Pavel's diary

Summary of my experiences with MacBook Pro

As I wrote earlier this month, I have a new toy - MacBook Pro. I'll summarize my experiences with it here.

If you do not want to read everything, just skip to the end ;-)

Packaging of MB Pro is (as always) perfect - decent black box (its depth is 8 cm) with white Apple logos on it. You can see some photos at Flickr.

Connecting MB Pro to power is easy - MagSafe connector is interesting idea. Its plug is located at the left side of the notebook. It would be nice to have the possibility to plug the power cable on the right side as well. I haven't tried to use USB nor, audio, nor card slot yet.

Keyboard illumination is fantastic - you can control it with F8, F9 and F10. Big icons on the monitor shows the current status when you press one them. When the light conditions are good, you can't turn the illumination at all. Working during night is much easier than it was before!

I had the first revision of MB Pro and its right speaker's sound is not clean. E.g. when you TAB complete commands in the terminal, it is audible very well. This is fixed in later revisions.

The raw compilation speed of the machine is impressive though. Working on battery depends on your workload. All I can write now is that it is very good at least according to my opinion - being able to compile for 3 hours when on battery is enough for me ;-). Wireless reception is quite good.

I'm now using a notebook which is a bit smaller and it is only 1.2 kg, so the new machine is a bit heavy for me. I also do not like the method of opening the display. I had to train myself before get used to it.

At the end, I think I'm now dependent on this machine. It is so impressive that I will cut down my requirements like docking station etc. and will bought new updated machine once available.

Summary: I like this machine. I was doing almost all of my OpenOffice.org related work on it in last days and I found it to be brilliant machine for developers. I have to return it back to Quentin tomorrow and I have to wait for the upgrade of processor from Apple. Hard days to come... I get used to it and going back to slower machine is not ideal ;-) Working with it is like drug - you can't stop :-) And I won't stop.

I'd like to thank again to Quentin and Martin Lér for the time I could spend with it. Good evaluation.