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.'"

Comments

NY Times Review

[nervouscat]

David Pogue has his review of the new Apple MacBook Pro in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/technology/circu its/02pogue.html

Head to head against Winders and *nix

[binaryDigit]

Another side effect of Apple switching to Intel chippies will be the increased number of comparisons of common apps (both functional and specific packages) across OS's. Before, it was always a bit sketchy comparing Win/*nix apps against OSX apps due to hardware differences. Now that the hardware is starting to become more "common", direct comparisions will take on more meaning.

Whether this is good or bad for Apple, we shall see.

Hee.

[sammy baby]

From the second page of the article:

Speaking of bedrooms, and not in the least bit tongue-in-cheek, I can see the built-in iSight as a new and even easier means for amateur, uh... adult photos... to be taken and sent around the Internet. I, for one, welcome our new Pr0nCam overlords. Okay, not really.

*sniff* It's like the reviewer was my long lost sibling!.

Re:Hee.

[Coming soon!]

iPatch, couldn't resist...

Not a typical Ars review

[thatguywhoiam]

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, and instead we more or less have a completely mundane blog entry about someone's new toy. The writing style is all wrong for that site.

If you use Xcode, you want one of these

[macrom]

I just got back from the Apple Compatibility Labs in Cupertino, and I was able to put my code on a MacBook Pro to do some build comparisons. On my current PowerBook G4, with a 7200 RPM drive, 1 GB RAM and a 1.67 G4, it takes about 20-25 minutes to do a full Release rebuild of my code (Universal Binary). It took around 5 on the MacBook Pro. Thank God my boss was with me to help test because that's the easiest convincing that I need a new laptop I ever done.

Bottom line : if you're a developer and you have long compile times on your code (AND you have the need/desire to be mobile), you NEED one of these machines.

When does the average tip? Typical for me.

[SuperKendall]

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.