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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."
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).
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
Breakfast served all day!
A rumor that Intel quickly denied. Others can support it, Apple was just first. The original statement was to the effect it'd probably be about a year before others would support it, because it would require new hardware, etc.
I'm no Mac fanboy. I'd probably attract criticism for being a Mac hater. In any case, I think some negatives are just unfair.
TFS says that Light Peak doesn't have peripherals yet, and paints this as a negative on the MacBook Pro. Why do all reviewers feel a compulsion to make up shit if they can't think of anything negative? That's like some video game reviews I've seen, where they can' t find anything to complain about, so they take a star off because they just don't like the genre. That's a good reason to fire a reviewer, in my opinion.
And whose girlfriend has a race-to-the-bottom HP laptop, both of which are paperweights, I'm willing to pay a little more for my next laptop, one made by a company whose business model isn't razor-thin margins and cheap-as-possible components, and slipshod engineering. Go do a search of the laptop forums for "Dell Inspiron," a horrendously flawed design, and see the hate. Then go look at the customer satisfaction ratings for Macs.
My next lappy will be a Mac, and I can use Boot Camp when I need Windows.
There's a difference between cheap and value.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Yes and no...
Apple is typically very aggressive about killing legacy things in favor of whatever new hotness they have decided on, even when customers whine about it, and they have recently been Intel's shiny launch partner of choice(so there is usually a short period of exclusivity for Intel's new hotness). They are also pretty aggressive about deciding that some feature should be 'baseline' rather than 'upgrade' at a relatively early date(this shows up with things like bluetooth today, or 802.11b back when that was optional on nastier PC laptops...) That is the yes.
The "no" is that Firewire was pretty much the last hardware standard that Apple had a major hand in. USB? Appeared on PC motherboards well before Apple ones(it was Intel's baby after all), Apple was just the first to burn the legacy options. 802.11b? All of Apple's 1st gen gear was rebadged Lucent off-the shelf stuff. Apple made it an available consumer option while Lucent was still squeezing the enterprise guys; but that was pure sticker engineering? Killed off the floppy? The first to stop offering it across the board, possibly; but you've been able to spec PCs without floppies well back into Apple's beige era. 64bit desktops? Hello AMD, 3D cards? Apple's selections are always archaic, even now that they are an Intel shop. etc, etc.
By virtue of their disinterest in coddling legacy users and low price points, Apple does, certainly, come up a lot on the "pushed technology X into ubiquity within their product line by murdering its predecessors and making it a standard option" list. However, the list of "was actually first" is substantially shorter, especially in more recent years. The list of "invented here, rather than launch partnered here" is shorter still, especially these days.
They undoubtedly do adopt-and-polish quite well; but their actual degree of pioneering needs to be kept in perspective.
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.
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.
Someone is a retard who can't tell the difference between a first and second-gen i7...
Not according to Intel, they don't.
"Other system makers are free to implement Thunderbolt on their systems as well, and we anticipate seeing some of those systems later this year and in early 2012."
Thunderbolt will appear on PC laptops as soon as the Sandy Bridge chipsets without SATA problems start shipping. Apple has the head start here because their machines don't have the eSATA port that is standard on most PC laptops today.
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.
The parts falling off my Inspiron were of the very highest quality.
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.
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.
USB? Appeared on PC motherboards well before Apple ones(it was Intel's baby after all), Apple was just the first to burn the legacy options.
USB was an obscure curiosity when Apple aggressively adopted it in the original Bondi blue iMac. I clearly remember watching the market for USB peripherals be completely driven by demand from iMac (and then other Apple model) owners at a time when PC users stayed away from the technology because it was incompatible with all their PS2, serial and parallel port peripherals. Often the place to find USB equipment was in the Apple section in stores.
802.11b? All of Apple's 1st gen gear was rebadged Lucent off-the shelf stuff.
This one I remember very well. Apple spearheaded the consumer wireless market with the introduction of the $299 Airport "UFO" wireless hub. I had wanted wireless for a while but couldn't afford it. The only other options were all so far above that first Airport price point that it was a shock to the market. The other thing Apple did to lead in consumer wireless was to make it an option in all their computers, especially in laptops, and then a standard option that you had to de-select and finally as an unremovable feature.
Killed off the floppy? The first to stop offering it across the board, possibly; but you've been able to spec PCs without floppies well back into Apple's beige era.
Maybe so, but no sane PC user did back in those days. The floppy ruled the PC data storage and transfer world well past the point when Apple users had moved on to other technologies. It took forever for PC USB boot support to be common enough to supplant the ubiquitous PC admin's emergency boot floppy.
Everything you have said is technically true but misses the whole story. Sure, Apple didn't invent the technologies you mention but Apple's influence was instrumental in getting early adoption going and building markets for them.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'll admit it-- you nailed us, right on dude.
And then we shall bomb your country and export democracy with our backyard-manufactured junk Apple computers. And take your oil. We're gonna bomb you until you bring us flowers. Haliburton all over your bitch. You might as well surrender right now, it's what the Republican Guard did.
Think of how a nice fresh coat of white phosphorous will make you look bright and shiny. And there's gonna be waterboarding. That's pretty much a given. Depleted uranium fertilizing your lawn.
You might as well just give up and start mailing us bulk fuel today. I prefer 87 octane, thx.
It's your own fault for being such a terrorist, really. You know Jack Bauer is right.
Yep-- I've owned a lot of cheap laptops, and laptops that weren't so cheap. My Fujitsus were made in Japan, and cost more than my 13" MBP... but surprisingly, the MBP is significantly better made out of superior materials.
Another thing people overlook in laptops is the display. The brightness, contrast ratio, black levels, and color gamut on the Apple LCDs is vastly superior to almost everything else out there. I've seen a Dell with a better screen, but Dell discontinued that screen option shortly after it was introduced. And it's like that for all the high-end PC notebook screen options I've seen on Anandtech -- you can't actually buy them. While the TN LCD isn't amazing compared to the better S-PVA and IPS panels on desktop monitors, it's almost unequaled among notebooks.
There's the little touches too, like the external LED battery check, the MagSafe power connector, backlit keyboard, glass touchpad, compact power supply, etc.
You get what you pay for. A $1200 MBP is a lot better than two $600 budget laptops.
I'm sorry, but this
fought USB as long as it could
is demonstrably false.
USB 1.1 was the first iteration of USB that was actually widely implemented by a lot of manufacturers. It was introduced in September of 1998, however the original iMac was released August 15th 1998 with USB 1.1 ports as the sole method of hooking up the keyboard and mouse as well as an additional USB port. The mouse plugs into the keyboard which uses one of the ports. Please explain how Apple shipping their brand new line of computers with USB 1.1 as the sole method of hooking up a couple of required peripherals 3 weeks before it's official release equates to "fighting USB as long as they could", especially since I remember buying Dells in the early 2000's that still shipped with PS2 mice and keyboards. I still have the iMac and some of the Dells lying around here someplace...
If you want to rag on someone because you think they're a fanboy, fine, but get your facts straight.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Apple has a long history with ARM. They had a part in the creation of the ARM6 and the Newton used an ARM processor, and now the iPhone with its custom A4 cpu... they've definitely had their hands all over that.
Because the observation is incorrect – apple tend to launch their new lines just as new parts become available – just as they've done here. With the original Core architecture, apple were releasing machines exactly as intel released the CPUs. Same with Core2, same with the Santa Rosa chipsets for them, okay Core i7 they were a bit slow on, but that was because of the mess with nVidia and chipsets (which incidentally, nVidia made *specially* for apple, and then released later as ion). And finally, with the MacBook Air, apple got intel to produce an entire new packaging for their CPUs just to fit in apple's laptop.
I dunno about you, but being the first out, or at very least one of the first, with all but one of the major upgrades is hardly what I'd call being consistently the last to transition.
As you decided to use Dell as an example, I'll carry on – lets use a larger sample than your biased sample of 2:
Inspiron Mini 1018 –no eSATA
Inspiron Mini 1012 – no eSATA
Inspiron Duo – no eSATA
Inspiron z101 –no eSATA
Inspiron 14r – eSATA
Alienware M11x –no eSATA
Inspiron 15r –eSATA
Inspiron M5030 – no eSATA
Inspiron M501 –eSATA
XPS 15 –eSATA
Inspiron 17r – eSATA
XPS 17 – eSATA
Alienware M17x –no eSATA
So if by "most" you mean "less than 50% of laptops made by one of the companies that uses eSATA the most", then you'd be right... Unfortunately that's not the traditional definition of "most".
ARM was spun out from Acorn specifically because Apple didn't want to buy processors from a competitor. ARM was originally a joint venture between three companies: Acorn, Apple, and NatSemi.
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There's a non-glossy screen option in the store. Also comes with a higher resolution.
The iMac replaced the floppy disk with the internet. That's what the "i" stood for, originally. And they explicitly said "you won't need a floppy disk because you can send files via email", etc.