearly obsessed with battery life at the highest (read: Jobsian) levels.
I replaced my desktop with a MacBook and an external screen, keyboard, and mouse. I get all the performance I need, the experience of a desktop, mobility, and no need to keep anything synchronized across different machines.
I eventually got a desktop because I didn't want to keep on re-plugging every time I got home and have lesser screen real estate than two dedicated screens and got a lighter secondary laptop. It's really a shame that macbooks don't have docks.
Sure. Most laptops are definitely powerful enough for my needs and I absolutely can’t stand the fixed nature of desktop systems (and their ugliness). My laptop is not on my desk most of the time, even though I don’t really take it with me (anymore) when I leave the house.
(I’m also one of those strange people who prefer using a trackpad to using a mouse.)
Desktops are less expensive, upgradeable, more powerful, and quieter. And you can setup a more ergonomic work area than with a laptop (unless you like a lot of peripherals hanging off your laptop, which kind of defeats the purpose).
If you must work from a coffee shop, just bring your $300 netbook and ssh into your desktop. Why bring a noisy and hot laptop that only lasts for 4 hours when you can have a silent machine that lasts for 14?
Desktops are great for power. Netbooks are great for portability. Laptops are bad at both.
My MacBook Pro is able to do everything I need and I have no problem carrying it around. I think "bad" is a bit of an exaggeration.
Desktops are optimized for power at the cost of obliterating portability. Netbooks are optimized for portability at the cost of being fairly underpowered. A good laptop is a generalist that doesn't do either as well as the specialist but can fill either role competently in most cases.
My major bugbear, I guess, is that a netbook has a crummy, tiny screen. I can live fairly happily without dual head for coding, but I find netbooks' screen/keyboard/slowness unbearable.
My laptop has enough power for my day to day needs (running web browsers, dev IDE, mail, and not taking forever to compile large tex docs), and for my larger needs, well, I need a 32GB RAM server for those, so I wouldn't have a desktop that could handle them either :-). Unless I'm really caning it, it doesn't make a sound, and all I have to do to turn it into a workstation is plug in a USB hub and monitor - not exactly a chore.
In terms of portability, my macbook is light enough for me to easily carry around, and in practise I get around 5-6 hours battery life even after a year's usage. If I upgraded to a newer macbook (I have one with a removable battery), I'd get closer to 10.
I completely agree about not buying a bad laptop. I have no interest in lugging around a behemoth that gets two hours battery life, or one that trades weight for being too slow for my everyday needs. A good laptop (and I'm not just talking about macs here, although I've had extremely positive experiences with mine) is powerful, light, and has good battery life. Unfortunately, you have to pay extra for that, but considering it's my only work-related expense, it seems cheap at the price. I love not being tied to my desk.
I've never noticed, as I use xmonad and don't really worry about screen real-estate. I started using a Windows 7 netbook, and you're right, the tiny screen makes things difficult. The solution is to not use Windows :)
I've never used windows on a netbook. My eyes aren't so great, so I tend to run slightly larger fonts than most people would, and the amount of information I can get on screen at once just isn't reasonable. I can't imagine trying to use Eclipse (say) on it.
In general, I just wouldn't consider a netbook suitable for doing a day's coding on - it's great for short term use, or if all I need is a couple of terminals, but it just doesn't have enough power or usability. That said, if it works for you, then great! I imagine it probably comes down to how much time you spend at your desk - if you're largely in a fixed location, then I see that having a powerful laptop just isn't worth the money.
I have a fall 2008 unibody MBP that requires a complete logout to switch graphics cards. Anyone know if the ability to switch on the fly requires hardware or will it make its way back down to older owners via a software update?
If not for the iPad launch, these laptops would probably have been released in February, so saying "Updates soon" for three months is about as much as could be expected.
If you're a business customer they'll often exchange your Mac without charge if you bought it within the 14 day grace period. That's been my experience anyway...
Has anyone come across performance tests between nVidias older 9400M chip and their new 320M chip?
I find it interesting that the 13" models now tout a "10 hour battery", up from the old 7 hour one - I am curious to find out if it's all caused by replacing the old 9400M north/southbridge with the 320M, or if there is also a new battery behind it. A 45% increase in estimated avg. battery time is a pretty damned nice number for any laptop user.
