This evening I tooled by our local Apple store, to grab some replacement headphones and see if they had the Mac Book Pro on display. Not that I intended to buy one immediately but just because I was, well, curious. I've only seen a few reports (tuaw has one, and David Heinemeier Hanson has a nice post also)

I only got to play with it briefly, and I didn't get an opportunity to try and exploit the chipset, but the applications installed on the demo units (a mix of native Apple products and some non-native third party applications) were all pretty zippy in launch and basic execution - overall each aspect of the system felt nicely tuned and responsive. I know DaveK is interested in Java benchmarking, but I haven't seen anything posted as yet, and didn't have anything to try at the time.

These machines run all day, so I wasn't too surprised to feel them as very warm boxes. But they were quite warm to the touch.

In contrast to my 1Ghz PBG4, these have the larger backlit keyboard, which threw me a bit. The interkey distance is just a bit larger than I'm accustomed to, and it made typing tricky.

I didn't see any obvious flaws in the display models, certainly nothing like the hum and banding that has been reported - 4 is a small sample size, but I was fearing something dramatic.

All in all, impressive hardware. Food for thought, indeed (barring IIfx fears of course). I await more reports anxiously.

[Update 20060224: Zac Bir posts his initial positive impressions. ]

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Posted by esinclai at February 23, 2006 10:04 PM |