Loving my new Macbook Pro 15" 2.16GHz... (1 Viewer)

[Carlo_M]

I work at a university and the computer store had a great deal on a power buy that they did with a top-of-the-line Macbook Pro. Normally the academic price is $2299, and the street price from an Apple store is $2499, but they were selling it for $1999. Specs as follows:

15.4" matte screen 1440x900
2.16 GHz Core Duo
1GB PC2-5300 RAM on 1 stick (1 free slot)
100GB 5400RPM HD
256MB ATI X1600 graphic card (normally 128 on other MBP models).

Plus, they had a mail in rebate for up to $179 with a concurrent purchase of any iPod. I bought a 4GB nano for my sister who will pay me back for it, so my net price on the MBP will be more like $1900 + tax. I will eat some of the cost of the Nano (approx $88) because her BDay is coming up and that's my contribution to her present. Couple that with the fact that I was able to use my 0% interest 12 months card, and I'm in hog heaven.

I started out with Macs way back in the day, but the last one I used was my old roommate from college's PowerMac 6200 (I think it was called). OS was probably 7 or 7.5. Then I entered the "working world" and had to learn Windows NT, then 2000, then XP. The Macs had always been such a high price premium that I stayed WINtel for all of these years.

However the new MBPs are some serious hardware, with the duo processors and a mean graphics card. Add to that the beautiful, durable and light aluminum case. I do a lot of creative writing on the go, and so I needed a light and durable laptop. I am a bit of a "font whore" (I own a lot of them) and the Apple OS is unsurpassed in the way it presents them onscreen. I have crossplatform Open Type fonts and they are hands down more visually appealing on the Mac (and my home PC runs on a Dell 20" LCD at 1600x1200 so it's not a matter of the Mac having more pixels to make the fonts look better).

Luckily I have access to Mac versions of the software I use most: Office and Screenwriter (crossplatform), so there's no immediate cost for software.

I've had the biggest grin on my face as I type this post. The forum has never looked so beautiful (font-wise).

 

[McPaul]

You're a lucky man, Carlo. Me and my Mac Mini are jealous...

 

[Andrew Pratt]

I've seen the new CoreDuo Mac's running OSX and XP virtually and I was very impressed. I live and work in an XP world though so I may be staying WinTel for awhile yet but I really liked how seemless it was to switch between OS's

 

[Craig S]

I've got one of the new MacBooks. The Pro's were tempting, but I wanted to go smaller (and cheaper) for traveling.

At any rate, after a month of use I still love it. Got the 2 Ghz white model w/ SuperDrive, stuffed it with 2 GB of RAM - the sucker screams. I got the stock 60 GB hard drive. I plan to upgrade it to a 120 or 160 GB (when the 2.5 SATA 160s finally come out) later this summer - replacing the HDs in the MacBooks is a snap, just like the RAM.

I've got Windows XP running on it via Parallels - this is an awesome combo; the cube-flip animation between OS X & XP always elicits ooohs & ahhhs. XP runs like a dream inside Parallels - I've even got the Office 2007 & IE 7 betas loaded & running without incident.

Kudos to Apple - so far they are kicking butt with their Intel line.

 

[Carlo_M]

Andrew,

Well of course, Bootcamp works nearly perfectly for WinXP...just in time to see MS release Vista On a serious note, our MBP loaner at work did have bootcamp and XP installed and to my limited experience (3 days, mostly spent on OSX but some time spent on XP) it runs pretty much identical to my desktop and other laptop (XP machines). I live in an XP world too (work PC, home PC, other laptop) but I don't regret this switch at all. And actually, when bootcamp goes primetime, I'll probably replace my home PC with an iMac 20" or whatever new G6 core duo machine they'll have out to replace the G5 PPCs. And if they say that they can support Vista as well, it's a no-brainer.

Craig,

I have 1GB on 1 stick and I'm trying to resist the urge to buy another stick right now and install it I don't come close to using all 1GB, but sometimes on System Monitor I see that almost all of it is spoken for (although usually 500MB+ is "inactive"). It's still not "free" but it doesn't seem to be slowing my system down.

I can't wait until more universal apps are available.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

That was me as well..too cool. I'd need to be able to switch quickly so bootcamp won't do it for me most of the time but parallels is ideal

 

[Carlo_M]

One piece of freeware makes the switch all so worth it: Handbrake.

 

[Citizen87645]

Finding the freeware apps is most of the fun!

 

[Carlo_M]

10.4.7 has made the forum even more beautiful on Firefox! Apparently the font smoothing wasn't optimized for certain programs (non-Quartz whatever that means) and 10.4.7 fixed that. I used to use Safari to do my browsing but being a longtime PC user, I am more familiar with the quirks of Firefox (as all browsers have quirks), so I am now back on familiar ground

 

[Yee-Ming]

Heh, I got a "slightly obsolete" 1.83GHz MBP recently (price reduced because they had been superseded by the 2.0 GHz chip in the newer versions). Lovely machine. And as you all say, Boot Camp runs XP just fine for those apps where you have to run Windows.