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MacBook Pro Reviewed
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has an in-depth review of the MacBook Pro that compares performance with a Dell Inspiron running a hacked version of OS X 10.4.4: 'Yes, you read that right. We at the Orbiting HQ were able to have some benchmarks run on an acquaintance's Dell Inspiron 9100 with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT chip running OS X 10.4.4, and decided that including the benchmarks from this machine would prove to be both interesting if not illustrative of what non-Apple x86 machines may be capable of if they could run Mac OS X (legally). Please keep in mind that the data from the Dell laptop is for illustrative purposes only and that no one at the Ars Orbiting HQ hacked a machine. As David Letterman says, this is not a competition. No wagering.'"
Looks like they still have some bugs to work out, as the PowerBook G4 still outperforms the MacBook in some of the benchmarks.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
after reading the article (and many others) now I am sure I am sticking with linux. after a few days of hasitation (I have tried macosx in vmware-player) and reading these hardware reviews I finally ordered a turion-based notebook.
sorry apple - maybe for my mom, not for me. not this time.
Mine showed up Monday. Thoughts from a mac os x beginner:
1. the screen does have some flicker on very dim settings as noted. The auto adjust for room brightness is also a bit too sensitive - an aspiring os x hacker might want to see if an app could be written to make it less real time - use a rolling x seconds average of brightness? It is a very nice screen all in all, though.
2. the power brick's connector goes green when plugged in to the laptop, and then the light goes brown. This isn't very intuitive.
3. The blinding white led near the lid latch oscillates in brightness when the machine is in sleep. Did I mention how blinding it is?
Been trying to see if I can get it to vpn to a watchguard with free add ons - no such luck yet (anyone have a racoon conf for that?). Office 2004 took what seemed to be a long time to install, but installed without incident - I have only used remote desktop so far. This weekend I am going to play with the encrypted home directory stuff, and see what I can cook up to have my home directory sync with my active directory home dir.
The reviewer states, "It is important to note, however, that there is a "Better Performance" option under the battery life menu which, undoubtedly, maximizes the battery life in every way that the computer can..."
Actually "Better Performance" means the opposite, as it disables most if not all power saving options. "Better Energy Savings" will give the user longer battery life at the expense of performance. I find most applications almost unusable at that setting and tend to run under the "Normal" setting when I need to get work done. The better savings option is good for movies and checking email.
I got my new 1.83 ghz MBP on Monday, and am upgrading from a 1ghz G4 iBook circa Apr '04.
Okay, the increased performance is awesome. Really, things are just quicker all around.
But the biggest improvement...
The screen. Oh my. It's wonderful. It makes the 12" iBook screen look like it might be broken because of how much brighter the new MBP screens are. It's amazing. It actually may be nicer than my external 17" LCD screen. It makes working away from home positively enjoyable. Really, the screen alone makes the upgrade worthwhile.
ce n'est pas un Sig.
The main thing that interests me is the noise. How loud are the fans? I have already heard several bad things about the MacBook: display emits a humming, notebook emits a humming if cpu is idle (apparently known from earlier apple hardware, too), fans spinning very often. Is anybody able to comment on that?
As owner of a G4 PowerBook, AppleCare does not happily repair the many defects discovered during the warranty periods of their hardware.
The list of defective parts is long, and there are some things broken by simple use that they refuse to fix under warranty.
Every user experience is different, but it makes me sad I encouraged our research project to use a lot of Apple hardware from XServers to powerbooks and desktops.
The result with generic hardware (which I have used often in the past) or Dell hardware would have cost less and hardly could have been worse from a support or defect perspective. How is switching to a new CPU going to affect the basic experience that Apple really sucks as a hardware producer and as a support company.
How's the heat dissipation on these things? Everybody talks about performance, but nobody is talking about heat. Will it cook my legs and sterilize me or not?
Bryan
Although your repair experiences are no doubt aggravating, you are one person and thus represent too small a sample to form a general conclusion on the overall platform. For that, a large sample is needed. The data I have seen from Consumer Reports surveys of readers (a sample of 134,000 computers) reported in the December 2005 issue suggest the opposite conclusion:
For both laptops and desktops, Apple scored highest in customer satisfaction with tech support by a considerable amount. For example, for laptops, Apple scored 82 (very satisfied). This compares to 70 for IBM, 58 for Toshiba, 58 for Dell, 57 for Gateway, 55 for HP, 53 for Sony, and 49 for Compaq.
In terms of the percentage of computers that needed repairs, Apple was the lowest among makers of desktop computers. Among laptops, Apple was 4th lowest, behind Sony, IBM and Toshiba. Following Apple was HP, Dell, Compaq, and Gateway.
Apple also scores very high in the reader surveys conducted by PC World. So, while your experience was no doubt bad, the conclusion that "Apple sucks as a hardware producer and support company" is not merited.
I received my MacBook Pro on Monday of this week. I transferred my data from a 12" PB using the Setup Assistant as well as the author of this review did. I found that application launch times and overall system performance were slower than the 12" PB I was replacing. A friend of mine bought an iMac Intel and had the same issue. I erased my drive last night restored the OS/bundled software and manually moved just my user data over to the MacBook Pro. Application launch times have drastically improved.
It seemed like the MagSafe connector came off in a lot of situations when the reviewer wanted it on. If I'm sitting in bed with it, I'll almost certainly be running on battery power, but if I'm on the go and *can* plug it in, I almost certainly will. If I have to use it on my lap, but I'm sitting next to an outlet, I'll be using it. It seems like this is the kind of situation that would be a problem. You can't blame the reviewer for calling a spade a spade. The resolution thing isn't that big a deal, but those 60 pixels could be my dock.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
I do not mean any offence to Jacqui Cheng, but with the (notable) exception of the Dell comparison, this review was shallow at best. When I surf Ars I typically expect the nitty-gritty Hannibal type review
You must be thinking back to the days when Ars actually reviewed stuff in depth - like the OS X reviews! Ahh, those were the days.
Sadly they are gone. The point I noticed this was when Ars reviewed Aperture with a similarily lacking review, including getting some things quite wrong and refusing to correct them and then simply not reviewing entire major sections of the application, while also not looking at any technical aspects of the application in depth.
Then I looked around a little more, wondering where my Ars had went. I found the most detailed review on the site at the time was a gaming mouse!
So, let's all say goodby to Ars and try to figure out where all the detailed technical reviews went to. Perhaps considering the past body of work this review is not "typical" but I think if you looked over the past year this review would in fact be very typical indeed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For those of us who still own Clamshell iBooks, 5 hours battery life doesn't sound all that impressive...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
I own a 4 year old Toshiba laptop with a 15" LCD that has a native resolution of 1600x1200. Newer laptops come with even larger displays and 16:9/16:10 displays are a fad right now. These displays, despite their significant advantage with horizontal screen realestate, have fewer lines of horizontal resolution. I have considered buying a new laptop a couple of times now, but I am always discouraged by the giant leap backward in resolution. I cannot justify paying $2,000+ for a laptop that runs at a lower resolution than the one I have now... when you get used to high DPI displays (1600x1200 @ 15" or 2048x1536 @ 21") it is actually painful/annoying to look at large, low resolution displays.
[Re: Battery Life] Amazing what a difference two years makes, eh?
Uh, no. Dell (and others) are still selling machines with massive and useless batteries. My point is that you can have one or the other. For anyone gushing over the performance of the Dell, it would help to temper that with it's dismal battery life. For the article to say that 3.5 hours of battery life for the MacBook Pro is disappointing, it seems like a glaring oversight.
I agree... the Mac is still pretty far behind when a 2+ year old box is keeping up with it on it's OWN OS...
That's not really conclusive. That same machine would likely outperform both the Latitude X1 and D610 you mentioned by a similar or greater margin. Are they "far behind", too? The Pentium M and Core Duo are both more efficient chips with higher IPC, but they're running at around half the clock speed of the Pentium 4. The P4 should outperform these systems. The point is that comparing them on performance alone is stupid and misleading.
Also, you seem confused when you say "on it's OWN OS". There is nothing magic about the MacBook Pro that would make Mac OS X run faster on it than on any other compatible hardware. Why would you even think that it would? Could you describe a way in which it might?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
MacBook Pro Offers Promising Start to Era Of Intel-Powered Apple
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history.
In general I agree Apple has done good sheding legacy technology from their products, but for communications options like the 3G cards there are two issues in addition to the PCMCIA vs Expresscard/34 discussion:
Unfortunately this will hurt the MacBook Pro in certain markets.
The future is in beta