I bought a new MacBook. I couldn’t help it. Three days spent in and
out of the press room at the MWC in Barcelona meant three days of
seeing the tiny 13” package over and over (these unibody MacBooks seem
to be popular). Worse, I was seeing the svelte new carcass alongside my
old-model MacBook Pro.
It’s a truism of Apple design that every product looks amazing until
the next revision is unveiled. Then, what looked great yesterday
suddenly looks old and tired. So I did it. I bought a new laptop to
replace one barely eight months old.
What follows is a comparison of the two in use, consisting of the
first impressions that will quickly fade from memory. For an in depth
review, including all the number crunching you might like, see our
official Gadget Lab review of the new MacBooks. If you want to find out
how the new consumer MacBook stacks up against the old Pro, and why you
might think twice about buying one if you are a photographer, keep
reading.
First, a few numbers. The old Pro is a 2.4GHz machine with the Santa Rosa chipset. It is loaded with 4GB RAM but is otherwise completely stock. The new, young whippersnapper is also 2.4GHz and is running on just 2GB RAM until four gigs on order from Crucial turns up. I also picked up a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter to hook it up to an external monitor.
First impressions
That “brick” nickname for the unibody process? It fits. This thing feels like a single, solid slab of Mac, even more so than the new Pros thanks to being so compact. The old MBP feels almost flimsy in comparison. Getting set up took a while — I used the Migration Assistant to transfer everything across from the old notebook. Much hand-wringing has been done over the dropping of FireWire, and it would have been useful this once to speed things up. As it is, if you have a bootable USB backup, you can use that. I did, and it took around an hour and a half.
Another thought on the ports — having them all on on side is way better. Both neater on the desk for right handed mouse users and easier to remember where you are plugging things in.
Trackpad
But you’d have to be crazy to use a mouse. I’ve been a trackpad fan forever, only using a mouse with the crap-tacular hackintosh seen above. But the new glass multitouch pad is amazing, and takes all of a couple minutes to get used to. The surface is huge and therefore very comfortable, and the four-finger gestures for Exposé and application switching are extremely useful. Result? A definite hit.
Keyboard
The 2.0GHz MacBook ships without a backlit keyboard. This was one of the reasons I opted for the faster model. The new black chiclet keyboard is way better suited to the backlights than the old silver pro ‘board. First, you can actually read the letters. The old one worked fine if it was really dark, but with some light in the room the backlights would bring the letters to the same level as the keys themselves, making the whole thing little more than a waste of battery power.
The new ones offer white-on-black contrast in all lights. The chiclet-style also bleeds a lot less light around the edges due to the precision milled holes. If you crank the backlight to eleven, it’ll look like a runway at night, but at more modest levels it’s crisp and sharp. Another win.
The Damn Display
This is so bad that I think I might have a defective unit. Seriously. The contrast is poor and the 13.3” LED backlit display has trouble showing proper blacks — all you get is dark gray. This isn’t all down to the glossy finish, either — my old white MacBook, now in the hands of the Lady, has a glossy screen and looks great. In fact, the only reason we don’t use it to watch movies in bed is because the MBP has a bigger, 15.4” screen.
You can’t see lack of black in the picture above because, well, it just wouldn’t register on the camera. You can see, though, the fall off of light towards the edges. The vertical angle of view on the new MacBook is tiny. From left to right, you can look at the screen almost side on and still see everything. Tilt it a little too far back or forward, though, and things quickly go wrong. Take a look:
Even the hackintosh does better, as you can see in the picture at the top of the post. And these pictures were taken after I had calibrated the monitor using the built-in OS X utility. Out of the box it was even worse. The picture also shows how bright the screen gets. The reason the Pro is a little washed out is because the screen just goes a lot brighter at the top end. In combination, these problems make the MacBook ill-suited to anything involving pictures. Which is a shame, as the machine runs Lightroom just great. Easily as well as the old Pro, in fact
Performance
I threw a folder of RAW photos at both machines. The task? Convert 115 pictures to dng format. The MacBook took 6:28s, the old Pro took 6:50s. So the new one is quicker by 22 seconds. Not bad, especially considering it only has half the RAM of its older brother.
The benchmarks from around the web show that for processor-based tasks, the new aluminum MacBook is the equal of the old MBP. This makes sense — they run on almost the same CPU, although the newer ones have a faster bus and some other architectural tweaks. Where the new MacBooks fail is on tasks that use the GPU, or graphics chip. The new, integrated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M in the lower end model is way, way faster (four to five times, depending on who you ask) but still not as fast as the old dedicated graphics unit in the MacBook Pro.
Unless you are doing a lot of video work, though, this will make little difference. It may cause trouble with the forthcoming update to the Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, which will allow applications to use the zillions of cores in the graphics chips to speed things up.
Other notes
There are a few other touches which I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere. First, we all know that the battery-meter has been moved to the side of the body from its rather useless place underneath. What you didn’t know is that when you pull the power cord, this meter lights up, showing you the battery level when and where you need it.
Also, when the light level meter is set to automatically adjust the display brightness, the brightness button in the display preferences pulses. This happens on the old Pro, too, so its a software update, but its neat nonetheless.
Also, Apple’s new earbuds with remote and microphone work with the new MacBooks, but not the old ones. Plug them into the headphone port and you can use the remote to play, pause and skip tracks, and adjust volume. The mic also works and shows up thusly in the pref pane:
Conclusion
The MacBook rocks. It’s solid, small and powerful enough for almost anything. Sure, you miss out on FireWire and an ExpressCard slot, but those are pro features, and you’ll need to buy the bigger Pro.
The screen though, is truly awful. Maybe I’ll get used to it, or maybe I’ll have to hold on to my old Pro for serious photo work (a rather expensive option as I was planning to sell it to pay for the new one). I’m writing this piece on the new MB and for browsing and typing, the screen is starting to look fine. If I fire up Lightroom, though, and put it alongside the old MacBook Pro, it becomes clear that its more than just a FireWire port and a couple of inches of screen that differentiate the Pro line.
See Also:
Who knows what dark, unreliable alleys the Commercial Times prowled to get this information, but the Chinese newspaper says that Lenovo is planning on shipping 11.6-inch and 12.1-inch NVIDIA Ion-based “netbooks” sometime in the future. Given the currently strained relationship between NVIDIA and Intel, it’ll be interesting to see if Intel comes through on its promise to sell Atom chips separately or if that was just the empty PR speak. We’ll see how this plays out — right now all we’ve heard is that Ion will launch on the desktop, so we wouldn’t hold your breath.
