motulist said:
I'm not saying the Macbook Pro is bad, if anyone wants to buy one for me I'd gladly accept it.
What I'm trying to do here is add a voice of reason. Given the forum we're in it's very easy for people to accept a biased version of reality. Here's reality as I see it. The Macbook Pro is a great machine with lots and lots of potential. At the moment though, it is clearly a first gen machine that needs some kinks worked out.
I agree 100% with this.
I also believe Apple is moving in the right direction with the switch to Intel. Perhaps AMD could have done it, perhaps not. We'll never know. However, we DO know that Apple is far better poised to bring the goods than they ever were with the G4.
Hell, that's how I felt with the 1.67GHz 17" Powerbook (happily will take one if someone would buy me one, which they did
) Anybody who's real with themselves will know that the "bump" from 1.5GHz (and it's really stretching it to call it that) was pretty sad. It was not hard at all for me to sit on my wallet. But I know that there is no question that my next laptop purchase will be a MacBook Pro, and the only reasons I didn't go with a Rev A is due to the universal binary issues (I run a lot of digital audio workstation apps - whose vendors are (typically) slow in getting out updates) and the fact that it was Rev A (though, if you think about it, now that MBPs are in general circulation, the only really big problems so far have been the buzzing issues that some people have come across - which to me signifies one of the better Rev A rollouts of an Apple product.)
Apple played it smart by not getting all crazy about the battery life...how could it possibly know without any real-world test results outside its own labs? If Apple had said "4 hours!" and the MBP only ran 3:30, then every hater in the universe would be calling for a whaaaaambulance to carry The Steve's severed head to the landfill. The truth was, it was never going to be this spectacular number. The notebooks that are getting 6, 7 and 8 hours of battery life are a lot lighter, a lot less equipped and run at a lot lower speed than the MBP. Additionally, they're either running Windows or an OS that isn't OSX, which doesn't have to determine at program launch whether an app has been compiled for one processor architecture or another, and based on that determination, doesn't have to spawn a separate process which does nothing but translate code.
I'm surprised at both the performance and battery life results. It only means they can get better. As more UBs are compiled, there's less of a reliance on Rosetta, which means a smaller memory footprint, which means less disk paging which eventually means better battery life. Additionally, once Rosetta is out of the equation, the performance numbers should start going through the roof. You see that already...look at Doom3. You needed a freakin G5 to run that program before. Now it cooks on the Intel.
Those of you who are moaning about a first-gen product need to relax and get your priorities straight. Not to sound like a fanboy ('cuz I'm not - I gave Apple much heat on the "nudge" they called an upgrade on the Powerbook) but this really is a good move on Apple's part. And the MBP is a big home run in my eyes...it could have been a LOT worse, and I know you know what I mean. Hell, there are programs that aren't even supposed to run under Rosetta that indeed are! (Cubase SX, for one) That's amazing. And the thing is, it's only going to get better as time goes on.
Just my nickel.
