Briefly About the Show

Today my MacBook Pro 17" arrived and I want to share my honest impressions. When the 15" laptops came out, it was important to me to read actual users' experiences. I hope this will return that favor.

To begin with, I previously posted a complaint about the accuracy of the shipping times posted on Apple's web site. I still stand by the complaint because the times were inaccurate. In fact they only became more erratic and inaccurate as the days went on, but to my benefit. The MacBook arrived 8 days early, which is in line with the original estimates. Why things are so messed up is beyond me.

Enough about shipping. I'm not going to post a bunch of pictures of me while I open the box. Who needs it? It's a box! Obviously the packaging is stylish - it's Apple.

I opened the machine itself and it looks pretty much the same as my old PowerBook 15" - obviously larger and with an iSight camera atop the screen, but otherwise the same.

The MagSafe plug is nice. If you haven't played with one in a store, it snaps with a lot of strength. Damn powerful magnet there. The power-brick is pretty big. About twice the size of the old one. I don't understand this, so I won't comment on the reasons. I don't like it being bigger obviously, who would?

I booted up and used the migration assistant to move "everything" from my iMac to the MacBook. This is where Apple shows off their talent. Whenever I bought a new Windows machine and wanted to transfer it all over, it was just not that easy out of the box. About an hour later all my files, settings, prefs, applications, users, and more were transferred. An almost perfect mirror of the iMac. I did have to activate/deactivate some apps - don't get me started on this.

Hardware Issues and Performance Fears
I'm now working on this post on the MacBook and I was worried that applications like Dreamweaver, Flash, Word, & Excel would be too slow to bear. I was wrong. I actually rebooted both my iMac G5 (2.1Ghz) and the MacBook Pro (2.16Ghz & running Rosetta) fresh and did an informal test. I launched Dreamweaver at the same time (using two hands). The MacBook launched only 5 seconds behind the iMac. That's incredible when you consider it's running a pretty massive app under virtualization software.

All of my software runs fast enough under Rosetta to do work as usual. And the apps that are Universal - wow! I'm talking instant launches here.

My other fears should be obvious... I was worried about overheating, buzzing, flickering, and other noises reported in early 15" models. I can tell you right now that there's none of that. It's been running steady for 4 hours now and doing the following almost the whole time...

• Transferring several GB of files continuously
• Downloading several files from FTP/HTTP sites
• Running Acquisition with active E3 video torrents
• Launching CS2 apps, Dreamweaver, Flash, Safari

After all that, I have not even heard fan noise. The heat is the same as my PowerBook 15" 1.5Ghz. No buzzing, and the screen is stunningly bright and vivid.

I wanted to post this in case it would help anyone in making a decision. I got the 17" because when you configure the 15" to match specs it's $100 cheaper, has a dual-layer DVD burner, and the sadly missing Firewire 800 port is there. It was just too good to pass up.

One problem I will report. When you put a new MacBook near an iMac and use the remote... there's confusion :)

Feel free to write in things you'd like me to try or test. I'll be happy to post the results here if they serve to help anyone.