MacBook Pro

This is just me blogging about getting a new toy...I just upgraded my work Mac laptop to one of the new 15" MacBook Pros. Some random musings...

They're really, really nice machines. Apple does a great job on the "appliance" aspect of the machines. The power cable attaches magnetically. The machine comes with a remote control that integrates with every media app that ships with the system. (All of which can share media from a remote server right out of the box. Digital housem anyone?) As always with Apple power management is good - Apple was preaching power management 10 yearse ago when no one knew what that was about, so by this point it's down in all levels of the software.

The MacBook Pros cost a bloody fortune ... I wouldn't own one if it wasn't for work. But the pro models come with a Radeon X1600, a very nice graphics chip for flight sim. By comparison the regular Mac Books ship with Intel integrated graphics, which are just crap...I'll have to rant on that some other time. Bottom line is - the non-pro MacBooks really aren't usable for flight simming, let alone flight sim dev. But for non-flight-sim users, the regular MacBooks aren't a bad way to get a nice Apple media-friendly machine.

Performance is great. Compile and sim speed rival the G5, a full sized heavy-duty desktop, and should be even better when the second gig of mem comes in the mail.

One quirk that I've seen in web forums too: when the machine is on batteries the wireless network will hang up if left idle for too long. Leaving a ping running keeps the card alive, but email checks aren't frequent enough. I haven't found a setting to keep wireless alive all the time.

EDIT: there is one way the G5 hauls the MacBook Pro - obvious but - virtual memory performance from the 7200 RPM SATA drives in the G5 is light-years ahead of the 5400 drive in the laptop. This is one case where a desktop comes through; the G5 is a "no-wait" machine because the paging performance is so good. But that's a form-factor issue.