Apple's Redesigned MacBook and MacBook Pro: Thoroughly Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 22, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
My Biggest Gripe: No Standard SSDs
A few months back Apple announced that the profit margins on its notebooks would be reduced as a result of increased materials and production costs. The result of these lower margins would make Apple's notebooks tougher to compete with. Given that Apple uses off the shelf PC components for its notebooks I figured the areas for innovation were limited to design or spending more on the individual components. Apple has historically outspent the competition when it comes to design, and it's one area where most PC OEMs have failed to follow in its footsteps. Logically, it would make sense for Apple to spend more here to widen the gap between itself and encroaching PC OEMs.
Spending more on components is a losing race for Apple. Companies like Dell and HP ship many more systems than Apple and could just as easily match any spending Apple does on additional components. Putting more money into design however requires that you have a team capable of creating visionary, leading designs. While the Dells of the world have made significant strides in closing the style gap, Apple continues to lead here.
Despite what makes sense, what I was honestly hoping for was for Apple to make the transition to SSDs on its notebooks. Apple has been inching closer with each new notebook launch; the MacBook Air was its first notebook to ship with a SSD option and both the new MacBook and MacBook Pro offer optional SSDs (although it's unclear what drives they're using; at $600 for 128GB I'm guessing it's a MLC drive, but I have no idea what controller).
I've been using a SuperTalent JMicron based MLC SSD in my Mac Pro as a boot/application drive for the past few months, and while there are definite issues with this drive (pausing and serious performance problems as you near full capacity, something I'll be talking about in my next article or two) the areas where it does improve performance completely change the way my machine feels. Applications launch in half the time of a normal hard disk and running a bunch of disk intensive applications at the same time doesn't bring the system to a crawl.
Economically there's no way Apple could ship a SSD standard in a $1299 MacBook, at least not at any reasonable capacity. But I assure you this: more than any upgrade Apple has put into the new machines, an SSD is very important if you want to have a machine that feels fast.
Let me put it this way. Normally whenever I snag a new Mac to review, the thing feels fast. It's got a clean install, nothing loaded, a fast processor, and using it feels very much like I'm watching a Jobs keynote. Everything is just so very snappy. For the first time ever, using these two new notebooks actually felt slow. Not because they are slow, but because I'm so used to an SSD on my main machine. I've already begun switching over my testbeds to SSDs as well.
My biggest gripe with these notebooks is that they don't ship with an SSD standard. I would bet that within a year that will change, at least at the high end. If anyone has an idea of what SSD Apple is shipping with the MacBook/MacBook Pro, I'd like to know; I would assume that Apple would have done its due diligence and offer something better than a JMicron MLC drive but at $600 for 128GB it's tough to tell what else it could be....
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plonk420 - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
could anyone test this with the new (and even old) Mac Book Pro to test for CPU usage?http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ADFYX083">http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ADFYX083
h.264 high profile (QT supports this now, right?) level 4.1 720p60, fairlight/the black lotus's demo Only One Wish (2nd place at Intel's second demo compo) .. has some really handsome bitrate spikes :D ~mid 20s mbps spikes (but not as good as the 60mbit spikes in a 6 or 8mbit (average) encode of ASD's Antisize Matters)
michaelheath - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
Having spoken to a few Apple developers I know, the reason for this oddity is Nvidia's software implementation for Mac OS 10.5. While the ideal situation was for them to be able to switch on the fly, the agreement between Apple and Nvidia to develop for the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros happened so quickly it left little time to create a proper application that would allow for this (think of how you had to restart your computer to turn SLI on or off: same slapdash type of programming).The hope is that quick-toggling between integrated and dedicated graphics will come with Mac OS 10.6 as it may be too large of an update to patch Mac OS 10.5. It also makes sense in this aspect as Mac OS 10.6 also includes OpenCL GPGPU algorithms, which Nvidia is already promoting and developing under their CUDA platform.
RDO CA - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
On my Thinkpad T-400 with switchable graphics all that is needed to switch is to go to the taskbar icon and click switchable graphics and choose what you want and the screen goes dark for a second and thats it.cliffa3 - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
I'll test it sometime this week, but on my Lenovo T61 it seems like I get much more life out of Ubuntu than I do Vista 64-bit. Could be a windows thing in general, not just something that OS X does better.How was the battery life comparison between XP and Vista?
PilgrimShadow - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
Anyone know if the 9400M and 9600M appear in Vista's Device Manager?TallCoolOne - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
I bought the new 2.0GHz MacBook last week as my first Mac and can say I'm not disappointed. The whole chassis feels as solid as, well, a block of aluminum! As Anand said, it feels like you get what you paid for. I actually like the multi-touch gestures, such as swiping with 3 fingers to flip pages and for back/forward when web browsing. I'd like to see iTunes also support that gesture. Two finger scolling is another great feature not mentioned in this article. What I don't like though is the stiffness of the mouse click. It takes far more pressure than any mouse and that required pressure is uneven in different areas of the trackpad. Pressing near the top requires more pressure than near the bottom. As for lack of standard SSD, Anand, perhaps you're a little too spoiled by that speed! I would not expect that as standard on even the fastest MacBook Pro at current prices. That is, unless you'd like to see the asking price for a MBP $500-600 more than it is now.vlado08 - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
It is interesting was vista side panel running during the test. Also was this fresh install of vista os. If it was fresh then was the indeing enabled.vlado08 - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
edit indeing - indexingjmpt2 - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
Very interesting to read your conclusions about better power management in MacOS vs Vista. This matches my experiences running Vista on the BootCamp partition of my Core Duo MacBook, and is the first time I've seen this discussed anywhere on the web. I found that with a main battery in quite poor condition after two years constant use, it became impossible to use Vista on battery power for more than a minute without the battery deciding it was empty and putting the machine into sleep mode. Under MacOSX the system could still be used for 30min+ (light use) before the same thing happened.I'd come to the conclusion that Apple were deliberately playing games with the ACPI tables to confuse Vista's power management code and make their own OS look better. This seemed to be supported by the fact that Vista is unable to correctly detect the charging state on my MacBook - running on battery power it would always report "Connected to mains, not charging". Does it still work that way on the latest MacBooks? In any case, your data does seems to suggest the problem is a more general issue with Vista. Sounds like you should investigate further...
BZDTemp - Thursday, October 23, 2008 - link
I wonder if OS X lasting longer on a battery can be transfered to the world of none portable?In other words say I run OS X on my daily, none laptop, work machine doing surfing, writing and perhaps listening to music(FLAC prefered over MP3) or even watching an episode of The Daily Show. Will this draw less power from the wall with a PC running OS X than with the same machine running Windows (and is there a difference between Windows versions). Also Linux should be included in the test.
Imagine the perspective - with the whole green computing movement this could really make a difference not just in the server rooms.
Please do check this out - this is not only interesting for us geeks but could make Anandtech something referred to by none-tech news media.