I finally broke down and bought an IntelBookPro (a/k/a MacBackPro, what a horrible name) on Thursday. I felt very smug walking into the Apple store, feeling as if they should roll out the red carpet as I walked straight to the service desk to order it. After picking up my booty, I sneered at all the non-Mac-owning people.
I spent Thursday night copying my data over to it. The immediate downside was speed. I quickly noticed it was slower than my Powerbook; my MBP has 512MB whereas my PB has 1GB RAM. I fired up App Monitor and saw it was constantly paging to disk when I had more than one app going. A few of my Apps like Firefox (which is surprising), Yahoo messenger, Photoshop (expected) were PowerPC binaries and required Rosetta to run. I had to install a new version of iTerm and the Cisco VPN client to work on 10.4.
Today I went up to Fry’s and bought a 1 GB stick of DDR2 PC-5300 RAM and installed it. Surprisingly, it was cheaper there than I could’ve bought it on eBay. Installing the RAM immediately fixed my speed problems. At first only the 1 GB stick was seated, but it made a /tremendous/ improvement in speed. Photoshop was quicker, switching among Rosetta apps was unnoticable. I later reseated the RAM and now I have 1.5 GB available. I can now say my MBP is faster than my Powerbook. Firefox will have a universal binary on their next release, which should improve my day to day usage as well.
Now that’s out of the way, it’s really nice having a notebook that’s actually portable again. The screen brightness can really be cranked up. I didn’t think I’d care much for the lighted keyboard, but it’s good to have. Front Row along with the Apple Remote is a slick application. I think if they can equip a Mac Mini with a recording capability, they’ll have a great media center appliance. I’m wishing my Xbox had the same interface; it’s very easy to use and will play anything Quicktime will.
The MagSafe power connector is a nifty thing, but I’m not liking it on the side since I tend to sit with my notebook in my lap with my legs crossed over. The lack of a SVideo connector is sad, since I occasionally hooked my PB up to my TV to play videos. I’m playing with Q, which is a x86/x86_64/sparc/powerpc/MIPS emulator for OS X based on QEMU. I’m attempting to install Win2k, it seems to be hanging during setup right now.
