Review: MacBook Pro

Well, I went out and bought myself a completely unnecessary piece of computer hardware: Apple's new 15" MacBook Pro.  This was the thought process that led me to unload $2,000 on a laptop:

1. I haven't bought myself anything in a while
2. I've been using the same computer since 2006
3. I live in a smallish New York apartment, and I have a huge gaming rig taking up valuable real estate
4. I'm tired of how much Vista cranks my hard drive
5. This thing is ridiculously beautiful

So I bought it. 

First Impressions

The first thing you notice when you get your hands on the MacBook Pro is that it feels like something organic.  It's smooth and the fit and finish is incredible.  Most pieces of electronics have loose fitting parts that you can manipulate even when they're brand new.  This thing feels like it has been through millions of years of evolution before it hit your desktop.  It's not really carved out of a single piece of aluminum-- there are a few pieces of aluminum-- but it feels great and I know it will last me a long time.

Nice Details

• The hard drive is user-serviceable
• The headphone jack has the same functionality as your iPhone headphone jack: it will use the iPhone headset's microphone and button
• Software turns screen white when it takes your account's photo
• The new multi-touch track pad isn't that big a deal, and it's not a mouse replacement, but it is a nice incremental improvement, and I was using it like a pro after about 20 minutes.
• It has two video cards: a low power integrated card and a performance-oriented discrete card.  Great idea.

Software / OS

The new MacBooks come with Mac OS X Leopard pre-installed, and when you start it up for the first time, the first thing you'll notice is that nothing happens.  It just starts you up at the desktop and no craplets open.  No Anti-Virus upsale opens.  The desktop isn't littered with ISP offers.  Nothing.  Happens.  This is really refreshing for anyone that's bought a pre-built machine from Dell or HP in the past couple years.

I won't make this a review of Mac OS X vs Vista, but let me tell you that the hard drive doesn't crank nearly as much.  The computer sits still when it's not being used.

As you get more into the software, you'll fine my favorite new feature in Leopard: spaces.  The idea is that you have multiple desktops to place applications.  The new feature here is that you can assign an app to a particular "space" in perpetuity.  I arranged my spaces as follows:

1. Adium IM Client and Firefox
2. Mail and Skype
3. iTunes and iPhoto
4. Terminal, Remote Desktop and System Preferences

I show the finder and any video game on all "spaces".  The great thing about this usage paradigm is that you don't have to minimize all the time and applications start to have very defined locations (much like the dock vs the windows task bar: Firefox is always in the same spot regardless of when I started it), and this leads to better muscle-memory for repetitive tasks as the expected location of each application integrates with your subconscious work flow.

Complaints on the software side:

1. Flash 9 is dog slow.  Upgrade to Flash 10 right away
2. Installing Warcraft 3 is a pain and VERY slow since the installer and the original software was built for PowerPC.  It took way to long to get the patched Universal Binary that doesn't need to be translated.
3. No Google Chrome, but Firefox works well
4. The dashboard just feels like bloatware to me, and it's yet another thing to configure.  I prefer my iGoogle page that is the same at work and at home.
5. I had to pay $20 for Connect360 to get this thing to stream to my XBox; this is free in Windows (obviously)
6. It's just difficult to get things like your Company's SSL VPN working in Mac OS X.  Much of this software is biased to IE or Windows.  I got it to work, but it was a project.
7. Lack of remote desktop.  VNC is slow.  There are non-free alternatives.
8. Keyboard is tough for gaming

Gaming

The only game I've tried on the system is Warcraft 3.  As I mention earlier, it was a bit of a pain to install, but once you get it installed, it does run very smoothly and at the native, wide-screen resolution.  All is not perfect, though:

1. Blizzard has done a terrible job adapting the keyboard commands to Macs, and I'm not sure some of the remappings I want to do are even possible without changing keys system-wide, which is possible.
2. The Mighty Mouse is not a gaming mouse.  The little ball in the middle gets moved every time you attempt to right-click, which is about a 85% success rate, by the way.
3. It was / is not obvious how to minimize a game once it's full-screen.  You hit Command-M, but it's not documented at all

That's about it for complaints in Warcraft 3, but I imagine I'd face similar problems with other games.  Performance-wise, it's very good.  Fram rates start at 120 when configured for the absolute best possible graphics and degrade only into the 70s in a heated battle.  I was very impressed.

Hardware Cons

Well, there have to be a few negatives about this luscious hardware, right?  Here are a few things I don't like:

1. It gets hot, especially when gaming
2. The battery life is OK, but not great.  About 3+ hours in low power mode and about 45 minutes if you're playing a processor intensive video game at full speed.
3. The glossy screen seems a little Best Buy, but I'm getting used to it.  At least it's glass, not plastic.
4. It's a little heavy for travel

Final Thoughts:

This really is a great piece of hardware.  If you're a hardcore Windows user, I think you'll be surprised at the usability and stability this thing offers.  It's also not your old, slow Mac.  This computer is fast.  It's a little overpriced, but it's built to a level of precision and detail that I've never really experienced in a piece of consumer electronics.

BUY

Vista: Built-in Drivers

Windows has built-in support for many types of hardware such as USB memory sticks and USB headsets. My install of Vista had trouble with these devices until I started telling it to search the following INF path:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERSTORE\FILEREPOSITORY

I have to tell windows to search this path for every single piece of basic hardware on my machine, but now everything works.

Vista: Sleep Mode

That Vista emphasizes sleep mode over power down is obvious when you look at the start menu:
So it's quite difficult to do anything but enter sleep mode. The problem is that sleep mode won't work if you share music with Windows Media player. This is not an obvious "feature". The only way I've seen to turn it off is the following in Power Options:

Digg

Is Digg the worst web page on the Internet? It's certainly a fast way to keep tabs on technology (don't even try their news categories), but reading digg has become severely taxing to the point where I can just wait for Slashdot or Ars to get the article.

• It's just creepy how often Digg's creator is mentioned in articles about, you guessed it, Digg. Somewhere around 5% of all articles on Digg are about Digg and "Kevin" is mentioned in most of them. I think the site's contributors are suffering from some kind of relationship disorder.
• Grammarz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Hatred of Microsoft. This is an Internet-wide trend, and it's just weird. I mean, I get sick of their mistakes sometimes too, but I, along with millions of other Americans, make my living using Microsoft products.
  
• The discussions. They're full of vitriol, stupidity and one-upsmanship such that they've become completely useless. Fark and Slashdot do a much better job.

Really, it's just devolved into a childish nightmare, far worse than even yourspace.