MacBookPro – Short Review
As mentioned here, I have been bitten by the Mac Bug and after some contemplation purchased my first Mac. I purchased the MacBookPro 13 inch model and upgraded the RAM to 4GB from 2GB at a small price.
Lets take a look and review this beauty.
Specifications
Intel C2D 2.26GHz
4GB RAM DDR3(after upgrading)
160GB HDD
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
13.3 inch LED Display
8x slot loading Superdrive
Magsafe power port
1x Ethernet port
1x FireWire 800 port
1x mini Displayport
2x USB port
SD Card Slot
Audio line-in and line-out
Built in AirPort (wireless 802.11n, b/g)
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Built in iSight Camera
Built–in 7hr Battery Life
Weight at 2.04Kg
Accesories
1x Magsafe power adaptor
2 CD for recovery (MAC OS X and iLife)
User Guide
Screen Cleaning Cloth
First Look
When I went to the Mac display at the Challenger store, I was amazed and awed by the beautiful design of the Mac. Clean and seamless lines and solidly build. Even the bottom is clean and and smooth. The beauty of the aluminium unibody design.
Pretty much light-weight at 2.04Kg and long battery life of 7hrs.
First time powering up the device itself gives you a touch of excitement. It gives a ‘bing’ sound and the apple logo shows up. Obvious it is the boot-up process that is running. Mac OSX Snow Leopard loads within 30 secs. The setup process which is mostly keying in your details and time & date settings takes about 10 minutes or lesser.
Performance
I did not purchase the fastest CPU but a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo based processor. With 4GB of DDR3 RAM onboard it is damn fast. I feel it is good enough for blogging. surfing, photo management and photo editing. I am yet to do photoshopping or video editing and I cant comment on the performance yet.
Opening windows and applications were snappy and fast. Much faster than my XP based system and quite comparable to Windows 7, though Windows 7 lags when certain apps are open. Mac OS X just proves that it is made for speed and stability here.
Keyboard and Trackpad
The Keyboard is full QWERTY with spaces great for a big fingers like I have. Typing is soft with good feedback. The keys have a little rubbery feel to it which is just fantastic. To top it up, the keys are backlit which varies according to the darkness of the room or place you are in. You can manually increase the light brightness or turn it off completely.
Trackpad is one of a kind. Huge clickable trackpad with multi touch capability itself just wins me over. You can tweak the settings in the System Preferences to enable right-click (two-finger taps).
MAC OS X 10.5.7 – Snow Leopard
This one of the best looking OS ever. Ok I actually like Windows 7 UI too. Both have their advantages and makes using the OS a lot easier and friendlier.
The bottom of the screen is called the Dock and this is where you can place your most used applications. All other applications are in the Applications folder.
Any HDD or thumb drive will be automatically displayed on the Desktop with the relevant name. Just to let you guys know, Mac does not use drive letters for its internal or external drives. Just names. Ah how easy to remember those names.
I have heard people say the Mac OS is not as tweakable as Windows. Not true. The way I see it is very tweakable from the System Preferences. Third Party applications can also be installed to further tweak the settings and performance. I am yet to delve into that and will ensure you are kept posted.
Application Installation
Most apps comes in the .dmg format. Upon opening the dmg file just drag the application to the Application folder in your system.
There are some application which gives you automatic installation or guide you on what to do. For eg. Firefox, you will see the instruction just to drag the app to the Application folder. How simple can it get?
Networking
As the specification states there is wi-fi available. Apple call this the AirPort. Ethernet is still available for those needing to connect via LAN cable.
Connecting to the wifi is very simple, click on the AirPort icon and select the wifi device, enter the password and you are connected.
I was more interested in sharing file and printer between Windows and Mac and found file sharing works wonderfully after ensuring file sharing is enabled. Appropriate setting will be applied to the firewall settings.
I trying to find ways to share my printer connected to the Windows 7 machine.
Conclusion
It is a worth while investment that I have made. Will I purchase another Mac once this fellow dies? That I am not sure. Only time will tell. You will never know, I might end up with Mac Pro (desktop).
Usage wise is damn friendly. If you are newbie and very used to Windows, you wont find much difficulty moving over to this machine. I took two days to get comfortable with the usage and trackpad and I doubt you guys will take more than that.
I will be exploring more with this machine and will be sure to update this blog regularly.
Go get a MacBookPro!
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