Lecta's Den

As promised, this is my little review of my new MacBook Pro.

This is a CTO MacBook Pro: Intel Core2 Duo @ 2.4 Ghz, 200 GB 7200 RPM Hard Disk, 15.4 Widescreen display.

It took approximately 3 weeks to arrive at the Apple center were I bought it. It’s a very long time but it was ordered near Christmas so this maybe slowed down the shipping.

The overall aspect of the MacBook Pro is very cool. The keyboard and the display reacts to ambient light (on darker ambient the keyboard light up and the display decrease its brightness and vice versa). The quality of the LED display is very high. The keyboard feels quite comfortable but needs some time to get used to it.

Leopard is very fast on this machine. It boots fast, it reacts at user input fast, it runs every application that I tried fast…

Perfect? well, we are closer to perfection than any Windows PC I ever used (including one laptop with Vista Home Premium) but… as everything made by humans, there is still room for improvements.

I had, for example, some troubles with a USB LACIE disk connected to the USB port of my Airport base. Sometimes the Finder has problems connecting to it from the side bar while connecting trough the “Connect to server” menu item works every time. The WiFi speed is not as fast as I was expecting (I have only the MacBook using the wifi network and the Airport base is just one room away from my living room). Anyway the speed is enough to stream audio and video from my home server with no glitches.

The new iLife suite that is included with Leopard is very powerful and easy to use. The only application that disappointed me is the new iMovie. It surely is easier and faster than the previous one but it lacks completely many of the effects and plugin support of the previous version. Fortunately Apple has put iMovie ’06 available free for download to every iLife ’08 users.Time Machine alone is worth half the price of the Leopard upgrade. It’s very well done. The only drawback is the fact that, currently, it supports only external disks connected directly to the machine and not network drives (I know, there is a simple hack to use also network drives but it seems to work not very well… probably that’s why Apple disabled them).

To write about all the things I like of this MacBook Pro and Leopard I would need a couple of day chained at the keyboard… so instead I will write about the things I dislike (fortunately much less writing to do).

• Why the HELL Apple removed del DEL button??? Having only BACKSPACE is real nonsense.
• The same can be said about the left ALT button. Now to digit the @ character I have to use two hands. So now I can’t type and drink at the same time
• Only 2 USB ports. Nahh… adding another 2 USB ports was so difficult?
• No TV out… the only way to connect to a TV is through some adapter hooked to the external DVI connector.
• No way to eject a disk manually. I mean… a simple hole to force the ejection would be enough… but maybe slot-in readers are not designed for that.
• No SD/MMC card reader.

That’s all for now.