Week One Update on our 2.16GHz MacBook Pro and our Power Mac G5 Quad is History

We've had our new 2.16GHz MacBook Pro for over a week now. We posted our initial impressions and some speed tests last Monday on this Web page. Since then we've mostly had it hooked up to our 30" Cinema Display, Apple Wireless Bluetooth keyboard and Microsoft Explorer 5-button mouse. Urged on by the great experience we've had with our 1.66GHz Mac mini Core Duo, we've used our MacBook Pro as our main computer here at MacsOnly.com's global headquarters.

We have learned that there is nothing that we do here that the MacBook Pro can't handle, including occasionally "testing" a 3-D game. Gaming is the department in which the Mac mini Core Duo falls a bit short but the 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 Quad excels. Our 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4 did not quite cut it as an omni-Mac, especially in the game department, so the MacBook Pro is a huge step up. The step will get even larger when some of our main applications like Adobe GoLive, Adobe Photoshop Elements and Call of Duty have Universal binaries to run natively on the MacBook Pro's Intel Core Duo processor. Until then, the MacBook Pro's performance is acceptable.

Of course, we don't process video or audio or apply numerous filters in Photoshop to many images. The most demanding thing we do is stay abreast of 3D games. We found that even at 32 frames per second (fps) versus 84 fps on the Quad, Call of Duty is just as playable, at least until it gets a Universal patch from Aspyr Media--we should see nearly 50 fps then. Doom 3 and Quake 4 are perfectly playable at 68 fps and 56 fps respectively because they already have Universal binaries. The only issue is the quality of the image. While all three games look perfectly fine on the MacBook Pro at medium quality settings, the Power Mac G5 Quad's Nvidia GeForce 6600 renders noticeably clearer than the ATI Mobility Radeon 1600X in the MacBook Pro. But we have always thought that images created by an Nvidia chip looked better than the images from a comparable ATI chip.

The MacBook Pro runs well closed and attached to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. It's also much quieter than our Power Mac G5 Quad. Our MacBook Pro gets warm but not very warm in the closed position while doing "normal" work, i.e. word processing in Pages, creating Web pages on Adobe Golive CS2, checking finances with Excel and Quicken, creating presentations with Keynote, working on our photos with Adobe Lightroom Beta, iPhoto and Adobe Photoshop Elements, surfing with Safari or Camino, listening to music on iTunes and processing our e-mail with Apple Mail--virtually everything. It gets very warm on the bottom near the back edge but not hot while closed and playing 3D games or extensively transferring large numbers of files or watching HD videos. We have it sitting on a CoolPad on the support arm under our display.

Our use of the MacBook Pro as our primary computer this past week convinced us that we should give up our generally lightly used 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 Quad to someone who really can use its monstrous "horsepower." It sold on eBay in less than a day.

On our opinion, the MacBook Pro is the best ever Mac from Apple, certainly it is the best ever notebook. [Bill Fox]