A Great Machine or The Losing End of Computer Evolution.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Very nice looking, reliable and just a must have for Apple fan!

Cons: Too expensive, still raw model from a company that is no longer interested in it.

The Bottom Line: 
This is a great machine which may be the last step before merge of the PC and Mac evolutionary tree. Think twice if you need it.

Author's Review
I am a big Apple fun and felt extremely upset when Steve Jobs announced that new MacBook Pro will run on… Intel Processor. I felt that life is over for us, committed Apple fans. But I was wrong, MacBook Pro opened a new Era in the war between PC and Mac.

This review has been copied from here. I misplaced it a bit originally. The text remains the same.

Mac vs PC
You know, it’s like Pepsi and Coke, like cat and dog, like US and Iran, like MIT and Harvard… as Coke CEO once said: "If there was no Pepsi, we should have invented it". This rivalry keeps public interested in the computer overall and increases number of PCs and Macs as well. The story dates back to early 80s when Mac dominated the computer world and only Steve’s arrogance and desire to have it all to himself (he did not want to license the idea to third parties) almost ruined the Mac world. By the mid-90s only very determined Apple fans and graphic designers kept saying that Apple is a good machine. At the time market share was less than 3% and it looked like the war was only in the dreams of those committed fans. Noone else took that seriously anymore.

Then Steve Jobs came back in Apple. To make story short, he was a CEO of Pixar and Next Computer whose core OS he proposed to use for new generation of Macs. Of all of his those promises, only one became a revolutionary point – Steve himself. Like a professional magician, he revealed new ideas, new devices and gave us hope, hope that we will finally be able to tell that PC sucker that WE ARE BETTER! WE GOT MORE GHZ! As time went on, we increased sales, but the share was not changing much. We had best OSX, best soft, best design, best everything, but one thing – GHz. This is what mattered to consumer most. Steve knew that and he even started to debunk "MHz myth" trying to prove that our 667 MHz are somehow more than 2.5 GHz on lousy PC (which is two times cheaper). Well, that did not work. Newest Motorola and IBM chips were no good compared to Intel and AMD. No surprise here: Motorola is a cell phone company and IBM is now more a consulting business, while Intel makes its bread from chips.

Life seemed very dim for Apple fans, until…until Macworld Conference in San Francisco in 2006 where Steve showed us the future: MacBook Pro!

What is MacBook Pro?
I’ve got my MacBook Pro right after it went on sale, here are the specs:
- 2 GHz, Intel DuoCore Processor,
- 2GB (two SO-DIMMs) of PC2-5300 (667MHz) DDR2 memory; two SO-DIMM slots support up to 4GB
- 800MHz frontside bus
- 100 G byte HD,
- Built-in camera,
- Built-in remote control,
- One FireWire 400 port at up to 400 Mbps
- One FireWire 800 port at up to 800 Mbps
- Two 480-Mbps USB 2.0 ports
- Built-in AirPort Extreme wireless networking (based on IEEE 802.11n draft specification); IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi Certified
- Built-in Bluetooth 2.0 EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)
- Weight 5.4 pounds
- Real battery life ~2hr (from personal experience versus claimed 6).
That was $2,600 at the time.

Now let’s put aside all those pamphlets to Steve and Apple, this is what you really getting:

Battery Life
Since Apple tries to troubleshoot its devices on users, they always start with raw products. Thus it is not a surprise that the actual battery life is not what it is in a claimed sterile conditions. You will probably get about 2hr of real working time. This is low on the industry standards, even compared to the previous G4 laptops, you could get about 3hr on those.

Body
This laptop is in aluminum case, which I find extremely important for people like me who like to drop things on the floor. Dropping it from about 3-4 feet height causes only minor deformations of the body (tested by me). What is really good about it is that Apple finally fixed locks. In the G4 model lock was very unreliable and could easily allow laptop to open up and start running. This is very bad for you as you may be walking and shaking it at this time and thus damaging hard drive. This problem has not been observed on new Intel.

One more interesting feature is a magnetic charger cord. This is just great idea I love Apple for! How many times have you dropped your laptop on the floor just because you stepped on the cord somewhere in the mess of your room? I did few times. Now the little magnet allows cord to simply pop off, leaving laptop intact. Just great! I can only compare that to invention introduced in Japanese cars – when you close the door lights go off, this saved so many batteries from recharge and so many people from wasting their money on AAA.

Size and Weight
The body itself is similar to that on G4 – sleek, thin, 1 inch thick and 15.4 diagonal TFT screen. Screen is quite bright, but again, there are brighter PCs nowadays. Weight is 5.4 lb, still on a low end of the spectrum, but could be better. I think it is ok for a new model though. I found that it is easy to carry around, but if you really want something very light, you may look at Sony.

Battery Life
Claimed battery life is 6 hr, which is something you may achieve if you do not turn it on. If you do use it, then it is more towards 2-3 hr. There is a good reason for it: it heats like a nuclear plant. The fan works like crazy to keep two processors cool. In fact you can’t keep laptop on your laps without incurring third-degree burns. The fan is also an awful story – first I thought it was going to explode, take off or something, the sound was quite unnatural. The technician in the store told me that it was okay to have a helicopter-type noise coming from my overheating babe. Despite of my fears, it never turned off due to overheating, unlike my HP machine that was dying on me frequently.

I think in future Apple will improve and laptops will have better battery lives. Now you can get another battery with longer life from Apple (for additional fee).

Processor
The speed itself should have been the key point here. This is the first laptop with over 2GHz for Apple and TWO processors. The reality is not that great… if you compare MacBook to rival PCs with similar speeds (I looked at 2.8 duo), there is a big difference. I could not compare to the same speed laptop, but this seems to be general idea: Mac does not deliver much better performance. There are some applications that Apple likes to cite (developed specifically for Apple Duo) that do run faster on it, but in general PC is quicker. There could be few reasons for that: first of all, Apple’s soft is in general very memory-consuming and you need a lot of memory to keep it running well, second is that OSX may not be able to take all the advantages of Intel Duo architecture just yet. Again, both points will improve in future and may already be better on newer machines.

Software Bugs
What is really great about Apple is OSX. This is an extremely stable and reliable OS that is way more advanced than XP. However, new Vista gives it a hard time. Still, it is pleasure working in a nice environment that makes you feel good about work. Everything is intuitive and Search feature is a great way to locate any file without having to scroll through thousands of folders.

Basic software comes with Mac, however, at the time iLife was not included in the bundle. Still iWork, iTunes, iCall, iPhoto and all other i-stuff is in. Basically you can work with it just with what is pre-installed. If you want to get some extra soft, this is a bit more expensive than that for PC, but still ok.

One of the major issues I have (it is not really related to MacBook, it’s same on PowerBooks) is that you can’t use an external hard drive on PC and Mac, you can read PC files, but can’t write on it. This still leaves an opportunity to run emulated Windows, but this is a hassle. Another point is that genuine Mac web browser Safari does not work well with all pages. Sometimes you cannot log in or open an application. Thus you need to get a FireFox (it runs slower, but sometimes is a necessity). Third point (the eternal headache of Macs) is that you can’t run PC applications on it, unless you install Windows (which defeats the whole purpose). This is a real pain – if you already have Intel processor, why can’t you just run .exe?


Conclusions
As sales results prove, MacBook Pro is still a raw product. Apple does its best improving it, but since it is no longer the first priority for Apple (they make same amount on iPod and on MacBook and even more on iPhone), it will take a while to make it a real winner. So far it is still a machine for Apple fans and that is why sales are not sky-rocketing. For $2000 you can get a better PC machine. This is the key problem with Apple – they are priced for exclusivity and that is why they will never be a mass-market product. Sales are increasing a bit, but they will not allow Apple to gain major share of the market until it starts to license and slashes the price. But this is not what Apple wants – they are multimedia company now and not a computer company. In fact all this indicates toward the fact that Apple will slowly become one of the PCs, Intel Pro is the major step towards it.

Thus I would recommend this laptop to all Apple fans and those who do not need to use a specific PC soft, those who can afford this nice-looking handy machine. You will really enjoy it! If you want an easy life – choose PC.