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SINGAPORE: MacHeads love telling every one how long they’ve been using Apple’s computers.
As I entered adulthood (that wasn’t too long ago), I bought my first Mac — a black PowerBook G3, just like the one Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City (SATC) typed on as she deftly wrote about stories of love lost and love found (tip: it’s wise to first declare an unblemished history of heterosexuality before admitting your penchant for SATC). And like most first loves, it (the PowerBook, not SATC) holds a special place in my heart, the one which every new encounter will be meticulously compared to.
The new MacBook Pro (MBP) is a beauty. It looks svelte with its contoured edges and most of the vents and screws are hidden. But aesthetics alone won’t do it any favour among critics. Thankfully, the MBP’s unibody enclosure — crafted from a single piece of aluminium — is tough. You can’t easily flex the laptop with your hands.
Framed by a black bezel, the 15.4-inch LED-based display is bright, and colours appear rich and vivid. However, the reflective nature of the display will get to you, especially if you’re a photographer or creative professional who has to bring your laptop out for fieldwork.
Apple has removed the FireWire 400 port on the regular MacBook and its Pro incarnation (which still retains a FireWire 800 port). Although the change is a non-issue for people who make a switch over, it alienates the Mac faithful who has relied on the faster-than-USB port for external hard drives, troubleshooting Macs and digital video transfers.
The new multi-touch, button-less glass trackpad is a pleasure to use. So much so that you may just forego using a mouse when you’re on the road. The roomy trackpad is a huge button by itself and you can program it to register a right-click when you tap on its corner.
Apart from the two-finger gestures that allow you to scroll through a document, rotate an image or zoom in and out of photos, a new three-finger swipe flips through selected items and a four-finger swipe reveals the onscreen desktop and lets you view or open applications. Performing the gestures feels intuitive and natural.
The MBP has two graphics processors. Switch between the higher-end Nvidia 9600GT when you need visual horsepower and the power-saving 9400M by the cumbersome process of logging out and in again. Adding on-the-fly switching and the ability to use both processors in tandem, for an even bigger leap in performance, would have been a good inclusion.
In day-to-day use, the MBP’s battery life averaged four hours, when the power-efficient graphics setting was enabled, and three hours when high-performance graphics setting was activated: an hour shy of the five- and four-hour battery life Apple claims respectively for each setting.
The MBP has the brains to match its looks, and trumps my PowerBook of yore and even its most recent predecessor, thanks to an update in design and internal architecture.
Despite some arguable drawbacks like the glossy screen and the lack of FireWire 400, we figure that it’s a good investment, because once Apple ships Snow Leopard — the new version of Mac OS X — next year, you can expect this laptop to run much faster when the updated operating system makes better use of multi-core processors and powerful graphics processors. - TODAY/sh
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