Its been almost a month since I receive my MacBook Pro, and I am quite pleased so far.
Shipped from Shanghai China, the MacBook took less time to get overseas than it took FedEx to deliver it to me once in Montreal. Not only is this my first Mac, but this is also my first laptop. I have had the luxuary to use many Macs, as well as many laptops in my day, but I have now had the experience of extended use of both platforms.
Lets delve into my experiences with the new processor core, the Intel Core Duo and battery life.
The CoreDuo when running on battery gives an average of about 4 hours in real world usage. This is pretty good for when you just need to do lot of typing. When it comes to running DVDs, I would not bet on it going for longer than 3 hours. I find that the screen draws the most amount of power, especially since its up to 67% brighter than older models. In conjunction with the DVD and CPU running on high, the battery metter cna show as low as 2:30. Still better than the first first 12 inch powerbooks that could only do 2 hours max, new out of the box.
The Dual Core on these chips are enhanced with a quad-pumped 166Mhz bus, yielding a 667MHz Front Side Bus with a maxmimum bandwidth of 5.3GB/s. This is slower than the 10.7GB/s capabilities of the DDR2-667 mememory interface. But this is significant in that systems running Unified Memory Architecture UMA to share the CPU bus with the graphic chipset, the higher memory bandwidth with DDR2 is really only relevant for the graphics card. The Core Duo has a 2MB cache running at full clock speed built into the chip. With both CPUs sharing the same cache, this reduces cache misses, and increases performance over the split-cache technique of previous Intel Dual core processors such as the Pentium D.
The Intel Core Duo's are more power efficient by virtue that there are two high-performance execution engines with intelligent power mangement features that deliver more performance-per-watt than a single core processor. In the same amount of cycles, more instructions can be executed, requiring less time and power to executte the same instructions overall.
MagSafe is definetly very cool. One has to try it to see just how innovative this technology is. Not only does it do what it is advertised to do, but it is consistent and a big help when you have alot of things on your desk, or tripping over the cord when getting up. Just make sure not to put any credit cards near it, or leave paper clips in your bag. Its definetly to find it way to the very attractive plug.
The screen is something to see as well. I had to watch all over DVDs over again, just because they look so much better. I had a 17 Powerbook user come over to me and measure his beside my 15 inch and got upset at that fact it was the same width - I've been prepared to the jealousy factor. Especially since I was a student and he was a successful real estate salesman.
The illuminated keyboard is a life saver. As a writter I find myself up at three in the morning squeezing out the last bit of inspiration before falling fast asleep, and the combination of a dimming screen and illuminated keyboard keeps my eyes in focus. There is no greater praise I can give Apple than to think them for the screen/keyboard combination.
Have not had any experience with the Sudden Motion Sensor on the SATA drive, and I don't plan on dropping this baby either.
I know some of you must be wondering about heat. I must say that I've been very surprised with the heat dissipation on this new MacBook model. I've heard many people complain about PowerBooks getting very hot, enough to make your fingers sweat. Although I'm not saying this MacBook does not get hot, in common tasks, the speed of the processor and the fact its only one ince think, means it can keep the processor frequency just high enough to get your work done and keep the overall temperature down. Once and a while the fan will kick in and there is a noticible pitch change, it is not very noticible when surfing the Net, word processing or playing music.
The vents have been placed at the back right below the screen. Its so sneaky you might think there are no vents. Their placement is in tune with great Mac design.
The Optical audio jacks is just what I needed. With my Sony Digital Equipment, I no longer have to worry about maintainig a perfect high quality digital workflow. I plug n play.
The scrolling trackpad is great fun, and a much needed addition to all laptops. Easy to use, there is not learning curve with this innovation.
