Jeroen's ongoing switch blog.

MacBook Pro replacing my Powerbook 15"

Well, you've all seen unpacking pictures and MacBook Pro closups, so I'm not going to post any myself.

On Thursday night the harddrive in my Powerbook 15" made a weird noise, like the motor inside the drive was suddenly spinning at a 10th of the usual RPMs. The sound was similar to a PC powersupply that has a misaligned bearing, except in this case I couldn't stick a match into the fan to force a temporary realignment. The system froze and I turned the machine off. When I turned it back on the same noise was back and the machine couldn't find a boot disk. I was told my face went a ghostly shade of white at that point. 15 minutes later I turned it on again and it booted fine, I connected an external drive and created a folder named "EMERGENCY_BACKUP"...

So today I went shopping and ended up at my favourite Apple shop, MacCentric in Chatswood (Sydney, NSW, Australia), who happened to have the configuration I wanted in stock. I'm in Alexandria so it's quite a trip in the middle of the day to the other side of the harbour!

I will give you my first impression of the new MacBook Pro: it's faaaaaaaassst.

Main Specifications

• Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz
• 100GB 7200 RPM drive
• 2x512MB 667MHz DDR2 RAM
• ATI Radeon X1600 with 128MB DDR3 RAM
• Extra battery

I am still wating for the second 512MB.

I bought this particular configuration because I didn't think an extra 170MHz and 128MB of graphics RAM were worth an extra $450AU. The main thing I wanted was a GB of RAM, a fast drive and a 128bit bus to the graphics part.

No Numbers

I have not had a chance to take actual performance figures but in a small amount of usage the MacBook Pro was blazingly fast. Quake 3 runs stupidly quick, almost all 1080p videos I have played played at or closely around 24fps, and all Intel binaries run very fast, a lot less waiting for small things to happen. Spotlight is now useful, helped by the generally faster system as well as the upgraded 7200RPM drive. PowerPC applications seem to run a little slower than on the Powerbook 15" 1.5GHz, the load times especially are slower. I would love to find a demo of Doom 3 for Intel Macs to check, but all I've done is play a quick game or 2 of Quake 3 for Intel.

BootCamp

Of course I tried this. Half-Life 2 plays beautifully at 1280x768 with full HDR enabled, no anti aliasing. I created a 12GB partition, I'll redo this and create on just large enough for the OS and a compiler or 2, all games can go to an external 40GB USB2 drive. A colleague will bring his Farcry and Fear in for some testing next week.

BootCamp means I do not have to upgrade my aging Windows box. I can still use my old Windows box if I need to work concurrently in Windows and Mac OS X, but all compiling for Windows can happen after a reboot. Booting Windows and shutting it down takes quite some time by the way... It also means I get to waste enormous amounts of my time playing Counter-strike again.