Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
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.
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.
You're just making up numbers. The only " 2-inch thick, 9-pound" laptops are 17" beasts designed for gaming, and they don't cost $399. Most of the 399 laptops are in the 5 to 6 lb range and are about 1.25in thick. Most of them have reasonable battery life too, at least 4 hours.
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.
I'm about to buy a T420s, which will cost around $1300 with a Sandy Bridge i5 and a higher resolution display than the 15" MacBook Pro. And it's thinner. And it weighs almost 2lbs less.
There is no getting around the fact that Apple's laptops are very, very expensive.
The build quality / durability argument doesn't hold because top-tier business laptops (ThinkPad T-series, EliteBook, Latitude E-series) now go for under $1000 and most have passed MIL Spec tests for vibration/drops/dust/etc (which the MacBook has not).
The performance argument doesn't hold because PCs and Macs now use the same Intel chipsets and CPUs, so the performance is the same.
The weight/size argument doesn't hold because you can get PCs with the same performance that are as small and light as the MacBook Pro - or in some cases lighter and smaller. The ThinkPad T420s is lighter (by almost a pound) and thinner than the MacBook Pro 13 and it has the same Sandy Bridge dual-core CPUs.
So we're left with the OS, the design, and some other features like a higher-contrast-ratio LCD. If you are willing to pay more for that, that's your decision. But stop trying to pretend that you aren't paying a big premium for those features.
You're buying the PC equivalent of a a Lexus. Yes, it's nicer than the Toyota that costs half as much. It's not twice as nice, though. And trying to pretend that it's somehow justified from a value standpoint is stupid.
The parts falling off my Inspiron were of the very highest quality.
Are you comparing a laptop from 1994 to laptops from 2011? Hardly seems fair.
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.