MacBook Pro - First Impressions
My MacBook arrived today @ noon, and I had a flight to catch at 6pm. So this was real trial-by-fire - I migrated stuff off my ThinkPad, but I still took it with me because I didn’t knew I couldn’t get everything off it.
First things first -battery life seems to be about 3:30 given normal usage. Video playback drops it to about 2:30. Dimming screen makes a huge difference on battery life, it seems.
The Keyboard backlight works really nice, and the ‘auto’ setting is really handy. It kicked in exactly when I needed it while on the flight out to Seattle.
Overall, I’m adjusting to keyboard quicker than I expected - after 5 years of IBM Thinkpads, I usually can’t use any other laptop keyboard. As well, the touchpad works better than I expected. I think part of that is due to the size - it’s the widest trackpad I’ve used.
It runs hot - certainly hotter than any laptop I’ve ever used (Thinkpads, Toshibas, G4 866), and can get uncomfortable when running at full speed.
My only benchmarks so far were Handbrake - 55fps vs. my G4 1.42 MacMini which did 16fps - so a huge improvement in terms of performance.
OSX is OSX - I’ve been using it for over a year, so nothing new/special there. The MagSafe adapter is cool, but means my G4 powerbook adapter doesn’t work, so I need to buy another one ($99 CDN) since Apple apparently won’t license it to 3rd parties.
I’ll post some updates to this over the next few weeks.
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