My Macbook Pro 17" 4 Weeks later

Why buy one?

I did not take this decision lightly.

I was in the market for a Mac because of my iPhone and web app business I am part of. The decision was formed in my mind that the other two guys were able to swap data and test the apps much easier than I could. @Matttakhar would have to create a special build for me and email it. Admittedly we all use the mighty dropbox now which could smooth the transfer, but I digress.

Secondly for the website design and a few graphic related tasks I was finding my home PC (a 4 year old HP) was starting to creak. Mind you I hasten to add the HP PC has been a great work horse machine, and has out-shone many PC's for a good period of time. However the fans inside the machine and including the GFX board one too, are starting to kick in all too regularly, even after taking my Dyson to the open side to suck up the dust.

Anyway I have a MacBook Pro 17" i7 with 4GB memory and the 7200rpm 500gb HD, with antiglare screen. I bought it with AppleCare and a few other items. Apple Charger, Magic Mouse and remote.

First Impressions

Taking it out of the box was a really treat and experience. It was packaged up simply and nicely. Manual and recovery disks were in a separate pack inside the box, a bit like the iPhone (or perhaps the iPhone borrowed from the MBP)

Once I had plugged in the magnetic power supply (very cool) and turned the device on, it was an absolute breeze to setup. Too easy.

In fact I found the whole thing just too easy that I did not believe it. And I still don't.

In fact I am still wondering where's the catch on this device and Mac OSX. 

I quickly put on Firefox, and Chrome as alternate browsers to Safari. The jury is still out on Safari. 

I was glad to be able to setup XMarks to sync all the browsers bookmarks etc, and Spotify existed on the Mac (Phew).

List of apps added:-

• Spotify
• Balsamiq
• Dropbox
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Xmarks
• Skype
• Growl
• Notify 2.1

Most other things are web based Apps which were platform independent.

Performance.

Well you have to understand my PC was 4-5 years old. I thought it was quick. On the MBP if I click to open Chrome, its opened instantly. I mean instantly, the browser window is there ready to go. Stunned.

Intense gFX operations work instantly.

iTunes makes no fuss and boots instantly, I am not sure if this is because I have not imported my library yet.

I like Growl and Notify. Very very cool.

What also makes me smile is going to the Apple trailer website and being able to click on the full 1080p HD trailers and expanding it out to full screen and watching the trailer without any jitters. Combined with my 50meg internet connection those trailers are ready to play in sub 10sec.

I quite like the Photobooth or more to the point the kids love the photobooth application that comes with MacOSX.

The Hardware

Well the 17" is a beast of a laptop. Especially to someone like me who has not needed a big phat laptop for my job and always had the luxury of smallish ultra thin laptops. At home there is a Netbook which was donated to us in our time of need and that is small with a 11" screen. 

So this is a radical change.

At first I thought it was heavy, but I have progressively got used to it. The length (front to back) lends itself to putting your wrists on the laptop which eliminates the bad posture.

The Keyboard

Ooooooooh it lights up. Yes the actual keys are backlit, and change brightness depending on the darkness of the surroundings.

However even with the British keyboard layout, Apple have opted to stick the "@" key shifted above the 2 key. And of course the """ key is where the "@" key was on a traditional UK keyboard. Annoying, a small minor niggle.

Another really really useful and cool thing, and bear with me on this one, I'm sure they have this on iMac's as well, but my function keys all have functions and you don't have to press a

Fn key to access them. 

I mean the really useful stuff like, CD/iTunes/Spotify controls, brightness up and down, mute, eject, and the really uber cool ones are for Expose (tile app windows) and the gadget up which brings up things like Calendar, Weather and calculator.

With all this simplicity I am getting back into keyboard shortcuts.

Pressing cmd and spacebar brings up instantly a Spotlight search bar to search anything on the laptop. Really cool.

And another handy one especially as the resolutions is quite high, keep your finger on ctrl and do a mouse scroll (using the trackpad use 2 fingers, on the magic mouse 1 finger) and you zoom in and out wherever the mouse pointer is pointing. And its fast, very responsive.

God I even like the little LED light on the magsafe connector for the mains power, its amber when its charging and green when its charged. Apple have thought of almost everything. There are major, major computer manufacturers who still do not think of things like this. Or more to the point strip it down to reduce cost.

The Trackpad

This took some getting used to. I bought a Magic Mouse as well, but have given both a thorough crack at getting used to them and I am glad I have put in the effort as they both make sense, and infect when I go onto Windows based laptops I find myself swiping and tapping the trackpad in an effort to reproduce the magic timesaving tricks you can on the Mac. Even the forward and back browser swipes (three fingers left or right) make perfect sense. 

The Magic Mouse

I have heard a lot of controversy when these came out. Along with the iPhone the Magic Mouse should be a design piece. It is a beautiful object to look at. It is aesthetically pleasing to the eye the gloss finish tempts you to touch it. 

There are no buttons as such that you can see, rather the who mouse acts as a button (with the same ease of click as a normal mouse button click).

The whole top surface acts as a swipe pad, so you can scroll up and down with acceleration using a finger swiping across the surface. Browser back and Forward is 2 fingers left or right.

Open/Close

OMG - Ok so most of the time on a laptop I rarely shutdown unless I know I am going to be without a power source for sometime. From a laptop closed lid, I swing open the lid and literally I am there. The full OSX desktop is there.... where I last left it. Incredible. No slow loading or larking about. Its just there ready to go.

Battery

I have no experience of past Macbook battery life performances and thus nothing to base it on. However for such powerful laptop Apple seem to have done a great job in squeezing out power to achieve a good 7hrs without sliding down known power hungry components. The funny thing is my Netbook probably has the same battery life, but with the 12th of the processing power.

 

I like the OSX battery indicator telling me how long until its fully charged and then if the MBP is not plugged into the mains it tells you how long it has left (the latter being nothing new).

Initial thoughts

Whether its the power, or the simplicity of the OS and the hardware, but I am fast learning that the laptop is there to just work and not hinder your creativity. You don't have to worry about things. They just work. It enables you to get on with it.

Things that are a little different to the PC world are there for a reason and when you learn it, you realise what the hell did you do beforehand. 

Things just work.

For example, use Safari to view an Apple film trailer (in 1080p) and it just opens quicktime without hinderance or a dialog window. It just does it, and it does it elegantly, without complaint. Try it on another browser on the MBP and you can see it is not so elegant, but it does it. Do it on a PC and it messes up. You have to click the trailer twice to actually get Quicktime to open, but it then opens 2 Quicktime trailers both trying to download 170gb of HD trailer <slap forehead>

I feel I need MS Office, but I for once in my life asking myself do I really need it? Will it just clutter up a perfectly running machine?

I wrote this on the built in TextEdit app that comes with the OSX operating system, not on some fancy word processor. Interesting. Probably because I don't want any formatting issues which tend to get carried across when you cut and paste into a CMS.

In summary

It just works and not only does it just work. It just works very elegantly and stylishly without compromise. A machine for right brainer's. In the words of Ferris Bueller "If one has the means I highly recommend picking one up"