In an impetious moment I returned my T61 and paid a visit yesterday to the local Apple store.
While the T61 ran cool, the pain and misery of using windows, coupled with the poor quality LCD display drove me back to Steveo and his wonderful OS; specifically a 2.4 SR with glossy LED.
Firstly, the heat is not that big an issue for normal use (50-66 C) with fan control 1.1 (@ 3k rpm - 50/75 thresholds) installed and the glossy LED display is amazing.
The biggest selling point was the fact that ALL 4 display 15" MBP SRs at the apple store were cool to the touch -- this was in stark contrast to the rev 2 display units which were hot (some 6 months previously).
I went with glossy b/c it seems to be a brighter, richer, more vibrant display -- in the apple store the matte display looked better due to the high amount of glare in the store, but in my normal dungeness computing enviornment there is zero glare.
When transferring my data across my airport extreme network from my intel mac pro, the left palm rest did get a bit warm -- some research turned up the fact that this is the location of the hard drive. During normal disk access this isn't an issue but it got me to lusting after a Sandisk 64GB SATA SSD drive (for heat and power consumption reasons) - I hope the prices come down.
I followed one forum poster's advice about putting an object (in my case a CD jewel case) under the rear of the MBP to prop it up and this seemed to improve cooling (allowing more cool air to travel underneath the chasis) -- there are no vents from what I can tell on the bottom of the MBP so I'm guessing that this is the 2nd law of thermal dynamics at work and that the bottom of the MBP is acting as a heat sync.
The most marked difference between this 3rd gen MBP and the 2nd gen MB I tried out for a week is that this machine feels ready to work -- I got the impression that the MB was desperately trying to undevolt itself and go into sleep mode in fear of its life -- this with fans blasting... The 3rd gen MBP on the other hand displays a confidence and boldness not unlike a desktop.
Side by side with my 2.66 intel mac pro 3GB RAM I felt myself drawn to use the MBP. Normally if given a choice the desktop would be a clear winner.
I'm going on a month long expedition of sorts (with the MBP in tow) but when I return I look forward to plugging the MBP into my 46" Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD via DVI to HDMI and doing some couch computing with the apple bt keyboard and bt mighty mouse -- sadly the bt mighty mouse has no right click ability in windows via parallels 3.0 so I'm goign to be forced to take a wired mx500 on my trip
So with all this in mind I want to apologize to Steve Jobs and Apple for disparaging the SR MBP -- while revisions 1 and 2 are (I continue to believe) worthy of disdain, the gen 3 SR MBP is a fine piece of equipment and worthy of praise.
PS I got a perfect unit with no yellow screen, no uneven latch or funny noises.
While the T61 ran cool, the pain and misery of using windows, coupled with the poor quality LCD display drove me back to Steveo and his wonderful OS; specifically a 2.4 SR with glossy LED.
Firstly, the heat is not that big an issue for normal use (50-66 C) with fan control 1.1 (@ 3k rpm - 50/75 thresholds) installed and the glossy LED display is amazing.
The biggest selling point was the fact that ALL 4 display 15" MBP SRs at the apple store were cool to the touch -- this was in stark contrast to the rev 2 display units which were hot (some 6 months previously).
I went with glossy b/c it seems to be a brighter, richer, more vibrant display -- in the apple store the matte display looked better due to the high amount of glare in the store, but in my normal dungeness computing enviornment there is zero glare.
When transferring my data across my airport extreme network from my intel mac pro, the left palm rest did get a bit warm -- some research turned up the fact that this is the location of the hard drive. During normal disk access this isn't an issue but it got me to lusting after a Sandisk 64GB SATA SSD drive (for heat and power consumption reasons) - I hope the prices come down.
I followed one forum poster's advice about putting an object (in my case a CD jewel case) under the rear of the MBP to prop it up and this seemed to improve cooling (allowing more cool air to travel underneath the chasis) -- there are no vents from what I can tell on the bottom of the MBP so I'm guessing that this is the 2nd law of thermal dynamics at work and that the bottom of the MBP is acting as a heat sync.
The most marked difference between this 3rd gen MBP and the 2nd gen MB I tried out for a week is that this machine feels ready to work -- I got the impression that the MB was desperately trying to undevolt itself and go into sleep mode in fear of its life -- this with fans blasting... The 3rd gen MBP on the other hand displays a confidence and boldness not unlike a desktop.
Side by side with my 2.66 intel mac pro 3GB RAM I felt myself drawn to use the MBP. Normally if given a choice the desktop would be a clear winner.
I'm going on a month long expedition of sorts (with the MBP in tow) but when I return I look forward to plugging the MBP into my 46" Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD via DVI to HDMI and doing some couch computing with the apple bt keyboard and bt mighty mouse -- sadly the bt mighty mouse has no right click ability in windows via parallels 3.0 so I'm goign to be forced to take a wired mx500 on my trip
So with all this in mind I want to apologize to Steve Jobs and Apple for disparaging the SR MBP -- while revisions 1 and 2 are (I continue to believe) worthy of disdain, the gen 3 SR MBP is a fine piece of equipment and worthy of praise.
PS I got a perfect unit with no yellow screen, no uneven latch or funny noises.