My wife Kathleen has used a Pentium II desktop computer with a gigantic 21-inch CRT monitor as her home computer for at least five years. The hard disk drive on that computer is dying, and so we are looking at buying her a brand new computer for the first time since she was in college.
Kathleen would like to switch back to the Macintosh platform with this computer purchase, so we started looking at Macintosh laptops at the brand new Apple Store at Suburban Square in Ardmore, Pennsylvania on Saturday.
We arrived at the Apple Store three days before Apple formally announced the MacBook, the new low cost Macintosh laptop that replaced the iBook. We knew that we could not see the MacBook, so we went there to get a sense of how the MacBook Pro would work for her, and to try to guess what the MacBook features would be.
I think the MacBook Pro is a beautiful looking, high performance laptop. The Mac OS X operating system is the best operating system for personal productivity that’s ever been shipped. I’d love to have one of these machines myself, and I’d be happy for Kathleen to have one if that’s what she wants.
The big question about the 15-inch MacBook Pro is whether it’s worth $500 more than the new 13-inch MacBook? I haven’t seen one of these new MacBooks in person yet, so I’m basing my current opinion on information available on Apple’s web site and commentary from people who have played with the MacBook already.
I was impressed when I learned that Apple decided to bump the processor speed on the 15-inch MacBook Pros to 2.0 GigaHertz and 2.16 GHz respectively, up from 1.83 GHz. They had to do this if they wanted to release the MacBook at 2.0 GHz, which seemed like a must considering the $1,100- $1,500 price.
I was hoping that the new MacBooks would be widescreen laptops, and I wasn’t disappointed when the annoucement was finally made. I think the 1280 x 800 display on a 13.3-inch screen is a nice improvement over the iBook, but isn’t as good as the 1440 x 900 display on the 15.4-inch MacBook Pro. The difference in resolution is a clear reason for a price differential between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro.
I was somewhat disappointed by the shared video memory scheme employed on the new MacBook, and this is probably the biggest issue I have with that machine. I think that Apple could included something better than an Intel GMA 950 graphics processor which takes 80 MegaBytes of system memory to drive the display, leaving 432M of system memory free for normal operation. The other Macintosh that uses this video scheme, the Mac mini is a lot less expensive.
Beyond that, I question the decision to price the Black MacBook at $200 more than the White version when the only significant difference apart from the case is an 20 extra MegaBytes of hard disk space.
I think the only way I’ll know if the finish of the new MacBook cases will work in our house (in other words– if they will be unlikely to become visibly scratched in normal use) is to see the machines in person. That’s easy to do by going back to an Apple Store.
Knowing what I know today, my tentative recommendation to Kathleen is to spend the extra money and get the 2.0 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro for $1,999. I think this is the machine that will have the longest useful life of all of the Mac laptops available today. If we go back to the Apple Store to compare the 13-inch Black MacBook to the 2.0 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro I’ll report on that here on Operation Gadget.
Technorati Tags: MacBook, MacBook Pro, Apple Store, Mac mini, Mac OS X.