Hooray! Have finally gotten my Macbook Pro!
Went and bought it yesterday.
2.2GHz, Matte (of course) no upgrades.
So, as many of you know, my only computer has been a 450MHz G4 Cube.
So, first, the bad. My screen does have a yellow tinge on the bottom third, and I'm guessing the thermal goop is a little thick (sorta calibrated the battery last night, drained it by looping a song and using the visualiser in iTunes uncapped, picked up to low 80's, but the fans came on at about 4600rpm (noisy, but not bad, just a whoosh, no "moo" or anything), and it didn't go much over. The visualiser wasted the battery in a little over an hour (quite effective).
One thing I noticed is as others have said, the default colour proile is absolutely ****. It's way to yellow, but it comes with an Adobe colour profile that I like very much. I don't think I'm that worried about the yellow bottom third, would be too much of a hassle to take it back and get it replaced. It's noticeable, but I don't really find it that distracting.
Now, on to the good. Holy crap, it's fast. (Am writing this on the MBP, of course) Now, Quake 3 couldn't do anything to it, so I'm ignoring it. I tried doing a benchmark using "OpenMark" between my Cube and the MBP. The cube gets around 130, and stops the triangle count at about 100,000. Now the MBP takes a hell of a lot longer to do the test, because it keeps bringing more and more triangles... I wasn't there to see how far it got to, but I'm sure it would have been around 10 million triangles. The final result was around about 13,000, 100 times more than my cube.
I am now using iTunes to convert 36GB of Apple Lossless music from my cube to a more hard drive friendly 128kbps AAC. It's going at 20-25x. While that was running (it will take a while), and playing a song, I tried running the game "scorched3d". Of course, even while converting songs, it completely demolished my cube, which is only able to play the game with decent framerates (20-30, maybe, probably less) on the lowest quality. The MBP was able to return easily playable framerates (~40) on the absolute highest quality, still while doing all the converting and song playing in the background.
Bryce 5.5 seems to work very quickly, although it's not Universal, but it does have some issues.
I will probably try using handbrake soon. My cube estimates it would take well over a full day to do a single pass iPod quality h.264 conversion of a single commercial DVD. I imagine this would take far less time ; )
I will probably download Freespace 2 some time so I have something at least close to worthy of this incredibly speedy computer.
Other bits and pieces will probably follow. ie. The keyboard is different from what I'm used to, sometimes it won't register a keystroke (while I'm typing this) but it seems excellent otherwise. Keys are straight and even. The lid closes very snugly and tightly.
So, anything anyone recommends? What is the best way to completely "torch" the CPU and GPU (other than games, I don't really have anything in that department that would be adequate) I imagine the "Openmark" GPU test would be perfect for the GPU, but what are those Terminal commands to get both cores going full bore? And is it just a case of quitting terminal to get it to stop?
So, everyone out there, no, Apple computers are not perfect, but neither is any other computer company, and the hardware is awesome, so as I've said multiple times before in other posts, stop worrying, and go get one!
Thanks, and here's one more positive thread.
Went and bought it yesterday.
2.2GHz, Matte (of course) no upgrades.
So, as many of you know, my only computer has been a 450MHz G4 Cube.
So, first, the bad. My screen does have a yellow tinge on the bottom third, and I'm guessing the thermal goop is a little thick (sorta calibrated the battery last night, drained it by looping a song and using the visualiser in iTunes uncapped, picked up to low 80's, but the fans came on at about 4600rpm (noisy, but not bad, just a whoosh, no "moo" or anything), and it didn't go much over. The visualiser wasted the battery in a little over an hour (quite effective).
One thing I noticed is as others have said, the default colour proile is absolutely ****. It's way to yellow, but it comes with an Adobe colour profile that I like very much. I don't think I'm that worried about the yellow bottom third, would be too much of a hassle to take it back and get it replaced. It's noticeable, but I don't really find it that distracting.
Now, on to the good. Holy crap, it's fast. (Am writing this on the MBP, of course) Now, Quake 3 couldn't do anything to it, so I'm ignoring it. I tried doing a benchmark using "OpenMark" between my Cube and the MBP. The cube gets around 130, and stops the triangle count at about 100,000. Now the MBP takes a hell of a lot longer to do the test, because it keeps bringing more and more triangles... I wasn't there to see how far it got to, but I'm sure it would have been around 10 million triangles. The final result was around about 13,000, 100 times more than my cube.
I am now using iTunes to convert 36GB of Apple Lossless music from my cube to a more hard drive friendly 128kbps AAC. It's going at 20-25x. While that was running (it will take a while), and playing a song, I tried running the game "scorched3d". Of course, even while converting songs, it completely demolished my cube, which is only able to play the game with decent framerates (20-30, maybe, probably less) on the lowest quality. The MBP was able to return easily playable framerates (~40) on the absolute highest quality, still while doing all the converting and song playing in the background.
Bryce 5.5 seems to work very quickly, although it's not Universal, but it does have some issues.
I will probably try using handbrake soon. My cube estimates it would take well over a full day to do a single pass iPod quality h.264 conversion of a single commercial DVD. I imagine this would take far less time ; )
I will probably download Freespace 2 some time so I have something at least close to worthy of this incredibly speedy computer.
Other bits and pieces will probably follow. ie. The keyboard is different from what I'm used to, sometimes it won't register a keystroke (while I'm typing this) but it seems excellent otherwise. Keys are straight and even. The lid closes very snugly and tightly.
So, anything anyone recommends? What is the best way to completely "torch" the CPU and GPU (other than games, I don't really have anything in that department that would be adequate) I imagine the "Openmark" GPU test would be perfect for the GPU, but what are those Terminal commands to get both cores going full bore? And is it just a case of quitting terminal to get it to stop?
So, everyone out there, no, Apple computers are not perfect, but neither is any other computer company, and the hardware is awesome, so as I've said multiple times before in other posts, stop worrying, and go get one!
Thanks, and here's one more positive thread.
