Broke down and walked out from the San Francisco Apple store with a new MacBook Pro, I definitely do not need an upgrade, I got my MBP this Jan. But the unibody is just too sexy, and I have to send in my MBP for repair and I absolutely cannot live without my laptop for a week, so getting a new one allows me to send the old one in for some cosmetic repair (free of charge by Apple), and then I can sell it on eBay. I went with the 2.53GHz version as I do want more memory, bigger hard drive, larger L2 cache.
By now I’m sure you’ve all read the specs countless times and know what the differences are on paper, here are some things you probably won’t find by reading the specs:
- the keyboard is LOUD, it is much louder than the gapless keyboard on the last generation MBPs and the PowerBooks.
- the keys of the keyboard has a slight “play”, overall the keyboard doesn’t feel as solid as the Apple Bluetooth or the slim USB keyboards, I actually might even prefer the keyboard on the plastic MacBook to this one. Keep in mind that the machine is only a few hours old so things like this might change with more usage.
- the glass trackpad is great, it feels better than a used MBP/PB trackpad, but again I’m not sure how it would feel a couple months from now, according to Apple it is supposed to stay this way because of the new material and processes used
- the machine runs quite a bit cooler, they keyboard and the palm rests don’t feel hot like my old MBP (it is 2 generations old, the last MBP with the old-style keyboard layout).
- even though the fans run at around the same speed as my old MBP (at around 2k rpm), they are a lot nosier. I could hardly hear the fans on my old MBP at 2k rpm, but I can DEFINITELY hear them on this new one.
- speed of normal usage (web, mail.app, etc) and web development feels about the same, I fired up Bridge and CS3 and it is a bit snappier.
- Migration Wizard was able to copy almost everything over, including the stuff in /opt (MacPorts stuff mostly, including my Rails setup). I had to however re-install X Code and Passenger again manually.
- I would prefer a matte screen but the glossy screen is okay so far, we’ll see how much I hate/like it during the day tomorrow.
Overall I am pretty happy with it. I’m gonna drop off my old MBP at the store to get the top deck replaced, when I get it back it will pretty much be a brand spanking new MBP. Let me know if you want to buy it!