My MacBook Pro 13″ Review

As I mentioned in my last post, about two weeks ago, I made a semi-impulse buy of a new 13″ MacBook Pro. I had been planning on buying one for months, but was going to wait for the next hardware refresh. However, my Thinkpad going into a spiral of death hastened my upgrade.

On paper, my new Macbook Pro and previous Thinkpad T61p are quite similar. They both use a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, although the Mac’s CPU is the newer P8700 (as opposed to the Thinkpad’s T9300) which uses less power but has less cache. They also both have 4GB of memory, with the Mac using newer DDR3-1066 memory rather than the Thinkpad’s older DDR2-667.  The Thinkpad has a discrete video card (Quadro FX 570M with 256MB of dedicated video memory) rather than the Mac’s integrated Geforce 9400M.

In terms of construction, the Macbook Pro is really a work of art. The unibody construction is solid, and the keyboard and trackpad are a pleasure to use. The new unibody design means the battery isn’t user-removable. However, it manages at least 4-5 hours of user per charge (and I can get 6-7 of lighter use) so the fact that the battery is built-in doesn’t bother me, especially when my Thinkpad was getting around 1 hour to a charge. The Mac is also almost completely silent, including the keyboard. Under heavier use, the drives and fan become audible, but only just.

It’s a fast machine, too. While not the most powerful Mac in the line-up (by a far amount, too), the 13″ MacBook Pro provides great performance for most uses. It goes in and out of sleep almost instantly, and while I’ve only had to reboot once since I first set it up, that was also a quick process (under a minute). The Mac’s hardware multitasks easily, and the user interface caters to that ability with multitouch gestures to easily switch from one task to another.

The screen is something of a mixed bag. While the image is very bright and crisp, the screen is a mere 1280×800 resolution, a far cry from the 1920×1200 I had on my Thinkpad. Due to the low resolution, keeping multiple applications on-screen at a time is difficult. In particular, looking at source code with only 800 vertical pixels to work with becomes annoying. Unfortunately, in order to gain a decent amount of screen real-estate, you have to go all the way up to the 17″ MacBook Pro (the 15″ only offers 900 vertical pixels), and the portability won me over between those two. I’ll look into an external display for my desk at home for longer coding sessions, but I’ve been managing for the time being by making good use of spaces. One advantage to the lower resolution, however, is that 720p content (at a resolution of 1280×720) displays natively with no scretching whatsoever, and looks amazing on the Mac’s LED backlit display.

All in all, I can’t describe myself as anything other than “very happy” with my MacBook Pro. While I was originally hesitant to go ahead and buy a machine based on almost the same architecture as my current one, I really needed a new laptop. Also, if I can get at least two years out of this (which I fully believe I will be able to), I’ll be able to replace it down the line with a laptop based on Intel’s 22nm architecture (assuming they stay on track, that is).