New Apple MacBook Pro Reviewed

adeelarshad82 writes "As fate would have it, an Intel chipset glitch delayed shipments of almost every laptop manufacturer, save one. Apple, which has typically been last in transitioning to new technology, is now among the first to launch laptops with Sandy Bridge. The Apple MacBook Pro (Thunderbolt) is the fastest laptop out there. Powered with a Quad-core Core i7 processor and AMD Radeon HD 6750M, the MacBook Pro has a lot of fire power to offer. Unfortunately though it is still a bit expensive and there is a lack of Thunderbolt devices to take advantage of the new interface."

Comments

Uh oh

[clang_jangle]

Apple, which has typically been last in transitioning to new technology

It's bad news when TFS is a troll.

Re:Uh oh

[PCM2]

Yeah, no kidding. This would be the Apple that invented Firewire, right? The Apple that brought networking to casual PC users? The Apple that killed off the floppy drive? The Apple that was first to trade old-school serial ports for USB? The Apple that was first to embrace 802.11b wireless? The Apple that was the first manufacturer to ship systems with Nehalem chips? I could do a Google search for "Apple was the first manufacturer" but what would be the point? That one sentence is so ludicrously off base, it makes me not want to read another word.

Re:Uh oh

[Jane Q. Public]

"That doesn't sound much like trolling to me, if you consider that Apple (more specifically Steve Jobs) refuses to allow USB 3.0 or even SATA 6GB/s."

Of course they did... because they were working on getting "Thunderbolt", which is better than both. A new technology. Which they will have for a year before anyone else.

Re:Uh oh

[drsmithy]

It's bad news when TFS is a troll.

Seems pretty accurate to me. Most new technology (eg: CPUs, GPUs, memory types, etc) are on the market for months (at least) before Apple picks them up. They tend to keep older technology around for longer, as well (eg: Mac Mini still has a Core 2 Duo).

The rare counter-examples (eg: Firewire, Mini-DP) are rarely found outside of the Mac ecosystem.

That's before even going into the technology other vendors have that they stubbornly refuse to implement. Like, say, a docking station for their ostensibly "professional" laptops.

Re:Uh oh

[hedwards]

So? It's legitimate to point out that only very rarely is Apple first at anything, most of the time they prefer to wait for a market to be at a tipping point before releasing a product. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, it's just disingenuous to suggest that Apple is an innovator, it's been a good long while since they were doing much more than perfecting something that somebody else did first, which is a much easier task.

Re:Uh oh

[gad_zuki!]

Err, Apple also brought us the one button mouse, fought USB as long as it could, and everytime I go to a meeting someone yells "anyone got a displayport adapter to vga so I can use this projector?" Not to mention some of us still need serial ports on our computers, but I guess that's beside the point.

Not to mention PC makers have had the option to not install the floppy years before Apple mandated it. That AMD really brought us into the 64 bit era, and that wifi was not at all an Apple thing. Or that I can buy a Dell Zino that does HDMI and Bluray for half the price of a Mac mini.

Look, relax, theyre just a company. They're not some perfect religion. Comments like yours just justify the Apple fanboy stereotype. Unclench, everything will be ok. Jobs is still alive and a massive millionaire.

Re:Uh oh

[nedlohs]

The claim was "last in transitioning to new technology".

Just adding the new technology and keeping the old isn't transitioning. Apple has often been first in dumping the old and hence first to transition - though really it's been due to them being small enough and being the monopoly producer so that they could much more easily. If Dell decided to make some of those changes a big chunk of their customers would just buy from HP instead, for example.

Re:Uh oh

[PopeRatzo]

Ubuntu is among the slowest dsitros I've ever used.

By god, you're RIGHT! I read a story right here on Slashdot the other day, a news story that broke the breaking news that Ubuntu had "lost a lot of love" from "the community". And here you are, hardly a day later, confirming that Ubuntu just isn't all that.

So now, I know better than to buy some vanilla hardware and put Ubuntu on it, especially since there are these new "Sandy Bridge" processors coming out just around the corner! And (gasp!) a brand new MacBook Pro, too!

How much do you want to be that I'll be getting an offer for a pre-approved credit card in the mail on Monday with a with a limit that's almost exactly the several thousand dollars that this new MacBook Pro will cost (of course, I'll want to add enough memory so it will actually run the new version of Final Cut Pro 7 that just came out (only $999 while supplies last!)). And look at this! The introductory rate on the credit card is 5% until the end of April. I wonder if that's a better rate than I can get if I sign up for the Visa card that (wow!) is right there on the Apple website. I can get a decision in JUST 30 SECONDS!

It's almost as if Apple and Intel and Visa and Kingston and Slashdot and the Slashdot "user" that posted the story about all the "love lost" for Ubuntu could tell the future and were reading my mind to know exactly the decision I was going to make. How could I ever have even considered putting Ubuntu on last year's hardware?

God, but the Free Market Economy is a wondrous thing. It's like living in a universe where everything works in harmony, if you just can extend your credit a little...bit...more.

A BIT expensive?!

[Shivetya]

It costs $2199 which for many means an additional $150 for the screen resolution it should have as default. Worse that $150 is the only way to get a non-glossy screen. So lets just say 2349 to get off the ground. Want a three year warranty? Considering your down 2349 its worth it to pay off the risk of that, but at 349 its 15% of the cost of the laptop.

Then you can go on with the extras beyond those two requirements. Sorry, in a day when you can buy a laptop for under 399 these premium laptops are absurd. I know you get what you pay for, but you really don't. The price difference stops somewhere well south of this things price point. This is like saying you need a Porsche for your commute because parking at Starbucks in a Chevy is so not your perceived status.

Don't get me wrong, I have an iMac, but I can at least see some of the value in its 27 inch screen. I can't find the value in their laptops. I know other companies make expensive laptops but damn, there are near equivalents for 90% of the apps most people will run for half this price let alone a quarter.

Amazing laptops in the range of workstation prices (looking at the real Mac Pros - the tower units).

Re:A BIT expensive?!

[znu]

Do some people buy MacBook Pros as status symbols? I'm sure they do. But some of us work in pro video. There are people who legitimately need high-end laptops, and a lot of them, because of Apple's strength in the creative pro market, use Macs.

With quad core processors and tons of external bandwidth over Thunderbolt, these new MBPs are game changing for pro video, or will be once a couple of TB devices hit the market. For instance, TB is fast enough to hook up both a RAID capable of handling multiple 1080p video streams and a video interface capable of doing uncompressed HD output to a broadcast monitor. This makes these pretty much the first laptops ever (outside of crazy hack jobs, maybe) that can plausibly replace towers for working with uncompressed HD video formats. That's pretty handy.

Re:A BIT expensive?!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Sorry, in a day when you can buy a laptop for under 399 these premium laptops are absurd. I know you get what you pay for, but you really don't.

How much does that $399 laptop weigh? How thick is it? How long is the battery life?

Have you noticed that the manufacturers of those $399 laptops also sell much more expensive laptops that, at least by the very narrow logic you seem to be following, don't spec out any higher? Do you ever criticize those, or are they given immunity because they aren't of Apple manufacture?

Apple simply doesn't try to compete in the 2-inch thick, 9-pound, short-battery-life segment of the laptop market. Not everyone carries about weight or size - but some of us do. Speaking for myself, I now happily pay a premium for lighter laptops - based largely on the fact that my first laptop was one of those 2-inch thick, 9-pound, short-battery-life beasts that, after a while, I stopped carrying around because it was too much of a pain in the neck (figuratively and literally).

Re:A BIT expensive?!

[msauve]

Apple simply doesn't try to compete in the 2-inch thick, 9-pound, short-battery-life segment of the laptop market. ... my first laptop was one of those 2-inch thick, 9-pound, short-battery-life beasts

Was that the Apple Powerbook 540c (2.3" thick, 7.3 lbs, not counting the power supply)?

Re:A BIT expensive?!

[Winckle]

Are you comparing a laptop from 1994 to laptops from 2011? Hardly seems fair.

Re:A BIT expensive?!

[19061969]

Sorry for responding to myself but I should point out that $2000 for a laptop that I *know* lets me do any day job I can get is worth way more. $2000? That's 3 days work. I can lose more than that by only having a PC.

Re:A BIT expensive?!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

$2000 is very, very expensive for a laptop. Period. You can get a high-quality, durable PC laptop like a ThinkPad T510 for around $900.

Amusingly, I worked at a company where those were the laptop options, Thinkpad or MacBook. The IT department kept statistics on failure rates (among other things) and their numbers lined up right about with Consumer Reports. Those high-quality, durable ThinkPads fail a whole lot more often than Macbooks. That's not to say Macbooks are a better deal for all use cases, if you keep a few extras laying around and have good backups/restore and a good repair program, but let me tell you, it doesn't take too many hours of lost work from a $100K+/year engineer to make the return on more expensive but more reliable laptops a bargain.

Re:A BIT expensive?!

[beelsebob]

How about this? You can get a ThinkPad T410 for under $1000 with an i5 and 6 hour battery life that weighs less than 5 lbs.

Comparing the most $969 (on sale – it's usually $1405, significantly more than the mac) T410 to the 13" MacBook Pro:
  Slower CPU (yes, it may be clocked higher, but sandy bridge more than offsets that).
  Slower GPU (yes, even the discrete NVS3100m is slower than the HD 3000 – you can check various benchmark sites for that).
  Half the RAM
  Half the HDD space
  Shorter (though not much) battery life.
  Much worse trackpad
  No thunderbolt

The performance argument doesn't hold because PCs and Macs now use the same Intel chipsets and CPUs, so the performance is the same.

Incorrect –the Mac is using a Sandy Bridge i7, the T410 isn't – this is the same kind of performance difference as between a Core2Duo and a Core i7 – Sandy bridge is a complete new architecture.

So basically, you're saying "zomg it's $200 cheaper", when it's got $200 less in it...

Thunderbolt an Apple exclusive?

[rekoil]

..."Apple is rumored to have an exclusive on this technology until 2012."

*shakes head* So much for wide support. Lots more people buy Mac then they used to, but 8 times as many people still buy PCs. Peripheral vendors aren't stupid.

Why not

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just put a paid-by-Apple advertisement at the top of the Slashdot homepage, telling you to buy their latest product. At least it wouldn't be so insidious.

Re:"Now among the first"

[DurendalMac]

Someone is a retard who can't tell the difference between a first and second-gen i7...

Thread creep

[tgibbs]

Interesting how the thread topic has slipped. When the initial criticism, "Apple...has typically been last in transitioning to new technology" was pointed out to be not merely false, but flagrantly so (Apple not only has not been last, but in terms of transitioning, they have tended to lead the pack in abandoning old tech), those looking for some excuse to pick on Apple pretend that the question was whether whether Apple was first to use new technology.

Re:Don't forget about the 30 minute battery life.

[Smurf]

I see you also didn't RTFA.

The reviewers tested five laptops. On the MobileMark 2007 test (which runs on Windows 7, for which the new MacBook Pros have not yet been optimized) the MacBook 15-inch (Thunderbolt) lasted 4 hours 40 minutes. That was much longer than the Dell XPS 15 (3:48), Asus N53DV-A1 (3:51), and Asus N53JF-XE1 (3:15). It was only outlasted by the HP Pavilion dv7-4283cl (5:46), a much inferior system that scored last or second-to-last in all the other tests, losing sometimes by a huge margin.

So I would say that yes, the new MB Pro has a very, very decent battery life especially for such a powerful portable machine.