So it arrived.
I’d had some experience with the Core Duo Macs through a 1.83 GHz iMac which arrived in the office about a month ago. It was quick, but hardly portable which meant I didn’t get to snatch a play as often as I might like. I dallied with SheepShaver for a bit, curious about how it would run (it didn’t) and I just kind of ignored it. It was a machine – a very fast machine – but just a machine.
However. Yesterday my MacBook Pro arrived. 2.0 GHz of integer-crunching power.
I was using a 1.67 GHz Powerbook (the model just before the higher res models) and it sometimes felt a little sluggish around the edges. Sure, it could play DOOM 3 and all the latest games, but it still felt slow. I’ve owned a 1 GHz Powerbook, a 1.25 GHz Powerbook before it, so my upgrades have been incremental.
My old Powerbook went to one of the guys in the office, moving him from a 867MHz 12″ Powerbook (USB1, poor graphics), and he’s wiped out with the speed. Says some Final Cut renders are 8 times faster than his old powerbook.
I digress.
The screen is great. My old screen seems fuzzy in comparison and it’s also much much brighter. Wireless reception is easily 50% better. Still not as good as the gold standard (the iBook) but still massively improved. Battery life is much the same and I love the MagSafe. It’s not as loose as others might describe. It’s hard to believe but I haven’t tried this baby with any games. Most of my apps are Universal. The only exception might be VLC but I’m a bit narked that I have to buy a new copy of OmniGraffle as my old version won’t run under Rosetta and Apple didn’t bundle Graffle with the MacBook Pro. I did get Comic Life and OmniOutliner. Two apps which will get pretty much zero usage. Did I mention it’s a LOT slimmer than the previous 15″ Powerbook? Oh, and it has a built in video camera which is not as good as the external iSight camera I used to use. That’ll be the fixed aperture. Front Row works mostly. I can’t get to the movie trailer server. I guess everyone and their cousin is logging into it. Darn. It looked so cool and it used to work on the iMac during the first month. Not so now on either. Bleh. Not really a killer feature.
All is not gold however. I’m tracing some sort of bug where my screen is all messed up on waking from sleep. I don’t think it’s a hardware issue. I think it may be some holdover from my “migration” from the Powerbook. So I’ve nuke some preferences. See how it goes. When it goes futzy, a forced reboot is the only recovery. Frustrating in the extreme. But minor and most likely my own fault.