Prime Notebook Computer Review

The new Macbook Pro line boasts some great new features like 7 hour battery life and a sleek, environmentally friendly unibody. This model has a fast 2.66GHz dual core processor and 4GB of RAM which is great for programs like Logic that use Memory for soft synths and samples. The Macbook is highly portable, stylish and will give you years of recording functionality without so much as stopping for breath!

Design
The 15-inch MacBook Pro sports the same carved-from-a-single-chunk-of-metal unibody design as its brethren, with a sturdy aluminum chassis and rounded edges. The overall look is classy and modern, though it makes upgrading individual components (like the RAM and hard drive) more difficult, as the entire bottom must be unscrewed.

The MacBook Pro has the same dimensions as before (14.4 x 9.8 x 1.0 inches), but weighs a slightly heavier 5.6 pounds. While we definitely felt it carrying the machine home, it did fit in our messenger bag, which is more than we can say about most 15-inch notebooks. The only system that comes close is the HP Envy 15, which has an equally slim and stylish profile (15.0 x 9.6 x 1.0 inches) and weighs a lighter 5.2 pounds. Regardless, this notebook will take up your entire tray table if you take it on a flight.

Keyboard & Touchpad
The full-size keyboard is a departure from the original one used in the 15-inch (Penryn). The new MacBook Pro adopts the non-interconnecting, groove-less keys from the MacBook Air and the new MacBook 13-inch (Aluminum). Typing is an absolute pleasure, not a chore, and the illuminated keyboard is a great asset in darkly lit areas. Competitors like the HDX16t and the Studio 15 use more traditional keyboards.

Evidently, the thought never occurred to anyone that a touchpad and mouse button can be combined into a single entity, thereby creating a larger surface to scroll, click and navigate. Aside from Apple, anyway. The touchpad slopes downward allowing you to click at the bottom, left and right hand sides of it, but not at the top. Apple even figured out the right sensitivity levels to use for the mouse click button. Clicking the entire touchpad seemed awkward at first, but it didn’t take long for me to get used to it. And then there’s the elusive right click mouse button that in the past could only be triggered with the help of the Control key. In Leopard’s System Preferences, you can designate the touchpad to right-click simply by applying two fingers or a single finger to the right and left bottom corners.

The new MacBook Pros come with gesture capabilities as well. In addition to pinching, rotating, and enlarging with two fingers, you can swipe four fingers to the right or left to switch between applications. Swiping upwards with four fingers will trigger the Expose application, while swiping four fingers downwards will bring up the dashboard. Applying three fingers to it will let you peruse through photos in the iPhoto application. This is very cool stuff.

Display and Audio
As usual, we loved the bright and crisp 15.6-inch display on the MacBook Pro. Its resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels is adequate, though we suspect many photographers and other creative pros will opt for the 1680 x 1050-pixel option. While reflections from the glossy display weren’t overwhelming, it’s also nice to know there’s an antiglare option–though only for the higher resolution display. Still, colors were bright, blacks were deep and dark, and viewing angles were excellent both vertically and horizontally.

Speakers on either side of the keyboard provided very good audio. At full volume, the Black Eyed Peas “I Gotta Feelin” filled a small room; higher tones were crisp without sounding distorted, and lower notes, such as the bass line in the song, had enough presence without being overwhelming.

Ports
Unfortunately, its feature set is the one place where the new MacBook Pro couldn’t deliver. Built-in media card readers are found in almost every laptop on the market—except those with the Apple logo. With the proliferation of digital cameras, you’d think that Apple would at least include an SD slot. The MacBook Pro, however, did manage to carry forward the ExpressCard slot, for expansion devices like mobile broadband. According to Steve Jobs, Apple’s reluctance to support Blu-Ray drives revolves around licensing and cost issues. If you run down the HDX16t’s features list, you can find things like Blu-Ray drives, a media card reader, E-SATA and HDMI ports—those are features that MacBook Pro users will miss.

At least for current MacBook Pro owners, the features didn’t get any worse. There are 2 USB ports, a Firewire 800 port, Ethernet, optical out and a headphone jack. The slot-loading DVD burner works the same way as older generation drives. The one significant change is cutting off DVI-out in favor of DisplayPort. Apple and Lenovo believe that DisplayPort is the video port of the future, while every other laptop manufacturer is betting on HDMI. Either technology, though, can drive both audio and video to an external display; DVI-Out carries video only. There are minor storage enhancements as well, such as the addition of a 320GB hard drive (5,400rpm and 7,200rpm versions), and an insanely expensive 128GB SSD option ($500). And of course, the MagSafe magnetic adapter, the iSight webcam, and the Apple remote can also be found on the new MacBook Pro.

Performance
Like other systems we’ve tested with the Intel Core i7-620M processor, the MacBook Pro returned superb results, especially considering it was paired with 4GB of RAM. After installing Windows 7, we ran PCMark Vantage in Boot Camp, and saw a score of 6699; that’s nearly double the mainstream average of 3,885, not to mention the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro’s score of 3,285 (which used a 2.66-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of RAM). The HP Envy 15, which uses a 1.6-GHz Intel Core i7-720QM processor and 6GB of RAM, came in about 500 points lower, at 6,173. However, the Sony Vaio Z, which had a 2.4-GHz Core i5-520M processor, scored a much 9936 (though that system had dual SSDs).