The MBP has landed
Well, here are some first impressions from a brand spankin' new 17" Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro... (2 GB/200 GB CTO)
I ordered through the Canadian Apple Education store on November 21 at 11:30 AM. The system projected my arrival date at December 15, some 24 days later. On November 24 (last Friday), I received a notice from Apple that my machine had shipped via FedEx. Playing the iSnoop game during the weekend showed steady progress from Shanghai to Anchorage, then to Memphis and Toronto. My machine arrived in Ottawa at 6:00 AM this morning, and was in my hands by 11:17 AM -- less than seven full days from the time of ordering! I'm a very happy Apple customer... (not to mention that last week I was also able to negotiate a new iMac replacement for a 2-year-old defective eMac for my brother -- but that's another story...)
I unpacked the new 'Book and went through the usual paces -- reformatted the drive, installed a fresh copy of OS 10.4.8 (bundled on the DVD), added the bundled applications, did the Software Update thing (only iTunes 7.0.2 needed updating until I installed iWork from a "late summer" family copy).
So far the only comments I have are:
1) Very fast -- nice and snappy;
2) Good battery life -- I fully charged the battery, let it sit for a couple of hours while using it, and then ran it to ground for the next 4+ hours. I am sure that with moderate use I would have had closer to 5 hours out of it.
3) Heat is negligible;
4) Screen is very nice -- no dead/stuck pixels (tested with full-screen colour graphics generated in PhotoShop);
5) When I first turned it on, there was some minor display "unevenness" -- a little brighter in the bottom two corners -- now, this is almost imperceptible;
6) The hinge is puzzling, but brilliant -- It is VERY EASY to lift up, but harder to close -- this has corrected the problem I understood plagued the older 17" powerbooks, whereby the lid would start to fall under its own weight as it approached horizontal... This seems to sit well wherever I put it;
7) Dead silent, except when accessing the optical drive -- no more noise than my 4-year-old 1 GHz TiBook (which I will retire);
8) I was concerned after reading some performance posts about the 200 GB drive -- I was worried that real-time audio streaming might suffer in Cubase, and I'd regret the slower drive -- no worries here... I loaded up all the demo songs that came with Cubase 4 (Universal Binary), duplicated many of the audio tracks several times and misaligned them (so the system would have to be pulling data from all over the file copies) and let 'er go... With 40 audio tracks and lots of effects, the CPU showed about 1/4 used, and the disk didn't even break a sweat...
9) I see no performance issues with MS Office 2004 and Rosetta
10) In a previous post (my first on MR, actually) I had noted an observation I made whereby the new Intel machines seemed to suck up vast quantities of swap space (more than double the PPC amount)... My machine was sitting at about 7 GB with dozens of open applications, so not too bad at all... Having the 2 GB of RAM really helps here.
11) I see no issues yet with the wireless -- I haven't stress-tested it, but had no problems on my MAC-filtered, WEP-enabled home network doing iChat video with my daughter elsewhere in Canada.
So, in summary, I couldn't be happier with this machine. It is everything I had hoped for in a replacement for my 4-year-old TiBook (which will go to my son, because it is still working just fine...).
As always, your mileage may vary, but there ARE some very good machines out there...
Koinu
