yeah it certainly is different. Surprisingly the SR MBP is lighter than my 12" PB. Also, the backlight is sooooo bright comparatively. I have it on half now and its blowing my PB away. I do kinda miss the footprint of the 12". It seemed like the perfect size. But I'm getting used to the 15" and starting to really appreciate the extra space as well as decent resolution.
the long and short of it: I don't want an ultraportable. If it got any smaller than the 12" PB thickness wise, it would be almost too slim and small to work on. The 15 is great. I say go for it. This thing is unbelievably faster.
I know what you mean, heatasmallhouse. I have the pre-SR MBP (the model before yours) and I couldn't even keep it at full brightness. I was used to my old 12'' PowerBook. .
Now I'm going to have to go to the Apple Store and see how bright these new machines really are
BTW, Here are my scores (15.4'' 2.33 Ghz MBP w/ 2gig of RAM)
Geekbench Score 3044
Version Geekbench 2.0.3
Platform Mac OS X x86 (32-bit)
Operating System Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7600 @ 2.33GHz
Model MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo)
Memory 2.00 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
System Information
Platform Mac OS X x86 (32-bit)
Compiler GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5363)
Operating System Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
Model MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo)
Motherboard MacBookPro2,2
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T7600 @ 2.33GHz
Processor ID GenuineIntel Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 6
Logical Processors 2
Physical Processors 1
Processor Frequency 2.33 GHz
L1 Instruction Cache 32.0 KB
L1 Data Cache 32.0 KB
L2 Cache 4.00 MB
L3 Cache 0.00 B
Bus Frequency 664 MHz
Memory 2.00 GB
Memory Type 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
SIMD 1
Integer Performance 2685
Blowfish
single-threaded scalar 1894
83.2 MB/sec
Blowfish
multi-threaded scalar 3990
163.5 MB/sec
Text Compress
single-threaded scalar 1838
5.88 MB/sec
Text Compress
multi-threaded scalar 3492
11.5 MB/sec
Text Decompress
single-threaded scalar 1818
7.47 MB/sec
Text Decompress
multi-threaded scalar 3674
14.6 MB/sec
Image Compress
single-threaded scalar 1491
12.3 Mpixels/sec
Image Compress
multi-threaded scalar 2894
24.4 Mpixels/sec
Image Decompress
single-threaded scalar 1289
21.6 Mpixels/sec
Image Decompress
multi-threaded scalar 2488
40.6 Mpixels/sec
Crafty Chess
single-threaded scalar 1898
959.4 Knodes/sec
Crafty Chess
multi-threaded scalar 3365
1.63 Mnodes/sec
Lua
single-threaded scalar 2602
1.00 Mnodes/sec
Lua
multi-threaded scalar 4863
1.87 Mnodes/sec
Floating Point Performance 4341
Mandelbrot
single-threaded scalar 1662
1.11 Gflops
Mandelbrot
multi-threaded scalar 3351
2.19 Gflops
Dot Product
single-threaded scalar 2354
1.14 Gflops
Dot Product
multi-threaded scalar 5585
2.55 Gflops
Dot Product
single-threaded vector 1659
1.99 Gflops
Dot Product
multi-threaded vector 3859
4.01 Gflops
LU Decomposition
single-threaded scalar 665
591.8 Mflops
LU Decomposition
multi-threaded scalar 1352
1.19 Gflops
Primality Test
single-threaded scalar 3305
493.7 Mflops
Primality Test
multi-threaded scalar 5092
945.0 Mflops
Sharpen Image
single-threaded scalar 4777
11.1 Mpixels/sec
Sharpen Image
multi-threaded scalar 9277
21.4 Mpixels/sec
Blur Image
single-threaded scalar 6023
4.77 Mpixels/sec
Blur Image
multi-threaded scalar 11823
9.30 Mpixels/sec
Memory Performance 2144
Read Sequential
single-threaded scalar 2947
3.61 GB/sec
Write Sequential
single-threaded scalar 2169
1.48 GB/sec
Stdlib Allocate
single-threaded scalar 2306
8.61 Mallocs/sec
Stdlib Write
single-threaded scalar 1555
3.22 GB/sec
Stdlib Copy
single-threaded scalar 1747
1.80 GB/sec
Stream Performance 1566
Stream Copy
single-threaded scalar 1509
2.06 GB/sec
Stream Copy
single-threaded vector 1695
2.20 GB/sec
Stream Scale
single-threaded scalar 1646
2.14 GB/sec
Stream Scale
single-threaded vector 1674
2.26 GB/sec
Stream Add
single-threaded scalar 1449
2.19 GB/sec
Stream Add
single-threaded vector 1720
2.39 GB/sec
Stream Triad
single-threaded scalar 1571
2.17 GB/sec
Stream Triad
single-threaded vector 1266
2.37 GB/sec
3044!!