I’ve noticed recently that a lot of people commenting on the Apple MacBook Pro who aren’t Macintosh users have focused on the comparing the CPU speeds of the new models with the final Apple PowerBook models and found the MacBook Pro models somehow lacking.
It’s hard to believe that the people making these points really considered why people buy– or should buy a Macintosh in the first place. You know as well as I do that most of the pundits making these comparisons can’t be Mac users.
I’m not sitting in front of a Macintosh right now, but I’ve been a Mac developer in the past and I understand the Macintosh user experience quite well. The User Interface of Mac OS X is simply the best available for any personal computer. I’m not talking about the appearance of the desktop here as much as the productivity that an average user can expect to achieve with a Mac versus a Windows PC.
Apple has invested a lot of their R&D efforts into building services into their operating system that enhance user productivity. A great example is Spotlight, Apple’s successful attempt to build “just do what I want” search technology into its desktop. This feature, which debuted in April 2005, really enhanced the value of Apple’s own add-on software. If I had Spotlight available to me, I’d probably switch to an email client that supported it and strongly consider changing the business applications I used if they didn’t integrate well with it.
Apple’s Automator is another feature that dramatically increases user productivity for repetitive tasks. There’s nothing that really compares to it in the Windows world, mainly because it’s not a core function of any Microsoft operating system. A technology like this wouldn’t be supported by as many line-of-business applications if it came from a third party.
That’s why I say that you should buy a MacBook Pro for the user experience, not because the benchmarks say that it’s CPU is x percent faster than its predecessor, or another Intel-based laptop running a different OS.
The thing that would stop me from buying this generation of MacBook Pro would be if I learned that the apparent speed of applications, expected reliability, or battery life were less than that of the last PowerBooks. Walter Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal addresses these issues in his MacBook Pro review, published in the Personal Technology column of today’s print edition. He says:
I’ve been testing the MacBook Pro and comparing it to both a late-model PowerBook and a roughly similar Windows laptop, the new H-P Pavilion dv5000t…. In my speed tests, the MacBook Pro beat the PowerBook at such tasks as importing photos and music, burning CDs, opening multiple Web sites and launching some programs. But most of the speed gains were slight, and even the biggest gains were nowhere near the 400% speed increases Apple claims.
For this and other reasons, Mossberg concludes, “The MacBook Pro isn’t revolutionary, but it’s a promising start to the era of Intel-powered Apple laptops.”
I think Walter Mossberg’s review indicates that people who are interested in buying a Macintosh as their next laptop can feel confident when purchasing a MacBook Pro. I hope to join you soon. Peformance of the MacBook Pro will only get better as third-party software makers port their applications to take advantage of the Intel CPU.
Finally, I think it’s dumb of Apple to throw out figures like “four-times faster” when it’s unlikely that regular users will be able to feel that much of a performance increase. Apple clearly needs to turn the Intel Core Duo processor into a major feature of it’s first Intel-based Macintosh laptop, but the way they are marketing the MacBook Pro lead me to believe that a PowerBook user would be blown away by the MacBook Pro’s performance. From what I’ve read and seen so far, that’s not going to happen.
Technorati Tags: MacBook Pro, PowerBook, Mac OSX