14 DAY TRIAL // Macworld has just published a hands-on overview of the MacBook Pros that they received yesterday, and, as Jason Snell puts it, "this shiny new Mac laptop may be packed chock full of hot new technologies on the inside, but it still feels like home."
In terms of performance, Macworld is still working on some in-depth benchmarking and will post a review later this week, but from the initial real world experience with it, the new machine is fast and the performance hit from Rosetta is often hardly noticeable in most cases. The machine is shockingly fast at certain tasks, almost to the point of the 4x speed increase stated by Steve Jobs during his keynote, however, much like the iMac, it is not very well suited for running intensive tasks in Rosetta emulated programs.
"Photoshop is clearly usable on these new systems, but there's no denying that processor-intensive tasks will take longer to execute so long as a Universal version of Photoshop is unavailable," Jason Snell reports.
One of the biggest questions regarding the new laptops was the battery power. Apple gave no exact numbers, saying that it will be about the same. Naturally this had many worried, but from what the Macworld crew saw, Apple was very accurate in their description.
"I can report the result of our first battery test, in which we played a DVD on a 15-inch PowerBook G4 and a MacBook Pro until their respective batteries died, with Energy Saver preferences turned off. The end result: the MacBook Pro died after two hours and three minutes, and the PowerBook died four minutes later."
As more and more MacBook Pros reach their customers over the next few days we can expect the reviews to start flying in.