A Review of Apple’s New MacBook Pro
It has been stated that According to Apple, the PowerBook line became out of date due to what the company said was IBM and Freescale’s inability to produce substantially faster PowerPC G4 and G5 chips that didn’t also produce enormous additional amounts of heat and that the switch to Intel allows this new model, the Macbook Pro, to leap a generation beyond PowerBooks while, through emulation, still supporting most existing software applications as programmers update them.
I think that for typical users who are running the iLife ’06 suite, iTunes, and even nonuniversal applications such as Microsoft Office and Adobe products, the Apple MacBook Pro is a solid notebook. It’s a sweet upgrade from the PowerBook G4, and Windows users switching over will like it just the same. But for sophisticated media enthusiasts or professionals, we suggest you wait a couple of months, or at least until the software can catch up with the Intel components, before diving in.
A few notable improvements besides the speed due to the intel chips is that the all-metal hinge attaching the screen to the frame has a rubber inset piece that increases antenna sensitivity exponentially, making it unfettered by the reflective metal surface that had limited Wi-Fi reception in earlier models, many people are saying that the MacBook Pro cant find WLAN access points everywhere. The screen is also brighter and shaper and doesn’t drain the battery either. Also the keys feel better and the sound is crisper from the speakers.
On a slightly negative side key programs such as Photoshop are still waiting to be updated for the new processor. The current version of Photoshop will still run on the Macbook, thanks to Apple’s Rosetta emulation system, but it won’t run at full speed until it’s been updated – a process that could take several months. As a result, the current version of Photoshop actually runs about 25-35 per cent slower on the Macbook than it does on a Powerbook G4.This is a big problem for what’s supposed to be a professional notebook, as Photoshop is a key program for the many professional designers using Macs.
The Macbook Pro is a well-designed and powerful laptop, but its potential will remain untapped until there are more universal programs available that can properly exploit its full power.
