Just about a month and a half after Steve Jobs's surprisingly unsurprising announcement at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco that the first two Intel-based Macs to be rolled out would be the iMac and the MacBook Pro—the apparently newly re-named PowerBook—MacBook Pros finally started arriving at eager users' doorsteps, but not without their own concoction of rumors as anticipation of actual MacBook Pros grew near.

There were rumors that the floor models available at MacWorld were mere prototypes and that the final design of the MacBook Pro was not even finished yet. There were rumors of chip shortages. There were even rumors that excessive demand was driving long shipping delays that apparently no one who had ordered immediately after MacWorld was experiencing whatsoever. Luckily, these rumors appear to have been all for naught, and the MacBook Pro started shipping last week exactly as expected, with one exception. A mere day before they were originally slated to start shipping to the masses, Apple bumped the chip speed of both the high- and low-end models of the MacBook pro from 1.83GHz to 2.0GHz and from 1.67GHz to 1.83GHz, respectively (with a 2.16GHz version available for built-to-order machines). While mystifying, no one was arguing with that, even if it did push everyone's shipping back by one more week.

That said, they're all finally rolling out, with the 2.0GHz versions shipping first and then the 1.83GHz versions in short pursuit. Here at the Orbiting HQ, we acquired a 1.83GHz MacBook Pro for review and have had an eventful time doing so.

 

Machine Specs:
CPU: 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo
RAM: 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM
Bus speed: 667MHz
Video: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600
VRAM: 128MB
Hard drive: 80 GB 5400 rpm ATA/100
optical drive: 4x SuperDrive
display: 15.4" (38 cm) 24-bit 1440 x 900 color active matrix
size: 9.6 x 14.1 x 1.0" (259 x 357 x 25.9 mm)
weight: 5.6 pounds (2.54 kg)

The first generation of MacBook Pros are obviously meant to be the next step after the last model of G4 PowerBook, the 1.67GHz G4 aluminum PowerBook that got announced in October of 2005, a mere four months before the official announcement of the MacBook pro. Alas, the low-end MacBook Pro was originally meant to also be 1.67GHz (albeit faster because of the dual core chip), but even with the last-minute speed bump, the MacBook Pro is near identical in dimensions to its G4 predecessor in many ways but with a few very subtle differences. The MacBook Pro is 0.1 inches deeper, 0.4 inches wider, 0.1 inches thinner, and exactly the same weight as the 15" Aluminum PowerBook G4. An 0.4 inch width difference is a seemingly insignificant yet important detail to make note of, as it makes squeezing the MacBook Pro into previously-owned sleeves, bags, and accessories made for other 15" Apple notebooks something like desperately trying to zip up that pair of tight high school jeans while laying on your back and holding your breath—it may technically "fit" but, it doesn't quite, if you know what I mean. As a proud longtime owner of a 15 inch G4 PowerBook up until about six months ago, I had collected a number of these accessories (not the least of which being my oh-so-trendy Timbuk2 Commuter bag, specifically made for the 15" Apple notebook and bought at an Apple retail Store) and had kept them around in anticipation of new PowerBooks, now MacBook Pros, around the corner. Attempting to slip my MacBook Pro into the built-in sleeve in my Timbuk2 bag as I was running off to work this morning was, to put it politely, rather snug. I'm still not sure how I feel about this.

"Honey, that sleeve does NOT make your butt look fat!"

Upon initial boot, the OS operated, well, exactly as expected. It played me an upbeat song while saying hello to me in something like 20 different languages, had me fill out my basic info, and then asked if I'd like to transfer my data from another Mac. Why, of course I would, thank you for asking! I hooked up an oldskool FireWire cable between my new MacBook pro and my 6-month-interim 12" iBook G4 and was off transferring my files, users, and network settings over, which took about an hour to transfer roughly 30 gigs of data. This convenient little system is standard issue these days with all new Macs, Intel or not.

After transferring all of my precious stuff, it was RAM installing time. The RAM is user-servicable, as it has been for several generations of PowerBooks now, but seems to have gotten progressively more inconvenient over time. Back in the TiBook days, all you had to do was pop off the keyboard and get behind the AirPort card (if there was one) to add a stick of RAM. These days, as with the AlBooks, the RAM slot is accessible on the bottom of the computer above the battery slot, wherein you must remove a small panel that is screwed on using the World's Smallest Screws To Exist, Evar™—hope somebody in your household has tiny glasses! Past that, however, installing RAM is a breeze. Unscrew, snap, screw, and you're done.

 

Disturbing, however, was the alarmingly long BEEEEEEEEP that I was greeted with once I tried to boot up the MacBook Pro post-RAM-installation. I had hit the power button but the screen was black and the sleep light in the front had blinked at me a few times, and then several solid seconds of just straight BEEEEEEEEEEEP. After looking horrified at what, at the moment, I had thought was suddenly a dead MacBook Pro, the computer rang its familiar Apple chime and continued to boot up as if nothing happened. What in the world? Some quick searches on the web yield no useful results for "MacBook beep," so the entire thing is still somewhat of a mystery. I shut down and booted up again soon after that in an attempt to re-create the event, but it never happened again. Yet.

Eric already gave a fairly complete mini-review of the new iApps available to new Macs (such as Front Row and Photo Booth) in his iMac Core Duo review, but I'd just like to make a couple of extra notes. The availability of the built-in iSight camera just above the screen and in between the two (two!) latches is certainly a brand new addition to Apple's pro-line notebooks, and according to some of our reader feedback, both a welcome and unwelcome change. It is unwelcome because, as Jade mused while at the MacWorld Expo, Apple can say goodbye to any previous PowerBook-using government workers or anyone who works in any sort of secure environment where cameras of any kind are not allowed. Oops on Apple's part. People with families or those who travel a lot, particularly business or service men & women, are thrilled to have the iSight built into the MacBook's frame to maximize the ability to visually communicate with loved ones without having to carry around extraneous bulky accessories.

Hello from my bedroom, where all the magic happens.

Speaking of bedrooms, and not in the least bit tongue-in-cheek, I can see the built-in iSight as just a new and even easier means for amateur uh... adult photos... to be taken and sent around the Internet. I, for one, welcome our new DickCam overlords. Okay, not really.

Front Row on the MacBook Pro works in the same way as it works on all other Macs that it comes installed on, and the MacBook Pro even comes with its own little Front Row remote with a tiny IR port on the front of the computer next to the latch button. Some people have lamented the loss of the S-Video out port on the MacBook Pro, which would make hooking the notebook up to a television for use with Front Row very simple, but the MacBook Pro comes with a DVI-out port and you can buy a DVI-to-Svideo converter from the Apple Store to satisfy your notebook-to-TV needs. The only annoying difference is that you actually have to buy a $20 accessory instead of the computer just being able to do it. Front Row itself is simple and delightful to use via the remote, which came as a surprise to me as I didn't consider it to be a particularly exciting feature of new Macs in general before I tried it out. I can't wait until a Mac mini gets released with Front Row installed and a little infared remote to call its very own.

Most of us, at least those of us who are not brand new Mac users, are long familiar by now with Apple's inclusion of the backlit keyboard, starting with the first Aluminum PowerBook G4 model all the way up through the MacBook Pro. Briefly, there are sensors on the sides of the keyboard hidden somewhere in the two speaker areas that detect the level of ambient light in the room and, when the room gets dark or you move to a darker area, automatically and gentlyr raises the level of backlight behind the keys of the keyboard. For the longest time, this was the single most exciting thing about the prospect of getting a new PowerBook for me, even though I almost never look at my hands or the keyboard at all while typing! Even the most experienced typist may need just a little bit of lighted guidance while popping open the laptop in the middle of the night, and it's an awesome automatic feature that I'm certainly glad was carried over into the new Intel line of Apple pro notebooks.

In addition to the keyboard backlight, OS X also has the option (which is turned on by default) to also adjust screen brightness automatically depending on ambient light conditions. This, at first, seemed equally as awesome as the automatic keyboard backlight adjustments, until I was sitting in bed last night typing up this review while cats and other resident humans were circling around me causing ever-so-slight shadows here and there—enough to have my screen brightness be automatically dimming and lighting again every few seconds. Needless to say, this got to be obnoxious rather quickly and I opted to turn it off in the System Preferences, which saddened me a bit to have to do, but it had to be done. I wish there was a sensitivity slider for the ambient light sensors so that such a subtle difference in lighting wouldn't have my screen brightness going up and down like a speaker system display.

While on the topic of screens, the screen on the MacBook Pro is nothing less than stellar. It's extremely bright, crisp, and the colors look great while still staying true to the Mac color profile. An quick of Pixel Tester 2.11 made sure that, to my delight, I had no dead pixels! LCD nitpickers, I believe, will be pleased with the brightness of the screen, however for my sensitive eyes, I usually run it on the lowest or second to lowest brightness notch for the large majority of my everyday use. This, however, brings me to my next complaint, which is that there are times when I have been using the MacBook Pro, set at the second-lowest brightness or so, and can see what I can only describe as a very faint screen flickering, as if the display was attempting to brighten itself by one degree and then going back to where it's set to. I observed this over a period of several days and even got several second-opinions to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. My cohorts, too, confirmed what appeared to be the presence of just the slightest screen flicker—something that is so subtle as to make you question whether you're losing your mind, but is present enough to begin to become annoying after some use. When I turned the screen brightness up a few notches, this flicker seemed to go away from what I and my co-observers could tell. Again, some quick Internet research didn't appear to turn up too many results except for one person's observation of a screen flicker on one of the floor model MacBook Pros at the MacWorld Expo. Was this foreshadowing for what could potentially be a real, non-imagined screen problem? We're not exactly sure yet, but we'll keep our eyes and ears out for any more news on the topic.

Finally, one of the newest and most seemingly innovative additions to the MacBook Pro is MagSafe, Apple's new power connector that goes between the power brick and the laptop itself that uses magnets instead of the old circular plug that has been in use since the Titanium PowerBook. As any laptop user can attest, there are just times, usually at least several, in a laptop's lifetime in which people (particularly small, young ones, but also drunken college roommates and the like) will be walking/running/dancing by, snag a foot on your power cord, and suddenly you find yourself making a heroic dive in an attempt to save your laptop from its impending crash to the floor as it sails through the air in slow motion. MagSafe is supposed to be the answer to that, as it connects very easily (I mean, who doesn't like the feeling of sticking magnets together?) and also disconnects very easily in the event of an unfortunate almost-accident such as the one described above. Herein are my trials and tribulations regarding MagSafe.

I have personally experienced the "trip-on-the-cord-OMG-CRASHING-TO-THE-FLOOR" scenario several times in the past, and albeit scary, the notebook has always survived (perhaps with a dent or two). At first, like most experienced laptop owners, I was thrilled to hear about MagSafe. Finally, our laptops are safe from terrorists clumsy people! Like a true reviewer, I was determined to put MagSafe to the test and put my new MacBook Pro's livlihood at risk, for the sake of science of course.

Initial tests provided predictable results. While running or even just casually happening by and snagging the cord, MagSafe released the cord as expected and no one was hurt. Things were looking promising. And then we ran over it with a car... Oh sorry, wrong review.

However, MagSafe began to prove itself as slightly less and less useful as I continued to use my MacBook in the manner I like to use it best, which is not on a table or desk. I'm one of those lazy hippies who likes to do her power computing in bed or on the couch while watching the new season of American Idol, where I'm most comfortable getting down & dirty with some code or an article. This is when MagSafe began to rear its ugly head. The problem is that, being a magnet that is designed, after all, to disconnect easily in the event of an accident, it, well, disconnects easily. A little too easily. Placing the MacBook Pro on my lap caused the MagSafe to pop out as it touched my leg at a less than 90 degree angle. 5 minutes later, after reconnecting the power, a cat came and laid next to me, plopping down on the power cord in a relaxing manner, causing MagSafe to disconnect once again. Frustrated, I laid on my side and pulled the laptop way over so that it was sitting flat on the bed and away from any legs or other living creatures lounging around. I thought I'd finally won, but 20 minutes later, I discovered that the MagSafe had once again become disconnected (by some method unknown to me) and had been for some time, as my battery was now down a fair amount. Bollocks!

Given this newly annoying experience, I'm torn as to whether I actually "like" MagSafe or not. I like the idea of it, and I like the concept that my MacBook Pro will never have to experience what PowerBooks, iBooks, and other PC laptops of yonder past have had to go through in order to earn their battle wounds. A fellow Ars staffer reported to me that he was able to practically drag his co-worker's MacBook Pro across the desk via the MagSafe power cord, and I confirmed the steadfastness of the MagSafe magnet when pulling directly perpendicular to the computer itself (pulling straight outwards from the plug)—it's pretty difficult to pull out in this manner. However, pulling at even the slightest angle, jerking, bumping, or anything really, the MagSafe comes out for pretty much anything. Personally, I'm not sure if the constant, accidental unplugging for the entire rest of the life of this laptop is worth the tradeoff for a couple of accidents here & there. You can be the judge of your own experience, but for me, it ultimately proved to be a quite a bit less than pleasing.

Ever since Jade's observation on Infinite Loop about the floor model MacBook Pros at MacWorld having what he considered to be "meh" battery life at 3 hours and 3 minutes, I figured that the battery life was an important element of testing on my brand new MacBook Pro. I ran three battery life tests from full 100% charge down to 0% charge with constant use, no sleeping, at the 2nd to dimmest (hey, that's average use for me!) screen brightness, but with everything else set to default computer settings (AirPort on, Bluetooth on, etc.). My usage, among these tests, comprised of average everyday things for me: surfing the web heavily, chatting on IM and Ars IRC, some benchmarking, both heavy and light Photoshop work, a fair bit of development work in Dreamweaver and SubEthaEdit, sorting through my photos in iPhoto and testing out a few slideshows, sorting through my music in iTunes, and the writing & editing of this review. I did slightly different activities for the three tests (because no one does exactly the same thing every single time they sit down to use the computer), but overall I considered my usage to be roughly the same "intensity" each time and wanted to average out my battery life times to get the best estimate.

I have mixed feelings on the results. On one hand, an average time of 3 hours and 15 minutes is not necessarily bad (in fact, many of my PC-laptop-using friends were still jealous to hear even this number). However, it's not as good as it could have been. I had been hoping for an average of 3:30 (even though I did nearly achieve that at least once this time), as I frequently got 3:30 or even up to 4 hours on my old 15" PowerBook and my 12" iBook. Apple has actually upped the battery from 50 watt-hours in the Titanium and Aluminum PowerBook G4s to 60 watt-hours in the MacBook Pro, but the battery life (especially for a brand new battery) seems to have taken a fairly noticable dive, no doubt due to the change in architecture for both the CPU and otherwise. My resident EE tells me that the dual core Yonah processors in the MacBook Pro use about 25 to 47 watts of power consumption versus about 30 or so on the Aluminum PowerBook G4s.

It is important to note, however, that there is a "Better Performance" option under the battery life menu which, undoubtedly, maximizes the battery life in every way that the computer can, such as turning off the screen after a very short time of no use and ramping down the processor speed when not required, but I wanted to run my battery life tests as realistically as I could with 3+ hours of straight usage in a "real world"-like situation. Your mileage may vary.

Ahh, the section that is of utmost interest to pretty much everyone. It is, after all, the ultimate reason for the Intel switch to begin with. We've all heard by now from various sources that the new Intel Macs "still feel like Macs, through and through." Well, without getting repetitive, this is still true of the MacBook Pro. There is no reason to think of it any differently than any other Mac, it certainly behaves in every way that a Mac user would expect, and after all, it don't matter what's on the inside; it's what's on the outside that counts! Er, something like that...

OS X, as you can expect, feels extremely (X-TREMEly?) fast on the MacBook Pro—certainly much faster than I, as a longtime Mac user, am used to on a Mac. Most apps, such as Safari, Mail, and iTunes launch in between a half a bounce to one full bounce. System Profiler, which typically takes about 800 light years to bring up, comes up instantaneously. iPhoto scrolls ridiculously fast, even with a library full of probably a couple thousand 8MB photographs, Spotlight certainly finds things much quicker than my dual G4 tower, and all is right with the world. The slowdown begins when you start trying to mess with Rosetta apps, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Photoshop is perfectly usable, but not in any way up to the speed it could be running at if it were in Universal Binary. Eric went over Rosetta in fairly good detail in his iMac Core Duo review, but as a reminder, Rosetta means that PowerPC binaries can be translated realtime to run on the Intel Macs, which technically makes them "non-native" and therefore slower than their native, Universal Binary counterparts.

We actually have three testing machines for this round of benchmarks, which I think produced some good results.

Yes, you read that right. We at the Orbiting HQ were able to gain access to an acquaintance's Dell Inspiron 9100 with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT chip running OS X 10.4.4, and decided that including the benchmarks from this machine would prove to be both interesting if not illustrative of what non-Apple x86 machines may be capable of, when put head-to-head, running OS X. However, it's important to remember that since OS X on this machine is essentially hacked and running with hacked drivers for all of its components, it is not and probably will not ever be able to run OS X at its 100% ability as long as Apple decides to keep the OS to themselves.

The other machine used in these benchmarks is the closest G4 PowerBook to the MacBook Pro, the 1.67GHz Aluminum PowerBook G4 that was released in October of 2005.

As you can see, the MacBook Pro's startup time at 23 seconds blows away both the AlBook, but matches perfectly with the Dell. I must admit that it's almost ridiculously fast when you witness it in person, and 23 seconds in writing actually seems a lot longer than you perceive it to be. I'm used to starting up and then going to get some water or something, but this puppy blows through the startup like I never shut down in the first place. The Dell's startup time was impressive to me, considering its relatively poor performance in the following Xbench test (due, no doubt, to the fact that it is running non-natively). At almost half the time of the AlBook's startup, things are looking good for the MacBook Pro.

The next series of tests were run on XBench 1.2 because, as we observed in the iMac Core Duo review, a Universal Binary application and therefore is able to benchmark the MacBook Pro against its noble competitors at its best. <-- Sentence needs serious help

Some of these results are surprising, and some are not. For one, the Aluminum PowerBook G4 mysteriously scored higher on the User Interface test than both of the other machines. Both the AlBook and the Dell scored higher on the desk desk, undoubtedly because they both actually have faster hard drives installed than the MacBook Pro's stock 5400 rpm drive. The CPU test results were rather close for all three with some minor differences, and of course the MacBook Pro spanked the AlBook on the Thread test (while spanking the Dell only slightly less). On the memory test, the MacBook Pro's RAM was significantly faster than the PowerBook G4.

Overall scores for the three machines were about what was expected, with the MacBook pro standing at 53.71, the AlBook G4 at 45.73, and the Dell P4 at 22.96, a score no doubt affected by the exceptionally poor performance in the User Interface test. Without that score factored in, the Dell performed pretty well comparatively. One can only imagine what OS X would be like on it if it were actually supported!

In addition to XBench, we also decided to run Cinebench 9.5, which is now also available in Universal Binary. Cinebench is interesting because it does a number of 3D tests based off of Cinema 4D and is available for both Mac and Windows, so it can be very representative of a machine's capabilities against one another.

Watching Cinebench run on the MacBook Pro hurt a little, even though it appears to have out-performed the other two machines on the various tests. On the single and multiple CPU rendering tests, it performed very similarly to the Dell running OS X (to stay consistent with the rest of our benchmarks with that machine). The MacBook Pro looks to have done exceedingly well in both of the shading tests, until you consider that the Dell's WindowsXP Cinebench scores (not included in the chart) for those two tests blew the MacBook Pro out of the water while running on graphics drivers that aren't hacked. Still though, the MacBook Pro performed, in numbers, a little better than I expected after having watched it chug through the tests.

The final set of benchmarks that we ran on these three troopers was a Quicktime encoding benchmark. We used a 24.6MB Quicktime .mov file and exported it for iPod using all of the default Quicktime Pro settings. The timing was started using a stopwatch from the moment the "Save" button was clicked until the encoding finished.

Both the MacBook Pro and the Dell performed very similarly and beat out the AlBook, but the Dell ultimately won at 1 minute and 22 seconds of encoding versus the MacBook Pro's 1 minute and 26 seconds. This is an impressive result for the Dell, as it performed at the same level as the MacBook Pro during the startup test and then slightly faster during the encoding test, but it's important to remember that the P4 HT processor is doing so at a rather high power consumption cost of roughly 70 watts (remember that earlier, we mentioned that the MacBook Pro's Core Duo processor was running at about 25 to 47 watts). So, at the very least, we can rest assured that the MacBook Pro is making efficient use of its power in comparison. The AlBook, well, let's just be glad they're selling MacBook Pros now.

All in all, the MacBook Pro is an extremely solid machine that makes me happy to be back in the Apple Pro notebook world after a six month hiatus in 12" iBook-land. The Intel switch has been an important step forward for Apple in general, but particularly for their pro lines of hardware to keep moving forward, technology-wise, at a competitive rate. Unfortunately, however, most pro software is not yet available in Universal Binary and is not expected to be for a little while (Adobe is estimating sometime in 2007, for example), but Rosetta is usable enough to get by in the meantime for those who are willing to put up with a little lag. Apple is still projecting their pro apps to be available in Universal Binary in March of this year, so we'll see if that ends up being true. If so, the migration over to Intel hardware for graphic and video pros will probably start moving a little bit quicker.

Because of some of the oddball behavior I experienced with this machine, however, I'm hesitant to be as glowing about the MacBook Pro as I could potentially be. The alarming beep upon a random boot after installing the RAM still has yet to come back, which is definitely a good thing, but I can't bring myself to forget about it just yet—the same goes for the low brightness screen flicker.

I feel that the MagSafe power connector is an absolutely ingenious idea that could use a little more refinement, given my experiences with it. Sure, it holds better than white on rice when attempting to pull it straight out, but what about, say, the entire rest of your daily life which is not so predictable and controlled? I already find myself now making special concessions in my laptop-using habits to try to ensure that the MagSafe is less at risk of being popped out by something unexpected, such as the mere existance of my own limbs or wandering-by, but ultimately harmless pets.

Despite all of this, US$1999 for the low-end and $2499 for the high-end MacBook Pro are still both good deals for good machines, as the MacBook Pros remained at the same price points that the previous 15-inch Aluminum PowerBook G4s were at before the MacWorld announcement in January. I remember back in the day when I ordered a 15" Titanium PowerBook G4 at 667MHz that came out to something like $3,200 after tax, and that was with my educational discount at the time! Apple's pro notebooks have come a long way since then both in price and technology, and the Intel switch is just one more step towards bigger and better things in that regard.

• Significant speed bump for Apple's pro notebooks
• Beautiful, bright display
• Built-in iSight (yay families!)
• Thinner than G4 predescessor
• Dual-link DVI

• MagSafe comes out too easily under imperfect conditions
• Wider than G4 predecessor (may have to purchase all new 15" laptop sleeves/bags if you have old ones)
• No Firewire 800, only 400
• Built-in iSight (bye gov people!)