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I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Apple's latest and possibly the greatest product to hit the market, two days after it was launched. No doubt it was way faster than my PowerBook 17" with a gig of ram. But is it really a good idea to move to the MacBook? I am not a fan of first generation products, but on the other hand Apple has never release a product that wasn't production worthy.
The first thing I that amazed me was how bright and clear the new display was. It was way brighter than the powerbooks that was launched a while back. I generally do not use my laptop with maximum brightness but the clarity was just amazing.
One thing that I would like to see is more battery life, my PowerBook gives me about 4 hours of battery life, with some tweaks a bit more. While the guy was showing me how the new MagSafe works I turned to check how much battery life the MacBookPro had, amazingly it was 4 hours. With all the mambo jambo on how the new processors are much more efficient on power, I expected it to be a lot more. Then again these are pre-production models.
I love the way the added the iSight into the new laptop and how crisp the images were. I did a quick test of the cam and a quic conference on the local network. I think this is a real good feature if your into video conferencing, since you don't have to carry around another piece of hardware.
The downers of this new system is that you will have to wait a while before you get a native binaries for software, I guess its going to take till March or April till most of the major ones have been ported to the new Intel platform. I did not find much of a performance hit running Photoshop CS2 on it though. Actually it did load up faster than it normally does on my PowerBook.
The new laptop is heavier than its ancestors, from 5.6 pounds to 6 pounds. Its actually heavier than my current one. The DVD drive is also a lot slower and not as powerful as the ones currently shipped with the PowerBooks.
Also with the addition of FrontRow to the new MacBook Pro, you can use it as a entertainment center. But then again how many of us use our laptops for this. It would make much more sense for Apple to ship the next generation of Mac Mini's with FrontRow since thats where ever one wants it. A good addition none the less, and another piece of plastic to bother about.
I am also not a huge fan of Apples new iWeb Application. Yes, it looks really cool and no doubt its easy to use and publish data. But then again the source code the application generates is not all the great. I wonder if it even passes any standards, also the new PhotoCast that they have come up with is not really standard, when Apple could have used MRSS they seem to have hacked up something of their own.
The latest iWorks is definitely some thing I am planning on buying. I have never used any presentation application or word processor that just works!
Conclusions... I guess I am going to wait a while till I get my self one. This is not due to the current shortcomings, but I would just like to have a 17" MacBook Pro. But for now I think Ill be buying a copy of iWorks
Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBookPro
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