MacBook Pro 13″
Well well, Apple comes through.
The last time I purchased (and kept…) a new laptop was as a university student in 2004, upon Apple’s release of the PowerBook G4 12″. That machine intrigued me because it was the smallest laptop I’d ever seen with a non-compromised keyboard, and it still had a discrete graphics card, a DVD drive, and all the other associated bits I use frequently such as FireWire, wireless networking, and so forth.
Fast forward to 2008. I’m still using my old and busted PowerBook which has been abused like someone being kept in an Austrian cellar, and hoping Apple will release a suitable replacement (I loathed the MacBook plastic models for a variety of reasons, including the screen, the housing, and the performance). Suddenly, Apple releases the all-new MacBook Unibody, and I’m thinking “SCORE! They’ve recognized the need for a slightly-more-premium small-ish laptop!”
Wrong. The screen still sucked, and for the love of god they removed FireWire? Seriously, Apple?
Anyway, two days ago Apple bestowed upon my life a gift: They readded FireWire, they upgraded the screen quality, and they renamed it MacBook Pro. I bought one, and so with you I shall share it:
Typical Apple packaging: Imagine the 15″ MacBook Pro box, and think of it a little smaller. There ya have it.
Being an adventurous sort, I decided to forgo testing to see if it was dead out of the box in favour of immediately upgrading it to 4GB of RAM and swapping for a 320GB 7,200RPM drive.
Ten Phillips-head screws later, the innards are exposed:
The new (allegedly) 7-hour integrated battery comes with a warning. I don’t know what the reasoning behind this is, but I’m curious:
As per the norm, Apple has used Torx bolts as mounting pegs for the HDD. If you’ve never run into a T6 or T8 bolt, you’ve never worked on a portable Apple product.
Out come the old HDD (Hitachi 160GB and what I believe to be Micron RAM), and here they lay next to their replacements (Seagate Momentus 7200.3 and iRAM 2GB SO-DIMMs):
…and they’re in:
Now to reassemble and actually look at it: Holy wow, that screen is shiny.
It’s worth noting at this point that I had two potential courses of action: Clone the factory HDD to the machine over FireWire, or do a fresh install. Being that I have no need for the 3 or so GB of printer drivers that OS X includes by default, or the god knows many GB of languages I don’t speak, I elected to do a fresh install.
So I powered up the machine and booted from the included installation CD. I was caught off guard by how decent the screen is, even before calibration. No, you’re not likely to be doing print work on it (it’s a laptop, after all, not a nice desktop IPS panel), but it sure does look nice compared to the junk that was found in the previous 13″ models (save for the Air, which this allegedly shares a panel with).
After installing the OS and such, I can comfortably say it’s a snappy machine. I have a hell of a lot of installations to do, but my first hour and a half with the machine have been pleasant so far.
As I type this introductory review, I currently have my work software installing, and I’m looking forward to giving more of an in-depth review, but hopefully you’ve enjoyed having a look at the internals and my initial thoughts on the machine…
… Oh, and the buttonless trackpad is going to take a bit of getting used to.
Update 1: Front edge is kinda sharp. Yow.