What can I say? Maybe it’s my age catching up with me. I am not sure. I know that I was just tired of all the mess there is in keeping a PC up to date and always running. Drivers, inter-application support, all of this is just something PC owners deal with and have gotten use to. I’m tired of it.
I found the iLife suite of applications a perfect answer for everything I needed. iPhoto, iMovie and of course iTunes (which I was already using on the PC along with my iPhone) are just a joy to use. iPhotos “places, faces and events” are super cool. And it’s amazing how easy it is to get photos in and tagged. Everything about OSX just flows easily and never gets in my way. Everything works together smoothly and nothing competes with each other. i.e. WIndows Photo Viewer and Media Player both wanting to manange your pictures and videos DIFFERENTLY. Typical PC reply is “oh just download this other app and install this service and then run this codec pack and set this registry entry and you’re all set’” NO…I’M DONE WITH THAT. iLife and OSX WORK.
Now to the hardware.
I liked the previous generation MacBook Pro. It was missing some things though for the price. For one, it seemed to not really offer much in build and features I couldn’t get elsewhere much cheaper in a PC laptop. This was not to say I would buy a PC but it meant I was looking at the MacMini or possibly even the iMac. Something I didn’t really want to do. I wanted a laptop. So I waited. Another year with the PC…then finally these new ones hit.
I was blown away by the features videos and when I got to handle one in person…WOW. They are thinner yet completely SOLID. Picking one up or just smashing the keys and you feel like you’re using something God would use. I can rest my fat palms on the faceplate without worry. The new black backlit keys are MUCH easier to see and feel great! The buttonless touch pad (the entire thing is a button) is amazing. It’s like the iPhone except with the addition of a button. Which is perfect. Be nice if the iPhone could get this feature some how. The gesture support is spot on. It’s the first time I’ve ever used a touchpad and NOT wanted to get a mouse instantly. You can really use it all day and it’s transparent. It operates so smoothly. FINALLY.
The sound from the speakers is much improved. iTunes in the background or jamming out loud is very clear and full sounding for a laptop speaker. Nothing sounds harsh or crushed. They are laptop speakers mind you, but for that, they are the best I’ve heard.
The display is very clear and off angle is nice. I find the contrast to be pretty good and the 3D performance to be awesome. (and should be with a 9600). The auto switching to the slower power saving 9400 is a pretty neat trick too. I play World of Warcraft and EVE-Online and they both run quite smoothly. When running on battery there is a performance hit with the cycled down cpu and slower 9400, but you’d expect that. I also tried Team Fortress 2 via “Crossover for Games” and it ran very smoothly. With only a couple of small display glitches.
My only real complaint is the lack of USB ports, it has two. I really wish it had TWO more. My model has the express slot instead of the mini card slot. I find you have many more expansion options with the express slot. Including putting in your own mini card reader. So why limit your options?
Finally, Amazon’s price was 0 cheaper than Apple’s. I got no tax and free 2 day shipping on top of that, pretty sweet.
Feature
- Built-in lithium-polymer battery. Up to 8 hours of wireless productivity.
- NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT discrete graphics processor and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics processor; Glossy display
- 320GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive; 512MB of GDDR3 memory
- 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory; two SO-DIMM slots support up to 8GB
- SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Overview
Meet the ultimate mobile studio: the new 17-inch MacBook Pro. It features a breakthrough built-in battery that delivers up to 8 hours of wireless productivity on a single charge1 and can be recharged up to 1000 times—more than three times the lifespan of typical notebook batteries.2 The high-resolution LED-backlit widescreen display has a color gamut that’s 60 percent greater than that of previous generations. Two high-performance NVIDIA graphics processors let you choose between integrated and discrete graphics: Enjoy up to 8 hours of battery life with the GeForce 9400M, or take full advantage of 3D games and graphics-intensive applications like Aperture and Motion with the 9600M GT. The latest Intel Core 2 Duo processor at speeds up to 2.93GHz makes the new MacBook Pro the most powerful Mac notebook ever. And the all-new, glass Multi-Touch trackpad is clickable everywhere, so you have more control and more room for new gestures. All in a precision aluminum unibody enclosure that’s less than an inch thin. (1)Testing conducted by Apple in December 2008 using preproduction 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo–based MacBook Pro (17-inch) units with a Better Battery Life setting. Battery life depends on configuration and use. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information. The wireless productivity test measures battery life by wirelessly browsing various websites and editing text in a word processing document with display brightness set to 50%.(2) Apple does not warrant the battery beyond Apple’s one-year Limited Warranty. The battery has a limited number of charge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced by an Apple Service Provider. Battery life and charge cycles vary by use and settings. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information.
Customer Reviews
Great in OS X, but dismal support for XP, Vista and BootCamp – D. F. Watt – Natick, MA USA
One year ago, disgusted by dismal experiences with multiple PC manufacturers (Dell, Acer, among others) in terms of their terrible support for Windows (along with poor hardware reliability issues and very poor servicing of hardware), I took the plunge and decided I would buy a Mac. I basically have to have windows XP because it’s required to interface with various hospital systems, but I thought if the Windows partition went down (a virtual guarantee with Windows XP at some point), at least I would have a reliable Mac system as a backup. I expected a far better experience, given the customer service ratings of Apple, which are better than any PC manufacturer. Little did I know what I was getting into.
The XP partition blue screened on a regular basis, from the first moment it was created. Microsoft of course makes it anything but easy to figure out why XP is bluescreening – part of their effort to duck and cover around the OS being a buggy mess. (Any misbehaving driver will bring it down.) And Apple’s position on this consistently was that “this is not their problem.” Adding insult to injury, I was charged for support by Microshaft (despite this partition being built from a new copy of Windows XP professional). Well, what else is new – this is standard PC fare, and the primary reason why so many people are switching to Macs.
What was a revelation was to discover (after using a great little program called BlueScreenView that not even Microsoft was aware of – that program should be installed on every PC) that the driver causing ALL the blue screens was Apple’s proprietary mouse driver for the touchpad/mouse. Even more stunning, I found out (after a lot of digging) that Apple apparently was aware of this all along (12+ months), but failed to contact users, and failed to correct the mouse driver issues for over one year, despite numerous complaints on the part of numerous boot Camp users about the mouse driver causing major problems. Apple stonewalled me for months on this issues, stating over and over that there were no problems with their drivers. What BS. Apple’s position on any difficulty under XP or Vista (and soon Windows 7) is that all Windows issues have nothing to do with them. One small problem with that . . . Apple was writing the XP driver software for the mouse that was causing all the problems. This kind of “it’s not my responsibility” attitude is something you expect from Microsoft, or perhaps from Dell, but you don’t expect from Apple. It’s been a total shock to experience this kind of corporate dodging and blame-shifting from Apple. Did they get lessons from Dell . . . . or may be our federal government??
After roughly one year of difficulties (blue screens almost every day or every other day, bringing down the system and causing loss of work and endless grief along with two corrupted C drive partitions and hundreds of lost hours), I was able to find a fix for this, no thanks to Apple. The Mac side of course works just fine, but I bought this system to use it primarily as a PC (with Mac OS X capability as a backup). If you are never going to use as a dual OS system, this is a fine computer and OS. However, I would strongly caution anyone against buying an Apple laptop or desktop system if they intend to have serious dual boot capability and intend to use some version of Windows more than 10% of the time. What you’ll find is a total lack of support and a position of complete denial of responsibility by Apple for anything that happens under boot Camp.
Given that this dual operating system capability has become one of Apple’s strong selling cards and responsible for a significant fraction of sales, this position by Apple has to be seen as egregious, and totally unacceptable. My discouraged conclusion is that if you intend to use this system to operate any version of Windows, you have to be aware that you will be on your own. Microsoft regards all OS issues under BootCamp as Apple’s problem, Apple regards them as just Microsoft’s problem, and in the final analysis, it’s all going to be your problem. Watch out!! (and unfortunately the virtual emulation of Windows under Parallels or VMWare is no solution either – earlier versions were massively buggy!!)
I am confident that this review will be trashed by the Mac faithful (hence the poor ratings!) – attacking Apple is about like insulting someone’s mother in some people’s eyes. Such loyalty is admirable, and speaks to some of Apple’s strengths – which make this experience all the more puzzling. But for anyone that has struggled with an XP, Vista or (soon) Window 7 partition on a MacBook, this experience should be a MAJOR caution. For those who will never cross into the unreliable and buggy wasteland of Windows on this hardware (a most fortunate majority of owners spared all the headaches of the PC world), this is probably a five star system. But it is striking to see such disparity between Apple on these two sides of an issue (OS X support vs Windows support), and it’s really a shame. I had hoped for far better.
As good as it can get – Francisco C. F. Leal – Recife, Pernambuco Brazil
Macbook Pros are indeed fascinating, specially if its your first mac. All the small details, the neat reworking of features of other operating systems, the WAY better performance/hardware ratio provided due to software optimizations and less middle-men (software abstraction layers), everything.
The purchase in itself was great: quick shipping, amazing customer service from the seller, product is as described. I just wish I could have bought it with the 512MB of video memory version without having to go all the way up with other hardware specifications, along with an extra 0+ in budget.
BEST COMPUTER – K8 M – New York USA
honestly if you have enough to buy this computer but feel like saving money and going for the Dell, DONT. Dells suck terribly and even though you are paying a lot more up front for the mac and you might not be used to it at first, in the long run you are saving money and its just a way better computer. Dell screwed me over with tons of money and three computers that all became outdated very quick and even crashed, I have yet to encounter a problem with my mac and I do alot of work with music on it! Seriously the best investment I ever made, I will never consider buying windows again. The best part about this computer is the touch trackpad for the mouse, once you understand how to use all of its features, which is pretty quick, you will wish every computer had one. It makes web browsing and everything else so much easier!!! Go for it, this computer rocks the screen looks amazing!!!! Apple MacBook Pro MC118LL/A 15.4-Inch Laptop
