I recently acquired a new Santa Rosa based MacBook Pro to use as my daily development machine. This new laptop replaces my trusty 17” PowerBook G4 which was beginning to feel a little long in the tooth. I have been using the new machine for 2 or 3 days now and decided to offer my first impressions of the machine as compared to the PowerBook G4.

The MacBook Pro is roughly the same size and weight of the PowerBook. In fact, other than the camera in the lid and the IR port on the front of the MBP the two machines look almost identical. The trackpad and keyboard look and feel the same on both machines. The external differences are minor. There is the aforementioned camera and IR port on the MBP and the MBP has a FireWire 800 port that the PowerBook does not. The MBP has the new MagSafe power adapter and the ports are arranged slightly differently than on the PowerBook. Its clear that the real difference between these two laptops is what’s inside, not what’s outside.

The screen on the MBP is AMAZING. Before I started using the MBP I thought the screen on my PowerBook looked pretty good. Now I can barely stand to look at the old screen. The old screen has a resolution of 1440x900 whereas the new screen is the high-resolution 1920x1200. I was concerned about the new resolution being too high and the fonts being too small. This has not been the case so far. The very high resolution means that the fonts are crisp and readable even at small sizes.

The new screen is also much brighter than the older one. I am not sure if this is due to the age of the PowerBook or if the MBP screen is brighter overall than the PowerBook screen. I don’t remember my PowerBook being this bright when it was new. I had decided to get the matte screen, but due to a miscommunication I ended up with the glossy screen. So far glare has not been a problem and the colors on the screen certainly appear bright and vibrant.

The new machine is certainly fast. I expected it too feel faster than it does, but I haven’t had a chance to run through my daily workflow with it yet. Up to this point I have been mostly downloading, compiling and installing software. One thing is for sure, the MBP is clearly much faster than the PowerBook.

One area that surprised me in terms of performance is the Rosetta emulation used to run PowerPC applications on the new Intel processors. I had heard glowing reviews of Rosetta, but it wasn’t until I actually saw it for myself that it sunk in for me. I was running some PowerPC applications and realized that they were running just like native Intel or Universal applications, you cannot tell the difference. Rosetta is some seriously cool technology, if only because it is so transparent and so fast. I haven’t really had a chance to try out BootCamp or Parallels yet, but I am sure that will prove to be interesting.

That is about it in terms of my first impressions. I will probably have more thoughts on it as I use the new machine in my daily workflow.

Update: I have some more information after using the new laptop for a full day with my normal workflow. I was able to get about 3 hours runtime while using the battery with everything set to its default settings. I was using the machine pretty hard and so I consider 3 hours to be decent. I could probably improve on that by turning down the screen brightness. The MBP does get quite hot when stressed and the fans are louder than the fans on my PowerBook. I think the fans run more often on the MBP as well. This is all to be expected, and I am certainly not complaining. Finally, on the performance front, my Rails test suite took about 13 seconds to run on my PowerBook versus 3 on the MBP. That is a respectable speedup and will encourage me to run my tests more often.

Tags: apple, macbookpro, osx