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.

Comments

Can someone help me?

[Salvance]

I'm not a regular Mac user, so I don't really understand the significance of this news story. Is publishing a few specs really news? I'd expect this on a Computer site like Tom's Hardware, but not on slashdot, so I'm wondering if there is some unstated greater significance.

From what I can find, this C2D is a laptop that Apple Stores started selling over the past couple days. If it's already out, what will it provide me that other Mac's won't?

Thanks!

Re:Can someone help me?

[drsmithy]

It's nice to know that they still use the firmware heavily restricted optical drives. (For those of us who are regular Mac users, and still want to regularly watch multiregion DVDs.)

I've always wondered if, in countries where region-coding is considered anti-competitive (eg: Australia), you can use uo your 5 region changes and then legitimately return the laptop as "broken"...

hooplah

[SuperBanana]

I'm a bit worried about the heat and noise of the new MacBook Pros.

I'm typing on a MBP "v1.0" and the only noise I hear is the hard drive- a quiet "whoosh". The fans at minimum speed (1000RPM) are completely inaudible. They are more progressive than the G4's which were pretty much an on/off switch.

As for heat? Every year I read whining about "how hot" the newest Powerbook is. It's all a bunch of shit (with the exception of the 12" Al Powerbook. That thing WAS an oven.) Component specs don't change- people just assume "oh, it's a gazillion times faster, it MUST run hotter!" Funny, but if you compare the new intel Minis to the old Minis- they use a few watts LESS power.

Right now it's sitting on my legs, I'm wearing jeans, and it isn't uncomfortable- smcfancontrol says it's 138 degrees F on the CPU die. When it's running too hot for comfort, I fire up smccontrol and bump the fans up to 1500rpm, where you can just barely hear them- and it cools things down by about ten degrees.

64 Bit Support?

[tji]

I sent Brian a question (shortly before he got "Slashdotted") about whether the new MacBook Pros supported 64 bit mode. He was kind enough to compile and run the little 'sizeof' program I sent him and respond about the output..

The announcements and marketing information about the new MBP's was conspicuously absent of any mention of the 64 bit support of the new Merom / Core 2 Duo processor. This is strange because both the Mac Pro and the iMac specifically mention their 64 bit support.

There is a lot of contradictory information floating around about the state of 64 bit support on the Intel Macs. So, I asked him to compile an app to show the sizeof a long int and pointer. The output showed 4 Bytes / 32 bits.

So, this is curious... Does x86 Tiger not support 64 bit mode? But, people have done tests on 32 bit vs. 64 bit on intel Macs ( http://www.geekpatrol.ca/blog/150/ ). So, why is the MBP different than the iMac, which uses the same processor and chipset?

Anyone have more definitive information on 64 bit support for this new MacBook Pro? Or for x86 Tiger, the new iMacs and Mac Pro's?

Also, before all the "64 bit support is pointless" replies; yes, I know it can only handle 3GB of RAM. I know the benefits of 64 bit will not be dramatic (I already have two Linux boxes running Athlon64's in 64 bit mode). I'm just curious whether all the features of the processor can be used. I also want the performance benefit of doubling the number of general purpose processors and 64 bit math. And, since Leopard is supposed to have much better 64 bit support, I want to see where this MacBook Pro will stand.

Re:WUXGA

[swimmar132]

Agreed. 1680x1050 is great on a 15.4" screen.

The next OS X is supposed to be resolution independent. Perhaps they'll upgrade the resolution on their laptops then.

Ubuntu on a Dell E1505 is a great combination, btw.

Re:It's a shame

[shmlco]

What we really need to do is to convince Belkin to make this product work on a Mac.