Review

Macbook Pro

The Aple Macbook Pro is something of a rare breed in our country. They are excellent laptops, but they are also very expensive. The new Macbook Pro continues this trend, but with some significant changes. We tested the 15-inch, entry level Macbook Pro. This comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo clocked at 2.53 Ghz, 2 GB of DDR3 RAM, a 250 GB HDD, and both the Nvidia 9400M and 9600M GT for graphics. The left hand side has the port cluster: two USB ports, one FireWire 800 port, network and audio, and the new mini DisplayPort connector. The right side just has the slot loading DVD drive.

The new Macbook Pro is a result of Apple’s efforts developing the Macbook Air. The new Macbook Pro’s chassis is carved out of a single block of aluminium. This unibody enclosure adds great structural rigidity to the machine, and it certainly feels solid. There’s not a hint of flex anywhere in the body of the machine. Apple laptops have always come with only one button on the trackpad, but even this was apparently one too many, since they have dropped buttons entirely from the new trackpad. The whole trackpad is now a button, and the top surface is made out of glass. It felt slightly smoother than the older trackpad, and the lack of buttons wasn’t a big deal, since you just tap away like you’re used to doing, and it works.

The biggest new change in this Macbook Pro is the glossy screen. Previously, you could choose to get a matte screen, but that’s no longer an option. This is going to be hard to take for some people. Designers especially may find the glossy, highly reflective screen disconcerting. There’s no denying that it makes movies and games look great, but if the screen has a dark image on it, you can clearly see your face in it! The keyboard is different too. It’s identical to the chiclet keyboard found in the Macbook.Typing on this feels nice, and the backlighting is ideal for low light conditions. A great new feature is the support for multi-touch on the trackpad. You can use three and even four fingers to activate different features. The usual two finger ones are all there—two-finger scrolling, pinch and zoom, document rotation, and two-finger- right-click. But now you can also use three fingers to go back and forth in Safari. Four fingers swiped left or right activate the task switcher that you get with Command+Tab, and up and down activate Exposé and/or expose your desktop.

The dual-GPUs are a welcome addition. The 9600M GT is capable of playing games at decent frame rates, while the 9400M gives you greater battery life. Switching between the two requires a log out, but that’s better than rebooting. Also, the next version of the Mac OS should be able to switch between the two on the fly. With the 9400M selected, battery life was close to six hours, with the screen set to medium brightness. The 9600M GT brought that down by two hours. This is an interesting successor to the older Macbook Pro. While a lot of the features are welcome, the glossy screen may cause issues for some. Barring that, though, an excellent laptop with (as usual) a very high price tag.