Is Macbook pro any good? Any reviews?

[zhenboy]

Is Macbook pro any good? Any reviews?
How fast is it?

[Jonny M]

No reviews because it's not out until February.

And it won't be as fast as Apple say, because Apple's stuff is never as fast as they say.

I'd still recommend the 15" PowerBook over this at the moment, it's just a more rounded system.

[oldman]

2 weeks to go I think you'd be a fool to buy a G4 today. They are still going to be sold alongside each other for at least a month or so. So just wait the 2 weeks and wait for proper comparisons to have been made.

Obviously the dual cores will be in some way faster but they may not be optimised for things such as video encoding etc. yet

wait and see

[Spud1]

I think that buying a G4 today is still a good investment, I mean, going by apples track record with their products, it's going to be 6-12months before it is really worth buying one of the intel based systems. Aside from the obvious first/second revison problems that are bound to appear, think about the software too.

Granted, the rosetta (i think thats the right name) idea is a good one, but at its heart it's still just emulation of a PPC processor on an x86 processor..even if apple is trying it's hardest to avoid calling it an emulator. I'm sure that it will be alot better than VirtualPC and co don't get me wrong, but I seriously doubt it will be much use for anything other than the most basic of none-universal apps (eg adiumX, irc clients, generally low resource stuff)

In 6-12 months or so though it's much more likely that there will be universal or x86 versions of alot of software out there, so it will be worth making the leap. I guess it depends how much money you have and what applications you want to use..

On the plus side this *should* help drive down the prices of the G4's etc on ebay/second hand places..so it might be worth trying to grab a bargin there to tide you over until intel based macs become worth it

[Gordy]

It will be quick quite a bit quicker than the g4 simply because the g4 was soo dated and hadn't had any real improvements in some time.

The only area that could be a problem with the macbook pro is software support as some of the main apps arent due to be converted for a while. Rosetta should over come that somewhat but some apps won't run whatever till the intel versions come out.

With the disctinct possiblity of being able to run windows xp as well that over comes any possible downside of the new intel macs.

Personally I would never buy a g4 now its not worth it. I've stumped up the cash for a deposit on a mac book pro to replace my 12in powerbook as I'm convident it will give me a big improvement over it.

With intel helping on the design I don't think there will be as many issues as their have been with previous version A's of new mac's.

[oldman]

how do you feel about going from 12" to 15" though? the only reason I'm holding back is that I'm worried the shift from my current 12" up to 15" that I'll just get irritated by the non-portability

[Gordy]

I don't think it will be an issue, I was getting frustrated with the low res on the 12in so I'm prepared to sacrifice for the extra screen space

[oldman]

but assuming they will bumb the 12" to a 13.3" widescreen at some decentish resolution like 1280x720...im' in a quandry

although it was rumoured 15" might end up being the baseline macbook anyway

[oldman]

A lot of the ars tech review of iMac Dual Core is probably fairly relevant:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardw...ac-coreduo.ars

[zhenboy]

thanks for the info. guys...