My MacBook Pro, A Month After

It’s been a month after I’ve upgraded to the Unibody MacBook Pro. I know a lot of people have wrote about it and really it’s been out in the market for months, so it’s nothing really new. However I just wanted to really give my take on it.

Build Quality

Easily this is the most well built (from structural standpoint) computer I’ve ever owned. Nothing about this says it a cheap ass computer. It shouldn’t! As prices of computers plummet Macs have dropped slower than others. It’s still quite expensive. That being said, it’s worth the money.

I love the engineering on this thing. It’s sleek and it’s sexy.

Glossy Screen

I really thought this might be an issue but it’s not. I’m loving the screen on this baby. I work mostly in a controlled environment so I can minimize the glare, so it doesn’t really bother me. Colors are vivid, the LED screen makes the whole display even. Colors on the edge of the screen don’t get darker unlike my previous MacBook Pro.

Keyboard

Some people like the previous keyboard, I like this one. Plus, the keys are inset on the body itself, leaving less room for dirt to go into. The black keys also hide dirt better so the keys don’t look as dirty as they really are when you’ve been typing on them a lot.

Battery Life

This one sucks. At least from my experience. I thought I’d be getting decent battery life on this but I don’t. I barely get 2 hours on this machine.

Although I’m not sure if there’s something wrong with my machine because other people get 3 to 4 hours on theirs. Although most of those who get that long a battery life use the 2.4 ghz version.

I’ve tried using both the integrated video card and the dedicated one and offer only a slight improvement.

Here’s some comments at the Apple support thread.

Performance

One thing I truly, truly love about this is the performance. It’s a step up from my 2.33 Ghz 17″ MBP. The one I’m using right now is the 2.53 Ghz. The .20 Ghz addition plus the 4GB Ram and the 512MB video card really bumps up the performance.

I’m now able to run Parallels without really having to worry about if I have other applications running and it doesn’t take much of a performance hit.

All-in-all

With the exception of the dismal battery performance, I’m quite happy with the Unibody MacBook Pro. It’s a worthy successor to the previous MacBook Pro. In terms of design, performance, etc..

It’s a good evolution of the previous design which I thought was really hard to top.

It’s only been a month so we’ll see how well it holds up.