I’ve been so busy with work and with remodeling that it took me three days to open the MacBook Pro box after it arrived. THREE DAYS! Talk about purgatory. Anyway, it’s open now and here are some early impressions:
• The LED screen is incredibly bright, outshining even my 20″ Cinema Display. It also has a very blue cast to it, something I’m going to try to solve via color recalibration. The thing just looks wrong otherwise.
• It’s nifty to have an iSight camera built in.
• I expected a massive speed increase moving from my PowerBook G4 1.5-GHz to the MacBook Pro’s 2.2-GHz Core 2 Duo. Overall, not seeing it. Things are snappier here and there, and certain applications (iPhoto, for example) are blazingly faster than before, but over all system performance doesn’t feel orders of magnitude quicker.
• This lack of perceived speed could be related to the number of non-Universal applications I run (Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc.), all of which have to be emulated in a transparent environment called Rosetta. Rosetta works great, but it does entail a performance hit.
• After transferring my user account from Mystic (the PowerBook) to Asgard (the MacBook Pro) and importing in all my digital photos, I only have 25 GB of hard drive space left of a 160 GB drive. I still haven’t moved back my music, and given this I’m unlikely to.
• Safari is doing a lot of crashing, more than I’d consider normal. I run a couple of plug-ins for it (Saft and Pith Helmet), so either of those might be the problem.
• Everything else I’ve thrown at it has done well in terms of reliability.
• I am very much looking forward to being able to run Aperture, Apple’s Pro photo manipulation and management program.
• I’m still strongly considering a Mac Pro later this year or (more likely) the middle part of next year.
• If you don’t need to run high end applications (Aperture, Final Cut Studio 2, etc.) or power-hungry games, you can save $1000 by getting a MacBook instead of a MacBook Pro. (I have to run the high end applications, otherwise I might have opted for the MacBook.)
• I’ll be very curious to see if Mac OS X 10.5 brings a big speed increase to the MacBook Pro and every other 64-bit capable Mac. (That’d be everything in the lineup right now except the Mac mini.)