Sure, 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz IS slightly higher than Apple’s previous generation (that being 2.16GHz and 2.33GHz), but the real difference lies in other improvements to the already great laptop line. Without getting into a lengthy discussion about the processor chips (dubbed Santa Rosa by Intel), the boost in FSB (front-side bus) will be a welcome feature to many. Not to mention the native 802.11n support (no more US$1.99 update to tap into the faster wireless support). Anyone can read a press release, and any Mac user or potential switcher can and probably have read something about the new machines. I’d like to stay focused on my own experience with the 17-inch MacBook Pro. This is a review about indulgence as much as the MacBook Pro.
"Steven, you don’t need it."
It’s not easy to explain to someone, especially a wife that couldn’t care less about computers, why I would need to update my slightly-more-than-a-year-old MacBook Pro. Oh, I tried to explain how I was now a full two generations behind (my previous MBP was the 17-inch 2.16GHz Core Duo), that I couldn’t take advantage of the increased speed of our new Airport Base Station until ALL our Macs were upgraded to 802.11n, and even how… oh the heck with it, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the MBP I owned and I wanted to upgrade for ONE reason and one reason only; I wanted, no, I needed, no, I HAD TO HAVE, the new laptop for its 1920x1200 pixel HD display. The rest of the upgrades were, quite literally, beside the point.
So, on the morning of the next day after the announcement of the new MBP’s I went upstairs to my office, launched my browser on my two-Quad Core Mac Pro (don’t ask), clicked on the Apple store link and ordered up a brand new, custom configured MBP.
Since I was about to make a major purchase for what was, to say the least, a flimsy excuse, I decided to add fuel to the fire by ordering it with a 250GB, 4200rpm HDD. Once I was done pondering the configuration (see below) I clicked the "Submit" button, waited for the order to process (watching the blue barber pole spin for what seemed to be an eternity and wondering "What IS my credit limit on this card anyway??") and once it had gone through I proceeded downstairs, poured myself a stiff drink of Vitamin Water on ice (pomegranate), and asked myself one of those questions usually reserved for the middle of the night, those "I am mortal!" kind of questions;
"What’s wrong with you man?"
The Indulgent Configuration:
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
250GB Serial ATA Drive @ 4200
SuperDrive 8X
MacBook Pro 17-in Hi-Res GL WS
NO MODEM
NO OPTIONAL SW
BkLit Keyboard/Mac OS
Country Kit
After all was said and done it was just a matter of waiting for it to ship from that far off land called China, to be flown from there to here, and then to be driven to my house in that lovely FedEx truck. In a mere matter of days it was handed off to me from the not-bad-looking-for-a-guy FedEx man (after he made sure I was who I said I was, which apparently was me replying in the affirmative that I was who he wanted me to be.). At this point reality had begun to set in and I was all but thrilled that my wife wasn’t home when the Apple fairy, through its proxy, paid me a visit.
"No Plan B?"
Now that I had possession of the NEW MacBook Pro I took the perfectly good one I already owned, sat down at my desk, erased the hard drive (after backing it up of course. I mean, I’m not completely crazy), reinstalled the operating system, spent a good 10 minutes polishing it so that it looked brand spanking new, and placed it on my wife’s nightstand next to her bed, and waited for her to come home. I figured I’d surprise her with a gift.
That evening she did indeed come home just as she had for the past 21 years. And just as in those 21 years she went into the bedroom to change out of her work duds and into something sexy. Sexy by now meant her 8-year-old ex-workout sweatpants and wife-beater (got to keep the marriage alive!) and immediately noticed the machine on her nightstand. “STEVEN!†she screamed. “Uh, oh.†I muttered under my breath. “I’m in troubleâ€.
To make a long story short (I’m not being paid by the word here) let’s just say that she’s the proud(?) owner of a 17-inch Core Duo MacBook Pro (yea, a DUAL CORE) and her even “prouder†husband is the owner of a MacBook Pro he can envision keeping for a good five years, but will undoubtedly do the same thing he just did in a year or so.
Like so many times in the past I managed to skate through this “I-gotta-have-it-now†manic mood swings and I sit here today with the task of writing up a review for it. And it only took me 790 words to get to it. Not bad, not bad at all.
"So, how is it?"
Let’s start with the main reason I bought the MBP … the Display. There is a lot to say to about all the little upgrades in the MacBook Pro, but let’s not fool ourselves here. It’s all about Real Estate!
I am, in fact, looking at the display right now. And when I took a look at the new display for the first time I was at a loss for words (believe it or not). I’m not sure how I felt about it then. Was it too much? Is the resolution too high? Yep, took me all of two minutes to fall in love with Apple’s most gorgeous display I’ve ever laid my eyes on. Took me less than a day to admit to myself that all these years of living with 1024x768, 1280x854, 1440x900, and 1680x1050, was, well, truly a sad state of affairs. “How†I asked, “did I ever manage?â€
"What’s this I hear about your storage fetish?"
Okay, now, don’t get mean. I don’t have a fetish for storage. But what with all this digital entertainment nowadays you can’t get by on 80GB hard drives. Yes, I admit to owning a lot of hard drives, but it’s because I need them. No, seriously, I do. Don’t you?
The only other custom configuration I could get on my beloved machine is the spacious 250GB HDD, unless I wanted to be laughed at by all of my Mac using buddies. I could have purchased extra Apple RAM and maxed this baby out at 4GB for an extra $750. (Do you know that you can buy 8GB of RAM for a Mac Pro for that kind of money?)
Anyway, how I lived with 120GB that I had in my previous MBP is beyond me. I had a fair amount of music, photos, videos (TV Shows from iTunes!), not to mention actual work-product on the previous hard drive and had maybe, maybe, 2GB or 3GB free at any given time. Totally unacceptable if you ask me. This 250GB gives me some breathing room, until sometime in the fall when all my favorite TV shows will once again find themselves streaming through the ether in the form of iTunes downloads. Oh, and of course a whole bunch of photographs that I will most assuredly create in no time at all.
"Notice any difference besides the ridiculously high resolution screen?"
Ridiculous? Are you joking?
"Talk to me about graphics cards"
I love a good graphics card, don’t you? When I bought my Dual Quad-Core I bummed some money from my wife in order to upgrade the standard card to the ATI Radeon X1900 XT (512MB of GDDR3!). Would have sprung for the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 but I just couldn’t do it. But yea, a good graphics card can make a world of difference and not just in gaming.
Apple ships the new 17-inch MBP with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT, which replaced the previous ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 (Or did Apple offer a better card in the first Core 2 Duo? Remember, my previous MBP was a Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo). Both cards sport 256MB of GDDR3 RAM, but the NVIDIA 8600M GT blows away anything Apple has ever shipped in a laptop. Anyone out there remember how much VRAM in the PowerBook 540c? Wasn’t it something like 512k? Isn’t that like HALF a MB? By the way, I walked into an Apple reseller in the summer of 1994 and paid them almost $5000, in cash, for a 540c. I swear! Needless to say I didn’t take the kids to DisneyWorld that year ... or the year after.
"Seriously now. Why do you need such a powerful card?"
The combination of a 16-lane PCI Express architecture and the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT delivers 16x full screen anti-aliasing, 128-bit High Dynamic Ranger rendering, and a texture fill rate of up to 8.2 billion per second, which, according to Apple, is 57 percent faster than the graphics capability of the MBP I pawned off on my unsuspecting wife (poor woman!).
For me, the higher level of graphics performance shows up in my professional work. I’m a photographer, and I went completely digital more than five years ago. Running both Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom software on this new machine means I can do so much more, so much more quickly, with so much more precision that it was, by itself, a good enough reason enough to want to upgrade. The speed at which I can go through 200-300 RAW images and quickly toss out those I don’t want, sort the ones I do want, and even experiment with white balances and other things in fractions of seconds means I am much more productive. Most importantly, I’m never bored waiting for images to load on the screen, or when I’m changing the white balance on a massive file. Plus, I don’t always have to run upstairs to my office when I want to work on large photos.
I suppose that this upgrade might be remembered most for the new higher resolution screens, and with good reason. 30 percent more real estate over the previous 1680x1050 pixel screen is a pretty big deal for people that deal in photographs and movies. People talk all the time about this ability of “editing in the field†and how a high-powered, high-resolution display makes it possible to do more serious editing on location. And I suppose they’re right, in my case it’s about being able to do not only “more serious†work, but actually ideal, production level work in bed, on the sofa, on my deck, or anywhere I happen to be.
What I now use in a laptop is far superior to what I was using in my desktop a mere two or three years ago. True story.
"What else do you like about this new MBP?"
Okay, before I answer that I almost forgot to mention; this particular model does NOT have the new-fangled, mercury-free LED display. That’s the 15-inch model, which is also a fine machine, or so I hear. That said, you have the option of getting your CCL LCD Glossy screen, which I certainly did. Makes a good bit of difference for video and photography pros, the colors are richer; more saturated, and just look stunning. Some don’t like it, too PC I suppose, but for photographers it’s a great way to view photos.
"The SuperDrive. Well?"
Apple’s SuperDrive, or rather a MATSHITADVD-R #UJ-85J has twice the write speed as the one on my previous MBP. Its also a dual layer burner and if you burn a lot of DL DVD’s, which has come down in price enough so that I actually DO burn double-layer disks quite regularly, the new 8x speed is a very welcome upgrade.
"Other stuff?"
On many of occasions I’ve hooked up my previous MBP to my 30-inch Apple display, and it was marvelous. I can’t say if the previous model offered three ways to use the built in DVI port, dual-display mode, video mirroring, and lid-closed mode, because I all I ever did was hook it up to my display and close the lid.
Like previous models the new MBP also comes with a built in iSight camera, Front Row software (overrated software IMHO), and an even better backlit keyboard. Seriously now, how do people type at night, in bed, with the lights off, without a backlit keyboard?
Airport (upgraded to 802.11n) Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, analog/optical audio in and out, three USB 2.0 ports (one more than the 15†model), FW400 and FW800 ports, and the ExpressCard/34 slot, which I know of no one that uses this slot. On top of all that you get a white, tiny remote that you can use with Front Row, or keep it as an extra remote for your AppleTV, which is what I have done.
All in all, this new upgraded MBP is, to me, a more-than-decent upgrade. I’ve been waiting to get into the Core 2 Duo processor action for some time and I’ve heard nothing but good things about Santa Rosa, and with the option of getting desktop size storage in a one-inch thick, 6.8 pound laptop is a definite plus. Did I mention the awesome 1920x1200 high-resolution screen?
"Is your new MBP faster than your last MBP? Be honest now."
In a word, yes. BUT, I’m not about to boast that it screams past the last one like a 1970 Dodge Challenger taking on a Toyota Prius. But it is faster, what with a faster front-side bus, faster RAM, and a much faster graphics card. Not even the hit I took on the 4200-rpm 250GB HDD caused much of a hit on speed. Since it is a 64-bit machine I expect Leopard to speed up at least the GUI, so there’s that. And as soon as I can I plan to upgrade the RAM to a full-boat 4GB. DataMemorySystems here in New Hampshire are selling 4GB (2x2GB) sets for this new MBP for $230. Remember when 16MB of RAM would set you back $600?
"Anything else you’d like to mention?"
How about a word on this form factor? I’ve been hearing some talk about how disappointing it is that Apple hasn’t radically redesigned the MacBook Pro. The “AlBookâ€, a name given the first PowerBook that came after the Titanium PowerBook, has been around for 4 years or so. It’s safe to say that this latest revision has pretty much nailed everything that goes wrong with a Rev A machine. I don’t think Apple necessarily needs to redesign hardware after it’s been perfected, just for the sake of redesigning something. I have no problem with an aged, yet beautiful, form factor that is the MacBook Pro.
Macsimum rating: 9.5 out of 10
The specs: 2.40GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM (up to 4GB), 160GB HD (up to 250GB), New Resolution: 1920x1200 pixels (native)

Price as configured: $2,799 ($2599 EDU Discount)
Thought I forgot about the quiz, didn’t you? Okay, here you go. Send your answers to smcbride@xtremecamera.com. Results might be published in the future.
Who invented the Internets?
Does Bill Gates like Pie?
What is the "Vagina Monologues"?
If you were a Mac which Mac would you be?
What is a floppy disk?
Alba or Biel?
Batman. Mac or Windows?
SPAM. Lunchmeat or Special Possums Acting Manic?
Spike or SciFi?
SG1 or Atlantis?
When did Battlestar Galactica jump the Penguin?
Bonus Question:
What would Jesus do?
About the author: Steven J McBride is the chief technology officer at [url=http://www.xtremecamera.com]XtremeCamera.Com[/url], an "about-to-be-launched" (June 22) web site that will cater to the photographer in all of us. Steven’s role at XtremeCamera is to make sure all the other staff members know about, and most likely purchase, all the new and great Apple products as they come down the pike. After Steven brought his new MBP HD to work with him, 3 others ordered the same model that very day. Chaos ensued this week when all four staff members decided to spend the day in Second Life instead of finishing up the code for the site, because, in the words of Steven, "It’s just SO much fun!" As of Sunday evening the code remains incomplete, Chaos reigns, and Steven is just sick about it.
