MacBook Pro Update

There's three blogs I want to complete before Dave and Rob's upcoming trip. MacWorld 2010, my digital video camera and this more full featured one (I didn't say much about it in my first blog) about my "new" MacBook Pro. I only wrote "new" in quotes because today Apple released an updated version (Spring 2010) of the 13" MacBook Pro (Summer 2009) that my work paid for so I no longer have the latest and greatest.

This isn't a full review as you can find many great ones online, but rather is my initial impressions after putting it in its paces the past half year. In short it's the best portable computer I've ever used. The size is perfect for traveling and fits great on an airline coach seat tray table. It's very light compared to my Dell Latitude that it replaced and doesn't need any accessories other than a power adapter. The battery life is freaking awesome and blows away anything that the Dell did even after I added a big and heavy 9-cell extended life battery.

The MPB sports the highly touted Unibody enclosure made from a single piece of aluminum. It's rock solid and never flexes like my plastic Dell did. In fact my son has stepped on it a few times with never a mark to show for it.

As Apple normally does, it's the barely spoken features that make it unique. Specifically there is a thin bar of light that pulsates when the MacBook is in sleep mode. When completely powered off (or when powered on) the light disappears into the metal case. According to Apple they machined the part where the light shows super thin and perforated the area with tiny holes to allow the LED light to shine through. Amazing.

I remember the feature that impressed me the most when I saw Kruddler's MacBook wasn't the design or the screen size, but rather the innovative MagSafe power connector. I believe his was the first model to incorporate it. With my MBP, the feature that blew me away wasn't the unibody construction or the never ending battery life but the glass trackpad. So silky smooth it makes my Dell feel like sandpaper. In fact I got so used to it that I often mistakenly try to perform gestures when going back to the Dell.

There are other features people made big deal about like the return of firewire, but to be honest I never used that port yet. The SD card slot is nice but since my iPhoto library is stored on my Power Mac G5 I found little use for it. It runs Snow Leopard like a champ as well as Windows 7 using Boot Camp (which I have to run for work purposes).

Any negatives? Very few but one is that the metal edge where your wrists naturally lean against is too sharp for my tastes. With my Dell the extended life battery had a built in wrist rest that was very comfortable. I suppose Apple went for form over function with this particular design.

The only other minor gripe I have is the screen resolution of 1280 x 800 is too small for certain tasks (don't even dream of using Modo or Final Cut Pro on it). I guess that's to be expected with a 13" widescreen display but I wasn't approved to order anything more expensive so I didn't have a choice. I connect it to a 20" LCD display at work so for the most part it doesn't bother me but when undocked I have to constantly scroll windows around. What's worse is that there are some Mac OS X Server admin tools that refuse to run with that small of resolution and will automatically close. I think that the 15" MBP is the best size compromise for screen size vs portability.

It's finally nice to have a portable computer that I want to take with me to trips, especially MacWorld earlier this year. I also like busting out with it on company business meetings where everybody else has a Wintel machine and they start asking me questions like why a Windows administrator owns a Mac.