I'd Like McBook And Can You Pro-size That?
Posted at March 29, 2006 01:13 PM - Category: Compooters
So, I've had my MacBook Pro for more than 24 hours at this point, so I suppose it's time to make some comments on it.
- First, thanks to FedEx for delivering it a whole day earlier than expected. That made my day! (although, it did throw me off a bit...)
- The white bar at the bottom of the screen isn't there. Well, it is, but only if you look down from the top and my PowerBook or any other LCD I've seen does that already.
- The 2nd CPU definitely makes noise. It sounds pretty much the same as my Powerbook did if you turned the processor performance on Highest. Luckily, there is QuietMBP, which basically keeps the processor busy enough to shut it up. I'm sure Apple will have some sort of fix for this eventually, too. And overall, it's not too distracting anyways.
- It's definitely thinner than my PowerBook and that's surprisingly noticeable. In fact, that's probably the most noticeable feature about it from my perspective.
- Performance is better, but not really noticeable for my kinds of tasks. I suppose if I start browsing the web more on this machine, I'll feel it. But email and other apps are just about as speedy as they normally are on the PowerBook. Of course, Mail does process my smart folders a lot faster now, though.
- I've yet to fiddle with Windows on this. I need a copy of iPartition, and I don't know if I want to shell out $45 just to fiddle around. Gathered, I do occasionally desire to repartition my Mac, so maybe it's worthwhile. We'll see if I crack...
- The iSight is OK, but not really useful to me. Front Row just seems gimmicky to me, since I don't really need a media center on a portable computer. That belongs in my living room.
- Apple's transfer tools are absurd. I let it run for an hour and when it finished and booted up, I basically had everything running on my MacBook Pro the same way it was set up on my PowerBook. That's basically impossible with Windows. However, make sure you do Software Update first! I spent 2 hours trying to figure out why Safari wouldn't load my saved passwords from the keychain. Turns out the last security update needed to be installed and included a slightly bumped up version of Safari that caused keychain to see the older version as untrusted (as the passwords in the keychain were authenticated for the newer version number).
Overall, I think it's a nice upgrade. Not as spectacular as I had hoped, but definitely solves some issues I've had with my PowerBook over time. Hopefully, I'll discover more of it's potential soon.
