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Want To Know About the New Apple MacBook Pro?
An anonymous reader writes to tell us about an extremely helpful user who is answering questions from all comers about the new MacBook Pro. "A few days ago, a user by the name 'bcavanau' posted on the macrumors.com forums that he had just picked up a new MacBook Pro. Forum members started asking him about features, specifications, and benchmarks. He was happy to oblige, posting responses to everyone's questions. Eventually the forum thread got out of hand, and he set up a website devoted to answering the questions. If you have a question that hasn't already been answered, email him at the address on the site. He is responding daily and sometimes within minutes. This guy is dedicated. Thanks 'bcavanau', you get two thumbs up." The link to the site is cached via the Coral Content Distribution Network.
While they were put up for order on Tuesday, they haven't hit the street yet (as far as I know). You can't go buy them in stores right now (unless someone knows otherwise). So basically this person got their hands on the laptop early.
So why all the fuss? First, this is a Core 2 Duo so it is supposed to have better performance than the Core Duo models that were replaces (and it is supposed to run circles around my little Powerbook G4). But more importantly while the MacBook Pros were nice computers, there were quite a few complaints about the amount of heat they generate, noises (from the speaker/screen/who-knows). A lot of people (myself included) want to know if the laptops run as hot as the MacBook Pros did.
To the Mac community this is a bit like someone getting their hands on a Zune and answering people's questions when there is no information about the Zune but specs out there (which I realize is not quite the case, but it's an example).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Are you on crack? OS X is the best UNIX I've ever used.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
For those asking that can't make it to the site, at idle both CPU cores are at 123.8 F, and the hard drive is at 100.4 F.
Long story short is that the guy says the noise isn't a problem -- it sounds nearly silent -- and he doesn't have any comparisons heat-wise.
The default ABI is 32-bit. Try adding -m64 to your compiler flags.
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Okay, I'll bite.
Unfortunately for me, I tend to prefer Microsoft Office over OpenOffice. There's no Microsoft Office in Linux, FreeBSD, etc. In reality, this is a shame, because I spend most of my time using LaTeX and it stinks that when I do need an "office app" I have to resort to Microsoft Office since I consider it a better application. Also, there's no Photoshop for Linux, etc. Please don't say GIMP. I actually learned on GIMP and would much prefer to use it over Photoshop, but there's no true color calibration system for Linux. Aperture is also on OS X and I don't really have a desire to use anything else to manage photos.
I loathed the OS X interface when I first started using it. In fact, the day I got my PowerBook G4 (my first Mac, about 3.5 years ago), I spent all of 10 minutes in OS X. And I spend that time while I was figuring out how to install Debian on it. I ran Debian on my PowerBook for a year or more. I decided to try out OS X and haven't looked back. Well, I did for a bit, because the UI was a bit different to me. Since getting used to the UI, I would never like to go back to traditional UNIX desktops.
When I come from home from work and need to do something on my computer, I don't want to have to worry about it. I don't want to worry, for instance, if the new kernel I apt-geted broke my VMWare installation and now requires a module recompile. I don't have the time, nor the energy, to care anymore. OS X is for the practical inside of me. OS X is for the artist inside of me. OS X is for the lazy inside of me.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman