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November 18, 2006

Two Weeks With A MacBook Pro

Two weeks ago, I bade fond farewell to my trusty PowerBook G4, and welcomed - with very, very open arms - a shiny new Intel (Core 2 Duo-based) MacBook Pro.

Without putting too fine a point on it, this is the machine I've been waiting for.

When Apple began shipping Intel iron earlier this year, I was one of the holdouts who sat, patiently, on the sidelines and watched others take the plunge. Nearly two decades of being a Mac fan has taught me one simple, incontrovertible truth about Apple hardware, which is: never buy the first generation. Ever.

And so I waited. I waited and read the boards on Macintouch, observing as others experienced the teething problems; waited as Khan bought a MacBook (and sent a fair amount of tauntin' my way), waited as other friends and associates bought machines. And, as the winter turned to spring (and spring to early summer), it was clear to everyone that Apple had been continuously revving their firmware and hardware designs and had ironed out the bulk of the problems much, much more swiftly than anticipated.

Then, as they are wont to do, Intel announced the successor to the Core, and I realized, well, a few more months of waiting wouldn't kill me. The chip shipped, Apple slapped it in the machine, I had a nice interaction with store.apple.com, and, now I'm a few grand poorer.

I've had the machine two weeks now, and in that time have come to get a pretty good handle on what it can do. Friends have asked me three big questions, over and over:

1. What's my impression of the machine?
2. How does it feel?
3. Do I recommend the upgrade?

In order:

1. It's fabulous. Easily the best Mac I've ever owned (dethroning even the mythical, much-admired SE/30 from its perch as Best Mac Ever).
2. It feels like a Mac, which, when you think about it, astounds. This is the third processor I've bought with a Mac wrapped 'round it, and, if I just came to the machine cold, I'd never be able to tell that it wasn't just a better, faster PowerPC. The fact that an Intel chip is under the hood is, well, invisible - a Mac is a Mac, regardless of the processor it's hosted on (and that, ladies and germs, is some damn good engineering).
3. I definitely recommend upgrading, with two important exceptions. First, if you need to run Classic, you should stick with PowerPC (Intel Macs don't support it). And second, if you have a high-performance application that's not Intel native (e.g., Photoshop), you might want to wait until it's ported over. For everyone else, feel free to pull the trigger whenever your checkbook permits.

A few random notes from the experience:

• Migration from my old machine to the new one was a total piece of cake. I used Apple's Migration Assistant to go from the PowerBook to the MacBook; basically, you just run a FireWire cable between the two machines, click "OK" and then go to dinner. When you come back an hour later, the computers have swapped brains - apps are moved, prefs are copied over, printers and network settings are all set up and ready to rock and roll. It's cool-scary voodoo, is what it is, and its's doubly impressive when you layer the fact that Migration Assistant needs to make good choices about which binaries to keep (PowerPC? Intel? Universal?) on each machine. (The Wintel PC world needs something like this, and needs it badly.)
• As mentioned, Intel Macs do not run Classic. Period. (Hell, there's not even a "Classic" Preference Pane in System Preferences.) This is somewhat momentous, in my opinion: it represents the total, utter victory of Jobs' vision for OS X as a replacement for OS 9, and is akin to a Wintel PC not running DOS applications any more. When OS X shipped back in 2001, Classic was a critically-important bridge to get people on the new operating system, in much the same way that people ran DOS applications on Windows 3.1. Since applications had to be updated to run on OS X, and Apple had such a terrible record getting new operating systems out the door (Pink, anyone?), several developers groused that they might not be willing to invest the time and effort in moving to X. Today, of course, OS X is such a runaway success (and enjoys near-universal respect among technical communities - something OS 9 never had), that Steve can turn the lights out on Classic with nary a whimper.
• The MacBook Pro is slightly thinner than the PowerBook G4. It's sleeker, cleaner. Sitting one next to the other actually makes the PowerBook look chunky, which is not something I'd ever thought possible.
• The machine screams. I bought the (entry-level) 2.16-ghz flavor, and, aside from boosting the RAM to 2 GB, the machine is stock - standard 120 GB drive, etc. Day-to-day use is noticeably quicker, with applications just zapping, "poofing" and zooming nearly instantaneously (Mail.app, in particular, has a new lease on life). When you move to processor-intensive stuff (like mixing down Confab in GarageBand, or ripping CDs in iTunes), the differences just widen. I remember staring, slack-jawed, at how fast the progress bar in HandBrake was moving when I started ripping video content down for my iPod.
• Intel-nativity has a nice benefit if you're a gamer. I'm not much of a video game enthusiast, but I do enjoy RollerCoaster Tycoon; the PowerBook ran RCT just okay, and my Intel-based Mac Mini ran it pretty well. The MacBook, however, is a no-compromise experience from start to finish - just astoundingly good. I doubt that the machine would satisfy the hard-core gamers out there (Keith, for instance), but for someone like me it's heaven.
• The battery life is fair. Two and a half hours of normal use, more if you dial down the screen brightness and stuff and just want to do word processing.
• The built-in iSight works fine, but its picture and light sensitivity isn't nearly as good as the stand-alone model Apple has sold in the past. I was always astounded by the fact that the stand-alone iSight could do great things with color and brightness correction, even in low-light situations. The built-in camera doesn't do nearly as well, and often can look grainy. That said, I find myself videoconferencing - and doing multiparty conferences - much, much more frequently now that there's nothing to plug in to the computer.
• (RollerCoaster Tycoon at 35,000 feet will kill your battery really, really quickly.)
• Before you migrate, it's a good idea to profile your system and see what applications you've got that are PowerPC or Universal. One easy way to do this is to use Apple's built-in System Profiler (/Applications/Utilities/System Profiler.app). Switch to the Software -> Applications section and wait a moment (it will need to index your drive); then, maximize the window. You'll see a complete list of apps on your machine, their version, modification date, and "kind". This last is what you want; just sort by kind to see what PowerPC applications you've got installed. Then, you can just visit the developer's Web site(s) to see if they have upgrades available.
• At the time of this writing, the only PowerPC applications I have on my drive are Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite. Everything else has a universal or Intel-only build available.
• Speaking of Intel-only builds -- I found that some programs (for instance, VideoLAN Player) don't offer Universal binaries, but instead have PowerPC and Intel-specific builds. Just be aware of it when you're poking around for upgrades.
• I did buy Parallels, and have a full copy of Windows XP running on my MacBook. The performance is truly astounding. Parallels isn't as polished as Virtual PC in terms of its user experience (there's no drag-and-drop from the Mac desktop to the PC desktop, for instance, and the software just looks 'chunkier' than VPC), but the Parallels team has done an astoundingly good job of iterating and improving the product since launch. Copy-and-paste works great; there's no need to "capture" and "uncapture" the mouse any more (just moving it beyond the borders of the PC window will return it to the Mac environment); Shared Networking and Shared Folders work fine. And, while I've had a few small issues with USB keychain drives (I can't seem to get 'em to work), these are issues that I'm sure will be worked out in due course.
• The overwhelming convenience of a two-for-one computer cannot be overstated. There have always been a handful of Windows-only applications that I've either had to live without or keep on a separate PC; today, everything is unified on one machine that I can keep with me. It's fantastic.
• With Parallels working as well as it does, I have no idea why anyone would consider buying a laptop from HP, Sony, or Toshiba. As I wrote back when Apple announced Boot Camp ("The First Boot Drops"):

  So if I'm a consumer, and I see a Sony laptop for $2000 that runs Windows alongside an Apple laptop for $2000 that runs Windows and Mac OS X, well, which is the better value? The Mac is. No question. It's the no-compromise choice.

  Apple has an incredibly good story to take share from those companies, and, given how aggressive Apple's pricing is on these machines, I daresay other PC makers should expect to lose sales.

Overall, I couldn't be happier. Apple has pulled off an amazing feat of engineering, managing to preserve both the core experience for their customers (a Mac is a Mac is a Mac) while adding some astounding new capabilities (Windows compatibility) and keeping prices competitive with other PC kit.

(Now we just need to get Office and Photoshop moved over, and we're in the New World for sure.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at November 18, 2006 11:01 PM. Posted to Apple.

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