One Weekend with the MacBook Pro
At work on Thursday morning, I was presented with my shiny new MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, it was a busy day so it wasn’t until Friday that I got to work on transferring files and playing around with it. Then I took it home this weekend and got to play. It looks like could compete with Darcy for my favorite Mac ever.
First, the stats. It has a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It’s got 2GB of RAM. It’s running Mac OS X 10.4.8. It has a 160 GB hard drive. It’s got a dual layer DVD burner and a 15″ screen.
It’s sweet.
Some observations:
- The big speed improvements are, of course, more noticeable in the larger tasks. The Finder is noticeably more responsive, but the real power is shown when doing something like opening a 90 minute, multi-clipped iMovie file. Zippy.
- Front Row may just be the coolest thing ever. The attention to detail is impeccable. For example, I love that when I go into Front Row and start some music, then escape out of it, it all keeps going and I can still pause/play/skip ahead all from the remote (while Front Row is not active).
- I also like that if I’m in Front Row and show off the video playing capability, I can go back into the music screen and it remembers where I was in the current song. iTunes by itself won’t do that.
- The built in iSight is just addictive.
- QuickTime Pro can record 320×240 video from it. It is highly compressed, but decent in a pinch.
- Photobooth is as slick as they say. It’s an app with no point, but it sure is fun. Ella loves it too.
- It came bundled with ComicLife (never got to try that out before—initial impressions are quite nice) and OmniOutliner (which I love). No OmniGraffle, though. Bummer.
- As I’m typing this, the fan kicked on (importing some stuff into iMovie). It sounds different… a little less intrusive.
- Transferring data was effortless. The Migration Assistant is top notch.
- Our IS guy watched in amazement as I simply dragged Microsoft Office from one machine to the other, fired up Word, and had it work.
- My preferences were copied over by Migration Assistant and I wanted to do fresh installs of all my apps.
- The MagSafe power adapter is far cooler than I thought it would be.
- Whoa, on that page I just linked above, I found out that using two fingers on the trackpad makes it into a scrolling trackpad. Nice.
- No modem. Interesting…
- The keyboard lights up, just like Powerbook G4. But the MacBook Pro is much brighter and seems to be more consistent with the lighting conditions.
In short, this thing rocks. Looking forward to playing with it some more. Perhaps this week I’ll get Windows on this, so I don’t have to bug neighbors to do IE testing…