Hey guys, so with a lot of people asking whether or not they should buy a Macbook Pro now, or never, I thought I'd give some impressions after having my Macbook Pro for 2 weeks now.
So my model is the new Penryn 2.5 ghz with a 250gb HDD, 512mb video card and 2 gb of ram as you can see in my sig. When I first got it I was of course amazed. I loved OSX and the general look and feel of the laptop, so this will talk more about now that I have my computer setup to how I like it, how I'm finding the Macbook Pro.
I'll start with what kind of computer user I am. I'm a university student in Canada and have been a windows user my entire life... only using my roomates macbook pro every once and a while to try it out. Finally I decided to take the plunge and buy my own as I'm making a good amount of money this summer at my job. Being a windows user I wanted to have windows on the macbook pro for those just in case times, and also because I play video games quite frequently. Getting windows up was a piece of cake, and it runs smoother than any other laptop I've owned. Granted it's XP and the requirements are pretty low, it has never ever seemed sluggish. So I have a 50gb partition for boot camp, and the rest is for OSX.
OSX:
At first I was amazed at the speed, and fantastic design of Leopard. I loved how easy it was to find my app and open it up. The apps that come with leopard are great. I play guitar so I've been messing around with garageband a bit, plus using iphoto and movie for the stuff I pull of my digital camera. All the iLife applications are very easy to use, quick and full featured. So much better than the crap you just delete with a new windows PC. I've also switched to using mail as my primary email program... and that too was extremely easy to get up and running.. just enter your email and password and mail does the rest. So all the apps are great. What impresses me more though, throughout my time spent in OSX is how efficiently I can work on the computer. (when I say work I mean do all my seperate activites... IM, music, browsing, email and whatever else). Using spaces to separate my activies, and also the shortcuts to switch between them, I find I can do things much more quickly than in windows. Expose is also fantastic if you have a bunch of IM's open for instance and need to find one thats in the background. Another thing that I've come to love is the dashboard. Having used windows sidebar in vista previously, I went in thinking that this would be nothing new...and in terms of the kind of applications you can put in dashboard, its not. What is special though, is the quality of those applications, and how much more they can do. For instance last night I installed a movie finder app that displays movie posters of all the current releases in theaters. I thought it was pretty cool, but then I realized once you clicked on a movie you were interested in, it would find the times it was playing in all your local theaters, and give you the option of streaming the trailer (assumedly from apples trailer database), all within the widget. Very very cool stuff. Over 2 weeks OSX has proven itself to be an incredible alternative to Windows. I still have a lot to learn on it (I just started using quicksilver last night... I feel like it will be a LONGG time before I figure out everything it can do), but whenever I boot up windows on my mac I now get this feeling of a much less quality product.
BootCamp, and VMWare Fusion
As I said from being a gamer, and needing windows in those clutch moments, I installed XP on my boot camp partition. Everything went extremely smoothly and drivers installed no problem (the only extra one I installed is a custom video card driver from laptopvideo2go.com for better performance). From a gamers perspective the laptop is great. Right now I have Age of Conan, Crysis, and Company of Heroes installed. Age of Conan made me wish I had made a bigger windows partition, but all of the games run great. Age of Conan and crysis I run on medium settings at native resolution, and Company of Heroes everything on high. Other than firefox and utorrent, that's all I currently have on windows, but will probably be adding some more apps as I head back to school in the fall. Up until last night I was running windows entirely through boot camp, but decided I would give VMWare Fusion a try as I had heard good things. So I installed it, and booted up my boot camp partition. Once you install the VMWare tools, XP runs nearly as smooth as it does when you boot it through boot camp. You can dedicate how ever much of the processor and memory to the virtual desktop, and hence make it the priority, or OSX the priority. After you have it all booted up, there are different ways to interact with your windows desktop. First is in a window where your XP or vista desktop is displayed within one osx window at a size of your choosing. Second is full screen where your xp or vista desktop basically replaces your OSX one and you can use a simple shortcut to go back to OSX. Lastly is called unity, where VMWare takes application windows from XP and turns them into windows on OSX, so it seems like you are running your windows apps in OSX, at near full speed. VMWare was fantastic in the time I spent with it last night, and am looking forward to using it more. (it's especially great because I don't have to leave OSX to do things such as downloading patches for age of conan etc.)
My time spent with my macbook pro has been extremely pleasureful. I've fully converted to an OSX and Mac user
. There are some things that take some getting used to, right clicking with the trackpad, the new shortcuts, scrolling and all the new trackpad features etc. But once you spend some quality time with it, they become second nature and you probably wouldn't want it any other way. The laptop is gorgeous... the screen literally amazes me every time I look at it (I have the matte ps), and especially so when I realize it's not even on full brightness. The battery lasts anywhere from 3-5 hours... depending on screen brightness, cpu usage, and wifi usage. Typically for me it will last about 4.5 with the screen on a good level of brightness and casual browsing and IM'ing.
so I hope that helps any doubters out there... I know the forums can make the macbook pro out to be a trouble filled device, but keep in mind that it's infinitely more common for someone to go on and post problems than it is for someone to write about how much they love their computer. If you have any questions feel free to ask, and if not go buy your damn mac!
So my model is the new Penryn 2.5 ghz with a 250gb HDD, 512mb video card and 2 gb of ram as you can see in my sig. When I first got it I was of course amazed. I loved OSX and the general look and feel of the laptop, so this will talk more about now that I have my computer setup to how I like it, how I'm finding the Macbook Pro.
I'll start with what kind of computer user I am. I'm a university student in Canada and have been a windows user my entire life... only using my roomates macbook pro every once and a while to try it out. Finally I decided to take the plunge and buy my own as I'm making a good amount of money this summer at my job. Being a windows user I wanted to have windows on the macbook pro for those just in case times, and also because I play video games quite frequently. Getting windows up was a piece of cake, and it runs smoother than any other laptop I've owned. Granted it's XP and the requirements are pretty low, it has never ever seemed sluggish. So I have a 50gb partition for boot camp, and the rest is for OSX.
OSX:
At first I was amazed at the speed, and fantastic design of Leopard. I loved how easy it was to find my app and open it up. The apps that come with leopard are great. I play guitar so I've been messing around with garageband a bit, plus using iphoto and movie for the stuff I pull of my digital camera. All the iLife applications are very easy to use, quick and full featured. So much better than the crap you just delete with a new windows PC. I've also switched to using mail as my primary email program... and that too was extremely easy to get up and running.. just enter your email and password and mail does the rest. So all the apps are great. What impresses me more though, throughout my time spent in OSX is how efficiently I can work on the computer. (when I say work I mean do all my seperate activites... IM, music, browsing, email and whatever else). Using spaces to separate my activies, and also the shortcuts to switch between them, I find I can do things much more quickly than in windows. Expose is also fantastic if you have a bunch of IM's open for instance and need to find one thats in the background. Another thing that I've come to love is the dashboard. Having used windows sidebar in vista previously, I went in thinking that this would be nothing new...and in terms of the kind of applications you can put in dashboard, its not. What is special though, is the quality of those applications, and how much more they can do. For instance last night I installed a movie finder app that displays movie posters of all the current releases in theaters. I thought it was pretty cool, but then I realized once you clicked on a movie you were interested in, it would find the times it was playing in all your local theaters, and give you the option of streaming the trailer (assumedly from apples trailer database), all within the widget. Very very cool stuff. Over 2 weeks OSX has proven itself to be an incredible alternative to Windows. I still have a lot to learn on it (I just started using quicksilver last night... I feel like it will be a LONGG time before I figure out everything it can do), but whenever I boot up windows on my mac I now get this feeling of a much less quality product.
BootCamp, and VMWare Fusion
As I said from being a gamer, and needing windows in those clutch moments, I installed XP on my boot camp partition. Everything went extremely smoothly and drivers installed no problem (the only extra one I installed is a custom video card driver from laptopvideo2go.com for better performance). From a gamers perspective the laptop is great. Right now I have Age of Conan, Crysis, and Company of Heroes installed. Age of Conan made me wish I had made a bigger windows partition, but all of the games run great. Age of Conan and crysis I run on medium settings at native resolution, and Company of Heroes everything on high. Other than firefox and utorrent, that's all I currently have on windows, but will probably be adding some more apps as I head back to school in the fall. Up until last night I was running windows entirely through boot camp, but decided I would give VMWare Fusion a try as I had heard good things. So I installed it, and booted up my boot camp partition. Once you install the VMWare tools, XP runs nearly as smooth as it does when you boot it through boot camp. You can dedicate how ever much of the processor and memory to the virtual desktop, and hence make it the priority, or OSX the priority. After you have it all booted up, there are different ways to interact with your windows desktop. First is in a window where your XP or vista desktop is displayed within one osx window at a size of your choosing. Second is full screen where your xp or vista desktop basically replaces your OSX one and you can use a simple shortcut to go back to OSX. Lastly is called unity, where VMWare takes application windows from XP and turns them into windows on OSX, so it seems like you are running your windows apps in OSX, at near full speed. VMWare was fantastic in the time I spent with it last night, and am looking forward to using it more. (it's especially great because I don't have to leave OSX to do things such as downloading patches for age of conan etc.)
My time spent with my macbook pro has been extremely pleasureful. I've fully converted to an OSX and Mac user
. There are some things that take some getting used to, right clicking with the trackpad, the new shortcuts, scrolling and all the new trackpad features etc. But once you spend some quality time with it, they become second nature and you probably wouldn't want it any other way. The laptop is gorgeous... the screen literally amazes me every time I look at it (I have the matte ps), and especially so when I realize it's not even on full brightness. The battery lasts anywhere from 3-5 hours... depending on screen brightness, cpu usage, and wifi usage. Typically for me it will last about 4.5 with the screen on a good level of brightness and casual browsing and IM'ing. so I hope that helps any doubters out there... I know the forums can make the macbook pro out to be a trouble filled device, but keep in mind that it's infinitely more common for someone to go on and post problems than it is for someone to write about how much they love their computer. If you have any questions feel free to ask, and if not go buy your damn mac!
