Apple MacBook Pro Disappointment Today

I am sure that most of you know that Apple refreshed their MacBook lineup. However the MacBook Pro 17″ didn’t get much love. As Pooh Bear would say, “Bother!”.

Current Status

As you know I use a Mac for almost all of my com­put­ing and have been very happy. I bought my cur­rent MacBook Pro in October 2006 and it is still run­ning very well indeed. I have not needed to wipe and rein­stall at any time which I would have done with Windows. I have had one hard disk cor­rup­tion where my machine would not boot, and it took less than two hours to restore from Time Machine, and lost only a half a day of data. I have upgraded it with 4GB of memory and recently added a 320GB drive. I am already plan­ning on buy­ing a 500GB 7200 RPM drive to get more speed.

Overall it is dif­fi­cult to tell you how impress­ive the Apple MacBook has been, because it just works the way you want. Its reli­able, doesn’t seem to get scratches or look worn out, the OS is easy to update and upgrade. And the applic­a­tions are really impressive.

In my cur­rent work­place, four other net­work engin­eers have MacBooks and every one is very happy with sys­tem. So it is not just me.

My Requirements

Since I am fully mobile, and run­ning dynamips, the MacBook Pro 17″ is the only laptop for me. I want a lot of screen real estate, and do a lot of heavy work­ing on my machine. The OS X apps are fine, it is the VMWare /​ Parallels vir­tual machines for Windows and Linux that are slow­ing it down. I want more memory than 4GB in my laptop. I didn’t get that.

Its heavy.…

And sure, the MBP 17″ is heavy. Really heavy. By the time I put the min­imum load into my com­puter back­pack, includ­ing power brick, cables, and a small pouch of pens and other “stuff”, I am strain­ing to lift it and need to brace my self and often make stu­pid grunt­ing noises.¹

So a quick check of the specs:((Taken from MacWorld UK))

The 2.5GHz 17-​​inch MacBook Pro, for a sug­ges­ted retail price of £1,949, includes:
 – 17-​​inch widescreen LED-​​backlit 1920 x 1200 glossy dis­play
 – 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 6MB shared L2 cache;
 – 800 MHz front-​​side bus;
 – 4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM;
 – NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graph­ics with 512MB with GDDR3 video memory;
 – 320GB Serial ATA hard drive run­ning at 5400 rpm, with Sudden Motion Sensor;
 – a slot-​​load 8X SuperDrive with double-​​layer sup­port (DVD+/-R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
 – DVI out­put port for video out­put (VGA adapter included);
 – built-​​in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wire­less net­work­ing and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
 – Gigabit Ethernet port;
 – built-​​in iSight video cam­era;
 – three USB 2.0 ports;
 – one FireWire 800 port and one FireWire 400 port;
 – ExpressCard/​34 expan­sion card slot;
 – one audio line in and one audio line out port, each sup­port­ing both optical digital and ana­log;
 – Multi-​​Touch track­pad and illu­min­ated key­board;
 – 85 Watt MagSafe Power Adapter.

So my two year old MacBook has the following:

–2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4MB L2 cache
 – 17-​​inch widescreen LED-​​backlit 1680 x 1050 glossy dis­play
–320GB SATA at 5400 rpm (installed my own HDD)
 – 4GB RAM (upgraded a year ago).

So there isn’t much here that I haven’t already got. It would be nice to have the 802.11n, or the new track­pad, ad the screen res­ol­u­tion is a bit higher but not enough to spend a couple of thou­sand pounds.

Still per­form­ing well

My cur­rent MacBook Pro is under war­ranty for another year, so no great rush. I am very pleased that this machine is still per­form­ing well after two years. It cost a lot when I bought it, but two years later I am still using it, and it still per­forms well²

So I will keep that money in the bank, run Onyx one more time to tidy up and accel­er­ate my machine and wait for the next refresh. Insert image of me strok­ing my laptop.

Footnotes

1. No need to point out that I am not very fit…thanks [back]
2. so I want more, but, really, it’s OK [back]

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