peteg's blog - hacking - mac - 2011 02 27 MacBookPro

When too much hardware is not quite enough.

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Finally Apple released a new MacBook Pro that was worth buying; I'd been waiting about two years for this. Somewhat surprisingly, given Intel's problems with the SATA interfaces on their new Sandy Bridge chips, Apple managed to roll out the new laptops pretty much under the radar and at a time that suited me: NICTA wanted me to pay off my salary sacrifice by the end of March (the end of the fringe-benefits tax (FBT) year, I believe), so I hurried off to the Apple Store at Bondi, where the service was terrible but everything was shiny.

The calculus of which one to buy was pretty easy, as it turned out. The 13 inch ones, which I would be inclined to buy, only have two cores and crappy Intel integrated graphics, and the bottom-end 15 inch one has an ATI/AMD card that is apparently worse than the previous-generation's NVIDIA one. That left the top-end 15 inch, of which I got the 2.2GHz one as I'm not going to miss 100MHz of CPU performance. I was going to get a high-resolution screen and faster hard disk, but they don't do that in the shop, and teeing up a delivery was a bit tricky, being on holidays and all.

It ended up being a lot of cash with the AppleCare and the 8Gb iPod Touch, free with a mail-in rebate. Yep, I got suckered the same way last time, but this time it's free! What could go wrong with that...

Performance-wise this machine smokes the old Core2 Duo MacBook; building my stock Isabelle theory takes about a third of the time, albeit by toasting my thighs. Given that the unibody is (even) more durable than the plastic case, I expect to easily get four years out of this thing. Moreover I can play finally all those games of yesteryear, such as Portal. I think there are a few issues for Apple to iron out yet, though; it's a lot crashier than the old MacBook, perhaps due to immature graphics drivers.