Macintels, Round One: Impressions and Opinions

I vote underwhelmed.

 

For a pro laptop, the screen should have been at least 1080p. 2 USB ports is absurd. No firewire 800 is weird, since they all had it. No S-Video out is irritating, cause they force you into buying their connector, which also means another thing to carry around with. They could have offered an improvement in price, but I guess that'll only come after they balance their R&D for the new platform. It's actually funny to hear that the new generic Intel processor costs them more than their proparitory G4/G5 processor.

 

Oh well. Hopefully the 17" Macbook pro will be a kiler.

 

Oded S.

 

P.S., Yes, MacBook Pro is a terrible name for a product.

I'm also disappointed to find that the mac book pro has no modem, a laptop with no modem? another thing to carry around now that's just stupid. I can understand that the imac has no modem but a laptop without a modem? crazy

Edited January 22, 2006 by Ptracker

I'm also disappointed to find that the mac book pro has no modem, a laptop with no modem? another thing to carry around now that's just stupid. I can understand that the imac has no modem but a laptop without a modem? crazy

 

 

The MacBook Pro has no modem because it has built-in WiFi (AirPort Express). That feature (and the lack of a modem) actually makes all sorts of sense given the preponderence of WiFi (and the growing lack of modem jacks).

Everyone would do ok with firewire 400 anyways, if you have a 5200rpm hdd it doesnt really matter.

Also, lol i dont use dial up, i dont want a modem

2 USB ports is okay, i mean how many things do you plan to plug in anyways?

Anyways, the price will prob not drop but specs will get higher

The MacBook Pro has no modem because it has built-in WiFi (AirPort Express). That feature (and the lack of a

modem) actually makes all sorts of sense given the preponderence of WiFi (and the growing lack of modem jacks).

 

Ack, and that is very useful if you live in a bigger city. But if not, this is really a minus. We know apple for

doing things like that, to show us that they are always at the peek of the technical evolution. Remember the

non-floppy iMac

 

Maybe it is because they think they hit their target group with the overpaid modern cosmopolit. I could live

without a modem, but i also can understand the folks that can't.

 

Maybe it is just the way how apple defines their "rest of us". And maybe this is one of the reasons why I would

like to help to free OSX for "the other rest of us"

 

I am very interested to hear some allday-tests from the current MacTel owners.

Edited January 22, 2006 by xtraa

I like how when watching a clip from the Mac booth, a MacBook presenter said something like "Apple has decided to drop the s-video input to provide one clean, unconfusing dvi output." It's a nice way of saying "we dropped some features." There's a difference between progress and retrogression.

 

Would it really be that hard to have s-video AND dvi? What about wi-fi AND a modem? Maybe these are cut-backs in an attempt to keep their MacBook line at the same price as the PowerBook line, since the new Intel cpus are a lot more expensive than the powerpc cpus they had in Powerbooks.

 

 

I think apple's reasoning is that most new LCD and plasma TVs sold now have DVI input - and DVI input provides a much cleaner and higher resolution picture than S-video. I hooked up a laptop to a TV via S-video - and it wasn't pretty. Text was blurry.

 

AS for the intel chips being more costly than the PPC ones, that's true - on a level. Yes, the PPC chips are cheaper, but Apple paid for the development of those chips, and also had to develop a chipset to go along with the chip - therefore mitigating some of the price difference. With Intel, Apple gets the chip at a higher price, but it also gets a matching chipset to go along with that which Intel developed.

 

If we look at how long it took mainstream PC technologies like PCI, AGP, PCI Express, etc. took to appear in a PPC mac, going with Intel ensures that Apple will have those technologies much sooner.

Performance increases are great but they actually reduced screen real estate by 60 pixels...

 

I'm upset by the reduction of features and the non-inclusion of the legacy bios in the EFI setup. Frankly I think Apple hasn't got the same priorities that their customers have....

Hi all,

 

I have ordered a MacBook pro, and i think/hope that these are very cool computers. I have actually a PowerBook G4 17" 1GHz and it become to be really slow for my tasks (essentially development), so with the new laptop i hope to be a lot more productive, especially since i will have a 7200 rpm hard drive and 2 cores : i hope that this will really improve the performances when running servers (sgbd, web, application) and developing with an IDE like Eclipse (which use a lot of RAM and CPU when doing things like refactoring, recompiling, I/O...) on the same computer.

 

Also it seems, and i discover this since i'm coming to this forum essentially to follow the topics about running Vista/XP SP3 on MacIntels, that this is difficult to have a computer/laptop with all his hardware supported by Mas OS X hacked to run on beige boxes. This will not be a problem for the MacIntels and we will perhaps be able to run Windows (i'm downloading build 5270 32bits now but the MacPro will not be here before one month :-( ) on it, so we will be able to do also gaming and testing [my goals behind running Windows on the Macintels]).

 

But now i'm afraid that the new EFI platform will prevent us to have a free choice for running OSes (see recent announcments about all drivers beeing signed for Vista Xp64), although Vista32 sound to be not so restrictive (so 64 bits OSes and computers will be locked by the cryptology used for communicating between drivers/os and hardware ? :-( ).

 

Also i think that the laptop arent really expensive because they have a lot of good peripherals integrated, and a good design, they are a little bit more expensive and less equipped than their counterparts on Dell/Acer but they are the only to run OS X for the moment with all the hardware supported.

 

So i'm really glad to read about these new platforms, so feel free to critizice my appreciation of the upcoming laptops, i can cancel my order if really they are bad (apart the fact that they introduce TPM :-( )

Edited January 22, 2006 by rastaman

I think the earlier critism of the iMac in this thread is a little unfair. You have to remember that the imac is to all intents and purposes a portable form factor machine so you have all the same cooling issues as you do with the laptops when you start to up the processor speeds in them. Also the type of people who buy an iMac are not after high end performance - i think we'll really have to wait on the new PowerMac of whatever apple decide to call it before we an draw true comparisons in perfomance of hacked up osx boxes to real macs. In the mean time it would be fairer to compare iMac performance to those of hacked osx laptops.

 

Dropping the modem from the powerbook seems like a strange move - its not like it takes up much space or costs a great deal. Firewire 800 never really took off so i can sort of understand them dropping that. I just wish they had included a higher res anti glare display. Nevermind - i've ordered one anyway so i guess i'll just have to wait and see.

I'm a bit disappointed as well. First they stuck with the old design (it is a cool design, but revolutionizing the interior should be accompanied with new exterior in my opinion). second: if you want an adequate powered homecomputer you're required to buy an internal display. sorry, leave it to the customer if they want 1 or 2 screens in the size of their choice. third: performance improvements should at least partially live up to the promises. They missed it. what do these dualcores do. why aren't they much faster than the oldschool P4 singlecore. why is iphoto 6 native not really faster than iphoto 5 through rosetta?

hope that the 30th anniversary will bring an imac pro!

Apple and the Mac crowd has a very different mindset than the normal computer user. They are willing to give up some speed and fuctionality in order to have a computer that is in a prettier package. Apple isn't for everyone and unfortunately they don't understand that. They see everything else as the "dull little boxes" from the commerical.

If I want to play a game or do something that requires alot of power, I do it on my desktop. I do however want a new laptop and am waiting for the intel ibook replacement. I like the 999 price point better than the pro 1999 price. I kinda hope they add the isight to the ibook and they don't call it a "macbook" eventhough I know they want the word 'mac' in the name. :sigh:

I have been fallowing Apple for some time and I am a big fan of their OS, but the recently release produts haven't convenced me to buy a MAC. I wish that the new IMAC with such a big screen had a secound INPUT, this would allow some flexibelity for us PC user to buy and IMAC and use it as a screen with PC.

I'm upset by the reduction of features and the non-inclusion of the legacy bios in the EFI setup. Frankly I think Apple hasn't got the same priorities that their customers have....

 

Are you daft? Apple is not about what you want. Apple wants you to want what they want.

Anyone know if that trackpad is a single-button mouse or dual-button mouse? I hate to say it, but someone will probably get Windows running on it but if you only have a single-button mouse, you won't be able to do much while traveling (I know you could use a bluetooth external mouse, but who wants to do that while sitting in an airport?)...

Well I guess they dont want to get into the details of why the dual core is better then the vanilla P4, as this would sort of be advertising for PCs...im sure we could find a dual core based PC at a lower price then an apple.

 

I agree that apples software is very nice. iLife is really one of the only proprietary peices of software i could ever see myself wanting.

 

I also agree that Macbook is a bad name, but i did not like the name powerbook either, i always thought it was a little ironic since it was less powerful then most other notebooks.

 

by the way and slightly off topic:

Does OS X have a disk defragment utility at this point?

 

all in all I am underwhellmed. I was hopping that the prices would drop with the intel chips. I guess the software and design might be worth the extra buck, but it has been my experience that apples unique software

and design is a double edged blade.

Edited January 23, 2006 by knavely

I was holding out to get a macbook this year but, with the problems it has so far, I really can't see myself plunking my hard earned 2 grand & a 1/2 down just for a laptop that will get put to shame when it comes to speed and preformance compared to a pc laptop half its price that can very well run the same osx with the option to swap hard drives to run xp/flavor of Linux etc. I really love macintosh but you pay a premium for their hardware. I think releasing the macbooks ahead of schedule seemed like a way to rake in sales from all the people that are about to get that fat income tax refund check and are looking to buy a decent laptop. This new macbook reminds me of the Xbox 360. They want to release it ahead of schedule even though it still has problems.

I've been an early adopter of various Macintosh computers since 1984. I've had the Mac 128k, I've had Apple's own (damned expensive) upgrade for that to 512k, I've had a few Performas, an original Bondi iMac, the early iMac DV, one of the "Playskool" design iBooks that supported DVD playback, the Cube, and lately my Mac Mini.

 

The trend has always been it pays to wait. OS X has been sucky (imho) up until Panther, and there are some features I felt should have been available from the get-go that actually haven't come about until Tiger.

 

Mac OS7~9 have been as bad or worse than a Windows system for me. I've always struggled with extension compatibility issues, hardware problems nobody could isolate, unexplained lockups and crashes...

 

I decided I could risk trying a Mac Mini because usually I can find out if a given Apple computer is going to be annoying to me within a week or less. I had 21 days in which I could return the unit (repackaged) for a full refund. During this time, I held its virtual feet to the fire.

 

After 21 days, the Mini never caused me grief. I decided then to pop the case, add 3rd-party RAM, overclock it to 1.5Ghz, change out the hard drive, upgrade to a DL DVD-RW slot drive, and add in the Airport/Bluetooth mezzanine card by myself.

 

In short, the Mini has been remarkably solid compared to the track record I have with "bleeding edge" newly-released Macintosh computers.

 

A Rosetta by any other name stinks as much as a 68k emulator. People who buy into the Intel-inside Macs are paying Apple to work out bugs in their system, beta test Rosetta, bring pressure on app developers to give them Universal Binary upgrades, and basically shakedown a new technology.

 

I see this point in time as being no better than when Apple transitioned to PPC chips, and perhaps as frustrating as the transition to OS X.

 

I am very tempted to watch price drops on these "half speed" iMac G5s which actually will run the legacy software as well or better than the Intel-inside versions, and definitely will run Universal Binary apps, but admittedly slower (although seldom 1/2 speed) of the "fast" iMacs.

 

People forget a computer's performance isn't all about CPU frequency. Things like RAM bus speed, graphics CPU performance, hard drive speed, and Internet connections all have some effect on the perceived speed of the system. Intel inside does have a superior CPU frequency, a superior RAM bus, but the graphics and Internet interfaces are basically the same between PPC and Intel.

 

I strongly suggest that people wait for 3Q or 4Q this year and see what the Apple line looks like then. You'll miss a lot of "early adopter's woes" which seems to be an industry standard for ALL computer makes and models, especially when a new technology is debuted.

Are there 15.4" LCDs with resolutions of 1080p?

 

Expresscard 34 will allow for more USB & FW ports. Intel's chipset doesnt support FW800.

 

The MBP's thinner than a comparable 15" Powerbook G4

I vote underwhelmed.

 

For a pro laptop, the screen should have been at least 1080p. 2 USB ports is absurd. No firewire 800 is weird, since they all had it. No S-Video out is irritating, cause they force you into buying their connector, which also means another thing to carry around with. They could have offered an improvement in price, but I guess that'll only come after they balance their R&D for the new platform. It's actually funny to hear that the new generic Intel processor costs them more than their proparitory G4/G5 processor.

 

Oh well. Hopefully the 17" Macbook pro will be a kiler.

 

Oded S.

 

P.S., Yes, MacBook Pro is a terrible name for a product.

 

 

According to Apple 10% of their users actually use the built-in modem. Only thing I'd find a built-in modem is if I used it to fax lots of docs & when my DSL's down. If my DSL's down i just go wardriving.

 

Ack, and that is very useful if you live in a bigger city. But if not, this is really a minus. We know apple for

doing things like that, to show us that they are always at the peek of the technical evolution. Remember the

non-floppy iMac

 

Maybe it is because they think they hit their target group with the overpaid modern cosmopolit. I could live

without a modem, but i also can understand the folks that can't.

 

Maybe it is just the way how apple defines their "rest of us". And maybe this is one of the reasons why I would

like to help to free OSX for "the other rest of us"

 

I am very interested to hear some allday-tests from the current MacTel owners.

 

 

Performance increases are great but they actually reduced screen real estate by 60 pixels...

 

I'm upset by the reduction of features and the non-inclusion of the legacy bios in the EFI setup. Frankly I think Apple hasn't got the same priorities that their customers have....

But increased the brightness by 67% making it as bright as their cinema displays. My #1 problem with my iBook is that under direct sunlight I cant see squat.

 

Apple designed their products to run OS X. Why spend extra resources for features only techies will use. Only reason anyone would need with legacy BIOS is if you wanted to run Windows or Linux.

I've been an early adopter of various Macintosh computers since 1984. I've had the Mac 128k, I've had Apple's own (damned expensive) upgrade for that to 512k, I've had a few Performas, an original Bondi iMac, the early iMac DV, one of the "Playskool" design iBooks that supported DVD playback, the Cube, and lately my Mac Mini.

 

The trend has always been it pays to wait. OS X has been sucky (imho) up until Panther, and there are some features I felt should have been available from the get-go that actually haven't come about until Tiger.

 

Mac OS7~9 have been as bad or worse than a Windows system for me. I've always struggled with extension compatibility issues, hardware problems nobody could isolate, unexplained lockups and crashes...

 

I decided I could risk trying a Mac Mini because usually I can find out if a given Apple computer is going to be annoying to me within a week or less. I had 21 days in which I could return the unit (repackaged) for a full refund. During this time, I held its virtual feet to the fire.

 

After 21 days, the Mini never caused me grief. I decided then to pop the case, add 3rd-party RAM, overclock it to 1.5Ghz, change out the hard drive, upgrade to a DL DVD-RW slot drive, and add in the Airport/Bluetooth mezzanine card by myself.

 

In short, the Mini has been remarkably solid compared to the track record I have with "bleeding edge" newly-released Macintosh computers.

 

A Rosetta by any other name stinks as much as a 68k emulator. People who buy into the Intel-inside Macs are paying Apple to work out bugs in their system, beta test Rosetta, bring pressure on app developers to give them Universal Binary upgrades, and basically shakedown a new technology.

 

I see this point in time as being no better than when Apple transitioned to PPC chips, and perhaps as frustrating as the transition to OS X.

 

I am very tempted to watch price drops on these "half speed" iMac G5s which actually will run the legacy software as well or better than the Intel-inside versions, and definitely will run Universal Binary apps, but admittedly slower (although seldom 1/2 speed) of the "fast" iMacs.

 

People forget a computer's performance isn't all about CPU frequency. Things like RAM bus speed, graphics CPU performance, hard drive speed, and Internet connections all have some effect on the perceived speed of the system. Intel inside does have a superior CPU frequency, a superior RAM bus, but the graphics and Internet interfaces are basically the same between PPC and Intel.

 

I strongly suggest that people wait for 3Q or 4Q this year and see what the Apple line looks like then. You'll miss a lot of "early adopter's woes" which seems to be an industry standard for ALL computer makes and models, especially when a new technology is debuted.

 

You would think they'd have learned this after the fiasco with first run G5s. Those were hoards of trouble, but the later models ran smooth. The first intels (and we're now getting this from both intel AND apple) are bound to be trouble, but will level out after 2-3 OS updates. If you wait till Q3 of '06, intel-macs will be standard edition and all of the chaos of the transition will have passed over by then, instead replaced by the 'holy {censored} this conroe powermac is sexy' that will come once we're back up to 64bit.

I'm a bit disappointed as well. First they stuck with the old design (it is a cool design, but revolutionizing the interior should be accompanied with new exterior in my opinion). second: if you want an adequate powered homecomputer you're required to buy an internal display. sorry, leave it to the customer if they want 1 or 2 screens in the size of their choice. third: performance improvements should at least partially live up to the promises. They missed it. what do these dualcores do. why aren't they much faster than the oldschool P4 singlecore. why is iphoto 6 native not really faster than iphoto 5 through rosetta?

hope that the 30th anniversary will bring an imac pro!

I was also dissapointed with the LCDs of the MBP & iMac. Couldnt Apple opt for the same screen as Acer's 15.4" Core Duo laptop? It could do 1680x1050 but if it ment less bright screens then I'd pass.

 

Steve noted in the keynote that that the benchmarks were synthetic and only measured the processor. The other components are the same speed as before.