Apple MacBook Pro 15.4 in. (MA610LL/A) Notebook

The Apple MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo) notebook computer is not only a high-end business productivity tool, but it is visual art and it recovered hours of my life each day.

I left the Apple world way back in the Apple // days of 128k memory and floppy drives. I moved into the PC world with the IBM green screens and thought I was really up-town when I bought the first 386 processor machine to be sold in Phoenix. In November, 2006, somewhat dissatisfied with the performance of PCs, the endless updating, the resource-consuming overhead needed to patch the gaps in the operating system, etc., I decided to try a Mac. I had never used a Mac in my life. I had seen them. I had not touched one. I figured something out there had to be better than my PC which had 362 Microsoft patches to the OS and countless antivirus and other software updates installed. At worst, I figured the Mac would be a cool if expensive toy to use for my amusement.

I seriously underestimated the new Macs. When mine arrived, out of the box it was able to connect to my wireless network at data transfer rates which put my hardwired PCs to shame and made my WiFi laptop look as if it was stuck. From there it connected through Bonjour Technology to all of my network printers. In Windows, installing a network printer can be an all-day experience. Not with the Mac. It wasn't even plug and play. It was turn on and play.

What we have here is a smooth synthesis of hardware and software thanks to the Intel Core 2 Duo hardware and the slick, fast and seemingly bullet-proof OS X 10.4.8 (Tiger). The operating system and the hardware are so well matched that this notebook starts up and is ready to use in twelve seconds. It shuts down in nine seconds. This will vary but it beats the heck out of my fastest Centrino PC which needs four minutes to boot, load all of the anti-everything utilities and the HP digital imaging monitor (which my Mac also loads in that 12-second time frame.)

The Hardware

The MacBook Pro is elegant. It comes packaged like fine jewelry. The brushed aluminum housing is finished perfectly. It is thin - very thin at only one inch thick it is about half the thickness of my HP notebook. It is light as well at only 5.6 pounds with the battery which is as elegantly-finished as the rest of the computer.

Apple appears to be sending subliminal messages with their product housings. They are so beautiful and so elegant that one is conscious to take very good care of them. If you leave an Apple Store or authorized reseller without a proper care for one of these, you will be going back for one. They just look so good one wants to keep one looking great. By doing so, the computer is spared a few bumps and bangs along the way.

The brushed/blasted finish produces a very fine texture which is good to the touch and helps one hang onto this computer but caution should still be exercised, particularly when handling this computer with very dry or chapped hands. It is smooth and there are no grillwork pieces to help hold onto it, but this makes for a very good, simple look.

Simple, this computer isn't. It's a productivity beast offering Firewire 400 and 800 and two USB ports in addition to a DVI output for use with a second monitor or even a TV set or projector. The MagSafe power adaptor insures that this computer will not be dragged off onto the floor if someone becomes tangled in the power cord. The illuminated Apple logo on the lid lets you sit on the "cool" side of the Starbucks and gently advertises status to the rest of the room. (I'm not kidding. I see this voluntary coffee house segregation constantly in my travels.)

OS X Tiger exploits the power of the Intel Core 2 Due 2.33gHz processor board better than any PC running any flavor of Windows (including Vista). This is a fast computer. It's blindingly fast. Click and things happen. If you are using the Safari browser (or Firefox or Camino) and are dealing with very similar pages, you will probably not even see this computer page from one to another. I have found myself saying several times, "When will this...oh, it already did."

The glossy screen is relatively new for Apple and the MacBook Pro is offered with the glossy screen which has the best clarity I have seen on a notebook of any brand or a slightly frosted screen which has been the norm. The whole industry is moving toward the additional clarity of the glossy screens but Apple's simply rocks.

Linking the screen and the notebook is a hefty hinge which is designed to allow even tiny adjustments in angle with little effort. The electronic linkage between the two is where the combo really shines. There are ambient light sensors (2) in the speaker grills which adjust screen brightness and illuminated keyboard brightness as well. Apple does not see this as a linear relationship and as light in the room increases and decreases, the illumination of the screen and keyboard vary for optimum viewing. This is so seamless that most early mornings I am not aware when this function finally turns off when it sees enough room light. It is certainly never annoying or glaring. I can simply see what I am doing.

Heat has been a problem with earlier Apple notebooks but that has been solved with the MacBook Pro. Temperature sensors all over the board can be viewed through the tiny "iStat" widget which can be added to the Dashboard and the user can see temperature values in degrees C or F. My MacBook Pro typically runs with a CPU temperature of around 118F. Processor-intensive activities such as ripping video will take that on up temporarily but the heat sinks and internal fans do a great job of dissipating the heat without venting to the outside and pulling in dust and other contaminants. The aluminum case is the final heat exchanger yet mine has never been unpleasantly warm even when editing video.

The Software

The real heart of the MacBook Pro is an elegant operating system known as OS X. This is the product of years of true evolution and actually listening to customers. Going from XP or even Vista, this is a serious trade-up in performance, ease of use, raw power to get things done and plain, old good looks.

OS X is not verbose. If you connect an iPod or a flash drive or a printer, it assumes the user connected that device for a reason, quietly "mounts" the device to the desktop and says nothing further. There are no bubbles to click out of the way to get back to the desktop. Control panels are simple and easy to understand yet give the user excellent control over software and hardware. The real beauty of OS X is that it does so much for the user, there is very little tweaking to do. Want to send a Word document as a fax, open it, select print then print to fax and enter the destination number. If you have a fax modem attached the system knows it is there and simply uses it. Straight printing is a click to choose to print and another to OK print options and it's on its way.

This brings us to Apple's longtime tragic flaw: Printing. Previous operating systems have been so geared to audio and video presentations that printing looked almost like an afterthought. This is quite pleasantly no longer the case. OS X is every bit as robust as Windows when it comes to printing locally, through a network or even to a shared printer on a Windows PC on a Windows network. That can be trick when using another PC but OS X makes it a simple task. I have yet to find any print function or task which is not better and faster in OS X than in Windows. Set-up of printers takes seconds, not hours. Print quality is outstanding and My Mac plays very well with all of the printers and PCs on my Windows network.

Included applications are actually useful and meaningful, not teasers to get the computer owner to buy the "full" version. Itunes is legendary in the Mac and PC worlds and yes, it's even better on a MacBook Pro. Plug in three iPods and this computer practically yawns as if to say, "That's all you want to do? Three simultaneous iPod updates with different information, playlists, podcasts and video?" iCal is a system-wide accessible scheduling application which is compatible with Outlook and can trade calendar, meeting and scheduling data back and forth with other Mac and Outlook users. Iphoto is Apple's photo application which imports directly from cameras, off a network, from servers, from the Internet - anywhere. It is a photo organizer with basic editing capability which is all most users (ahem - I am one) will ever need. It links to Mail to make sending photos a snap. Import, drag, drop, send. Done.

I had always used Eudora Pro on PCs because it could handle multiple accounts easily. Apple Mail is even better at doing this. In the account set-up process it can actually query SMTP servers to find out how they like to be addressed (Outlook has some of the capability) and it can learn just how those servers like to handle mail on all of a user's accounts. So checks and sends are very fast and efficient. Mail handles IMAP accounts far better than Eudora or Outlook and to me, does it better than Entourage but some Mac users prefer Microsoft's Entourage which is part of Office for the Mac.

OS X includes applications for editing video, re-sizing video for iPods, editing audio and basic word processing. MicroSoft Office for the Mac is cool, well-written and provides platform compatibility with the PC world through Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage. I recommend this highly, especially for those who work in a largely PC environment. I even imported my WordPerfect templates into Word for the Mac and they work better on the Mac than in WordPerfect on a PC.

The part which really surprised me about OS X is that I can run my old, antique, DOS-based (yes, you read that correctly) accounting system on my Mac. Through a shareware utility called DosBox, available online, I can run my 1988 copy of FoxBase (again, you read that correctly) which in turn runs an application I wrote in 1988 for keeping track of my business expenses for tax purposes. This DOS application runs better and faster on my Mac than it does on my PC. I didn't have to give up my favorite, lean expense-tracking application just because I moved up to a Mac. This blew my mind!

Backing-Up

I have yet to find a PC backup strategy which does not involve "hope" as a key component. We hope it write the correct info. We hope the huge data file is not corrupted. We hope if we need it, our data will be there and readable. This has always bothered me. OS X side-steps all of this.

Plug in a USB or Firewire outboard drive and you can not only back-up all of your "user" files from emails to Word templates, fonts, music, photos and video, but you can also create a "Startup Image". Fellow PC users, take a deep breath. Exhale. Again. Good. This is an actual clone of your hard drive. It's not a backup. It IS your hard drive in exact detail. Anything your local drive can do, your remote drive can do. You can start-up the computer from the outboard drive and run it from that drive. It will be slower going through a cable but if you use FW800, it won't be much slower.

This means if your internal drive dies, you install a new one, boot the Mac from the outboard drive and tell it to restore everything - EVERYTHING! At FW800 speed, after 45 minutes it will all be back. Partition your outboard drive and use one partition for your startup image and the other for multiple generations of user file backups. Oh, did I mention that the user file backups look exactly the way they do on the Mac. You can drag and drop them back and forth. You don't need proprietary software to look through the folders and pick out something you need. You can see what you've got. This is but one Mac backup strategy. All are more useful and secure than PC backup strategies because Apple lets its customers clone the operating system and even provides the utility (Disk Utility) for doing so. Amazing and thank you, Apple.

Compatibility with the PC World

There will always be a few issues such as evolving video formats. There is a Windows Media Player for the Mac but Microsoft has ceased development of this product. However, there is a freeway application called Flip4mac which installs plug-ins to allow Windows Media audio and video to be played in Quicktime with all of the Quicktime controls. Move up to Quicktime Pro and you can capture and edit Windows video in Quicktime on a Mac. Use the version which comes with a Mac and Flip4Mac and you can watch Windows video in amazing quality.

Safari is a lightning-fast browser which I took to immediately. There are a few minor compatibility issues on a few websites but I even find compatibility problems with IE7 now and then, depending on how a page was coded. Safari coexists well with other browsers such as Firefox and Camino without a constant war to determine which will be the preferred browser. Drag them all down to the dock and use any one you want or all three at the same time.

I have yet to find anything I do on a PC which I cannot do as well if not better on a Mac. The days of the two platforms being polar opposites are definitely over. Both Microsoft and Apple are hearing their customers in this area.

Battery Life

The battery in this computer will last a good 3.5 hours with all resources on. Turn off resources such as the AirPort Extreme WiFi section and it will run longer. Unlike a PC which runs to the end of its battery, the Mac simply goes to sleep until it can be charged. No fuss, just a nap. It doesn't crash or even hibernate. It just sleeps until it gets some more energy. I can get 4.5 hours out of my battery easily and the efficiency with which a Mac sleeps allows it to turn off when not in use and bounce right back instantly when needed so it can get though a full day of work on the battery alone.

Bluetooth

As a longtime PC user I was under the impression that Bluetooth was just a cruel joke. I never got it to work on a PC - not reliably anyway. Oh, I could get a Bluetooth mouse to work for a while on a PC and then get a freeze or even a blue screen which was supposed to be impossible. At least they were color-coordinated. Apple got it right. The Bluetooth keyboard from apple and the "Mighty Mouse" are must-have accessories. They just work. I'll repeat that. They just work! They don't hang or fail to pair or disconnect. They just work. Let a Mac go to sleep and it can be awakened by the wireless keyboard OR mouse. I don't know how that works. I'm just glad it does.

Overall Impressions

Having thought I might be spending $2800 on a toy which might not help me a lot in work, I was pleasantly surprised. The MacBook Pro is solid, reliable, lightning-fast and does not need to be iron-plated with protection software to keep bad things out. A Mac can still be attacked but only if the user lets something nasty in through the front door by typing his/her password and telling the system to install it. Just be careful in what you download and install and you won't need that protective overhead. If you have to work in a dangerous environment, several protective software packages are available from Norton, McAfee and others. I don't use one and I'm very much okay with that.

In four months of daily use, I have not had anything quit, freeze, lock-up, reboot or blow my data to tiny bits. This computer has been 100% reliable and a real joy to use. It saves me time by not asking me silly questions, deluging me with pop-ups to tell me the obvious such as "You are now connected to..." or "New hardware has been detected." It lets me know what I need to know and the rest of the time it shuts up and lets me get on with my work. I have found that I have some time to play now with music, photos and video.

It is tempting to write about this computer in nothing but a long string of superlatives which would make it sound like the Super Bowl played in Valhalla. I jus thave nothing negative to say after four months of constant use. I can't think of a time when this has happened with any product. Oh, I wish it would jump up and clean my kitchen or wash my car. That's as close as I can get to criticism. I suppose if pressed, I could say that the housing is more delicate than a plastic computer housing and that it requires some extra care, but that's it, folks. Okay, one problem. I force myself to travel by air with a PC because I am not about to place my beautiful MacBook Pro into one of those government-issue plastic trays at the airport and then let a trained monkey slam it through the x-ray machine. Apple has this covered with clip-on hard plastic skins to protect the computer but I am a purist. Like a fawn frolicking in the woods, my Mac should be in its natural environment, safe on my desk.

Final Thoughts

The MacBook Pro is a true alternative to the PC. It is more powerful, faster and has a more advanced operating system which does more "real stuff". Provided software is real, not a bunch of "gotchas". It's beautiful, fast, efficient and fun to use. Comparably equipped PC hardware works out to be within $100 in price so the old "Macs are expensive" is no longer true. I am glad I bought this computer and glad I joined "the dark side". I actually look forward to Mondays now because I know I won't be fighting with my computer to get things done.