aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, March 03, 2006

MacBook Pro: dazzle with a dash of disappointment

The Times looked at the MacBookPro yesterday, “Why do Mac fans despise the new name so much? Partly because all those harsh consonants - K, K, P - make the name uglier and harder to say:”

You can see why Apple might be fond of its latest machine. The one-inch-thick MacBook is only 0.1 inch thinner than the PowerBook, but somehow feels worlds sleeker and more futuristic. Fit, finish and quality are spectacular.

The wireless antenna has been moved, so Wi-Fi reception is much improved. The guts, from the bus (circuitry) to the graphics card, have been substantially accelerated. Battery life is pretty much the same as on the PowerBooks: 3 to 3.5 hours.

A brighter scren, built in video camera, a remote control and an elegant magnetic power cord (more on Mac Magnets here) attached to a clunkier power brick for only $2,000. Oh, and it’s 4 to 5X speedier than my clunky (9 month old) Power Book (unless you use Microsoft or Adobe products, which are not yet “recompiled"):

These older programs still run acceptably on the MacBook, thanks to the magic of Apple’s smooth, invisible translation software. But they run slowly, with pauses here and there. Even Photoshop runs all right, although photo editors won’t want MacBooks as their primary Photoshop machines.

Now, Apple always giveth and taketh away. This time around, though, Apple hath taken away quite a few PowerBook features. The S-video connector, for high-quality TV playback of movies, is gone - a weird omission, considering the multimedia emphasis implied by the new remote control. (You can restore the S-video jack with a $20 accessory cable.) The FireWire 800 connector, for high-speed hard drives, is also missing. The DVD burner is only half as fast as the previous model (4X instead of 8X) and can no longer burn dual-layer DVD discs. Current PC expansion cards (including high-speed cellular Internet cards) don’t work or fit in the new narrow-format ExpressCard slot.