In part three of this review, I want to look at networking, heat, and Windows on the new MacBook Pros. I’ll also revisit the screen briefly before wrapping up. In case you missed the earlier parts of this review:

Part One
Part Two

Networking

With notebooks in the modern world, networking is synonymous with a species of networking: wireless. Although the new MacBook Pros have ethernet ports, I doubt mine will ever see an ethernet cable (similar to how my PowerBook G4 has a phone jack for the internal modem, but has never seen a phone line). My experience with Apple notebooks and wireless receptivity is mixed. My first notebook was an iBook, which could seemingly fasten onto any wireless network that was even remotely close, even through several layers of concrete (once I purchased and installed the Airport card). My PowerBook G4, on the other hand, is lucky to be able to pick up a network whose base station is one room over.

The good news for me is that this new MacBook Pro picks up networks very easily. In my immediate vicinity, a MacBook picks up 12 networks. My iPod Touch picks up 3 networks, and my PowerBook G4 picks up 2 of them. In contrast, the MacBook Pro picks up 16 networks. Now of these, most of them have a signal that is extremely weak; I could probably only get decent performance out of my neighbour’s. But after years of being frustrated with receptivity, the MacBook Pro is a welcome change.

Heat

I’ve never had a notebook that doesn’t get hot, and this one is no exception. When under heavy load, it can put out quite a bit of heat. But it doesn’t seem to get any hotter than any other notebook I have used. Mind you, I haven’t tried to use it on my lap while running Quake IV. I have run World of Goo though, and Plants vs. Zombies under Windows-and-VMware with 3D enabled. I also imported a large iPhoto library and let the Faces function sort through everything. In each case, the machine gets warm, particularly near the hinge (both top and bottom). Here is what I gathered from iStat Pro (temperatures in Celsius):

World of Goo:
Fans (left/right): 2000/1990 RPM
CPU: 66 degrees
GPU: 62 degrees
Subjective: no noticeable increase in heat except at hinge, bare legs probably okay, fan noise not noticeable

Plants vs. Zombies (Windows-and-VMware):
Fans (left/right): 3600/3550 RPM
CPU: 69 degrees
GPU: 64 degrees
Subjective: no noticeable increase in heat except at hinge, bare legs not okay, fan noise not noticeable

iPhoto Faces:
Fans (left/right): 2869/2869 RPM
CPU: 77 degrees
GPU: 62 degrees
Subjective: no noticeable increase in heat except at hinge, bare legs probably okay, fan noise not noticeable

iPhoto Faces (after 20 minutes):
Fans (left/right: 3700/3700 RPM)
CPU: 73 degrees
GPU: 60 degrees
Subjective: no noticeable increase in heat except at hinge, bare legs probably okay, fan noise somewhat noticeable

When commenting on fan noise above, I’m thinking of the fan noise with me sitting at typing distance from the machine, in a quiet room. Volume is at about 65% in the games, but there are no generated sounds while iPhoto is up. When the fans are at 2000 RPM, you really can’t hear them unless you are bending close to the machine and listening for them. When they are at 3700 RPM in a quiet room, you hear them, but they are still in the background in a quiet room.

One other thing I have noticed is that the fans are always on, spinning at about 2000 RPM even when the machine is idle. This is different from what I have experienced with previous Apple notebooks, which under normal loads did not have fans on at all, and under heavier loads the fans were quite loud. I’m not sure whether fans on at all times is normal, but I’m going to reset the power management to see if it makes any difference.

Windows

My experience with Windows on a Mac is very limited. When I run Windows XP under VMWare, with all animations and fanciness turned off, things seem to run well. There is nothing I really need my notebook to do that requires Windows, but I do appreciate the occasional adventure game (in the old style). Time will tell whether VMWare can run these sorts of games, or whether it will be necessary to use Boot Camp.

I do have, however, one point of comparison. I have tried to play Plants vs. Zombies on a Core2Duo 2.16 GHz MacBook under VMWare. What I noticed is that it was not really possible to do this with 3D graphics. Without 3D enabled, the game was playable; but anything involving 3D made the machine grind to a halt. In contrast, it is quite possible to play Plants vs. Zombies with 3D on the MacBook Pro.

Screen

I’d like briefly to add a bit about the screen, in response to a comment someone made to Part Two of this review, and something I’ve noticed with the screen of this MacBook Pro in particular. First, the comment was to the effect that a high resolution screen was more desirable for a developer, and this claim was backed up with a number of compelling examples. I think there is a certain amount of truth here: developers may be able to put the extra screen area of the high resolution screen to good use.

I suspect that whether you will be satisfied with a standard resolution screen depends a lot on where you are coming from: if you are accustomed to using a screen smaller in size, the standard resolution screen will probably work fine for you. If you are accustomed to larger screens, perhaps the high resolution screen is a better choice.

One thing I have noticed with this screen: the pixels in the top left corner of the screen walk a bit, particularly greys. This isn’t ideal because most windows have a grey title bar, so it makes the walking more noticeable than it would otherwise be. If you are not familiar with pixel walking, have a look at this page on LCD Testing while using an LCD screen.

Conclusions

This new Arrandale MacBook Pro is a great machine for writing and developing, and not bad for casual gaming. Give the tasks I use a machine for, the previous generation of MacBook Pro would have been absolutely fine. But I do like the fact that I do not have to manually manage which graphics chip is being used, and the inertial scrolling is something I’ve become quite used to. Compared to my PowerBook G4 of course, it seems lightening-quick.

That said, the price of the machine is very high. It is not without some sense of guilt that I have purchased an expensive notebook when there is so much poverty close by (thanks so much, Peter Singer). But, I’m intending to assuage that guilt by working hard on my next book. Or maybe just playing some World of Goo.

In part two of this review, I want to look at the graphics, screen, and battery life of the new MacBook Pros, with particular concentration of my most-used applications: TextMate (for writing) and Xcode (for coding). In case you missed it, here is:

Part One

Graphics

Much has been made over the new graphics technology sported by the new MacBook Pros (15” and 17” models). In particular, they have two graphics chips: one integrated, one discrete. The integrated chip is fast enough for writing and browsing, and is more power efficient than the discrete chip. The discrete chip is activated when quicker graphics are needed, but slurps up more battery life. This is nothing new: integrated and discrete graphic chips were available in several models of the previous generation.

What is new, is that the new MacBook Pros will switch between the integrated and discrete chips on-the-fly. This is, to my mind, the most important hardware advance of this machine over the 2009 MacBook Pros, because it makes the 2010 MacBook Pros dramatically more useable. With the older models, having a discrete graphics chip was advantageous, since you could turn on the discrete chip for faster graphics when needed. But it was significantly less useable than its single-GPU predecessors since you had to log out, and then log back in, in order to activate (or deactivate) the discrete chip. Having the switch take place behind the scenes is much more convenient, much more useable. It brings us back to where we were before multiple GPUs were slipped into the same laptop: we don’t have to worry about what is doing the graphics processing. But now we can tap into either power savings (integrated) or improved speed (discrete). Sweet.

World of Warcraft runs for me, with everything cranked, at 800×600. The machine is definitely being weighed down at that point, but it works. This gives me some hope I’ll be able to run StarCraft II at a reasonable resolution. The discrete GPU is shouldering much of the load in games, so while it isn’t equivalent a desktop GPU, it works just fine for light-to-medium gaming. I primarily use my machine for writing and coding though, and the integrated GPU has more than enough power to deal with these tasks. What is more important for writers and coders is screen size and resolution.

Screen

This machine has a glossy standard-resolution (1440×900) screen. I did think long and hard about getting a high-resolution anti-glare screen. But in the end, I decided against the larger screen. At $150 in additional cost, I figured I could get used to the glossy, and it is also true that high-resolution screens have much less of an impact on writing and coding applications.

Prior to this machine, all my notebooks have had anti-glare screens. I always intended for this to be the case. If an anti-glare screen were free on the MacBook Pros, I would have selected that option. But because of the cost, I decided not to, keeping in mind that when I have used a friend’s notebook in the past, the glossy did not bother me. What is obvious to me, when I have my PowerBook G4 sitting next to my MacBook Pro, is that the white on the PowerBook looks downright yellow. I suspect this is partly due to age, and partly due to the screen’s anti-glare coating. To tell you the truth, it never bothered me that the PowerBook’s whites were yellowish; but the contrast is striking.

I find that for the most part, the glossy screen is not a problem. If I do get glare, which occasionally happens, I simply shift the position of the screen slightly. As I type this, I do notice reflections on the screen; but if I am not explicitly paying attention to them, they do not register. The mind just filters them out.

The bigger question is screen resolution. The difference between a 1440×900 and a 1680×1050 screen is 468k pixels, which means the high-resolution screen is 36% larger in terms of screen area. If you are doing graphics work, this is significant, and will probably make your life easier. But if you are coding, and particularly if you are writing, what matters is vertical screen space, not screen area. The reason for this is that writers and coders do not (usually, anyway) have text that spreads across the entire screen width. It is just not practical for the eye to go from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line if the lines are too long relative to the size of the font and height of the line.

So, what is really at issue for writers and coders is the height of the screen: 900 for standard-resolution, 1050 for high-resolution. This means the high-resolution screen is a little over 16% larger. “Not that big of a deal.” Taking into account that the high-resolution screen is not any larger but rather more dense, I suspect I won’t miss it except on rare occasions.

Battery

The battery life of the MacBook Pro is a bit better than the last generation, which is to say it is phenomenal. I’m getting around eight hours with a full charge. Enough to be used non-stop on a trip across the Atlantic. This brings me back to the days of my first notebook – an iBook G3 (still running, by the way) – which would get over five hours on a full charge when it was new. This also means that as the battery in this machine inevitably deteriorates, the deterioration will have less of an impact on how I work: even when the battery will only charge to 50% of its original capacity, I can still expect four hours of use.

Up Next

To summarise, I really like the way graphics are handled by this machine. And the standard-resolution screen is probably suitable unless you are working with graphics a lot. In the final part of this review, I’ll wrap up by looking at heat, Windows emulation, and some issues I have noticed with this particular machine.

It has been over ten months since Apple updated its MacBook Pros. The unibodies were last updated in June 2009, which means this is the longest wait for new pro notebooks in recent memory. In the course of this short three-part review, I am going to look at Apple’s latest offering. I’m going to review the new MacBook Pro, with a focus on how it measures up for developers (using Xcode) and writers (using the MacTeX distribution of LaTeX), and I’m going to answer the question: was it worth the wait?

The machine I am looking at in this review is a stock 15-inch Core i5 (2.53 GHz) machine. 4 GB of memory, a 256 MB 330M graphics card, and a 500 GB hard drive. In part one of this review, I will share some of my initial impressions of the machine’s design, and benchmark it with a couple of real-world applications I use frequently.

Design

The 2010 MacBook Pro looks pretty much the same, on the outside, as the other unibody MacBook Pros. The lines are sleek and both the case and keyboard feel solid. It looks modern.

If you are coming from an older MacBook Pro, or from a Powerbook, you will doubtless be somewhat disappointed by the chicklet-style keyboard. It neither looks as good nor feels as professional as the silver keyboard. In particular, I find myself missing the slight curve each key had on the old keyboard when I type on the flat chicklets. That said, I got used to the new keyboard pretty quickly: it’s functional, but it’s not as nice as it could be. Among other changes from the silver keyboard, Apple has removed the stand-alone Enter key (which used to be to the right of the rightmost Command key), and replaced it with a second Option key.

The large touchpad is nice. Although the technical specification says it is made of glass, it does not feel like it. It feels similar to the non-glass trackpads of the Powerbooks. Those who are used to iPhone and iPod Touch gestures will like the touchpad: you can pinch and zoom photos and web pages, as well as rotate documents and pictures in preview. You can also use Mac-specific gestures, such as four-finger swiping for Expose and to switch between applications.

One of the new trackpad features to bubble up from the iPhone is momentum-based scrolling. When you do a two-fingered scroll and flick up or down, the scrolling continues after after your fingers leave the trackpad. When I first heard about this feature, I was skeptical. But in practise, it adds to scrolling functionality without any drawbacks that I have discovered. I have noticed that the algorithm seems a little less fluid than that on the iPhone, especially just before scrolling stops: the motion sometimes seems a little stiff. But you can turn off momentum-based scrolling in preferences if this, or any other aspect of the feature, annoys you.

As with all recent Apple notebooks, the ports for external connections are on the left side of the machine. This may look good aesthetically, and allows for the DVD-player to have its slot on the right side of the machine. But I am already feeling some pain. It was nice to have ports, in particular a USB port, on the left and the right. Also, the two USB ports are quite close together, and this might pose a crowding problem for certain devices.

Speed

I am coming to the MacBook Pro from a PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz, so almost any recent notebook is going to seem like it has “teh snappy” to me. But I thought I’d give an inkling as to just how quick. In my capacity as a writer and a developer, I use MacTeX and Xcode quite often. I’d like to say every day. The LaTeX benchmark is for a book that is 260 pages long, with about a dozen half-page images and hundreds of footnotes. The Xcode benchmark is for a program that is approximately 37,000 lines long, spread over 130 source files. I also threw in a CD-ripping test, 57.5 minutes of music over 10 tracks, just for interest. The settings were identical in each case. Here are the results:

LaTeX Compile:

PowerBook G4: 44.3s
MacBook Core2Duo: 15.2s
MacBook Pro i5: 12.4s

Xcode Compile:

Powerbook G4: 171.4s
MacBook Core2Duo: 42.1s
MacBook Pro i5: 30.8s

CD Rip:

PowerBook G4: 439.2s
MacBook Core2Duo: 371.8s
MacBook Pro i5: 225.7s

(Powerbook: 1.5 GHz G4/1 GB memory/4800 RPM HD)
(MacBook: 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo/2 GB memory/5400 RPM HD)
(MacBook Pro: 2.53 GHz i5/4 GB memory/5400 RPM HD)

Obviously the MacBook Pro beats out the other machines, and so it should, given the Powerbook is 6 years old, and the MacBook is 2 years old. It is pretty clear the move to a MacBook Pro build in 2010 will give me a lot of my life back.

Up Next

To summarise, the new MacBook Pro looks great, but has a couple of questionable design decisions. But in terms of speed, it smokes the older notebooks. In the next part of this small review of the 2010 MacBook Pro, I’ll have a look at the graphics and battery life.

Intuition is a breakthrough in puzzle games that blends out-of-the-box thinking with brain-teasing fun. Inspired by the MU-Puzzle in Douglas Hofstaedter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Intuition has been described as one part Sudoku, one part Minesweeper! Sure to be a winner with brain-game aficionados, Intuition also offers easier puzzles for the casual player.

Go to the Intuition Website

The puzzles of Intuition come to life with a vibrant soundtrack and colorful animations. The result is wildly addictive gameplay, featuring two unique and entrancing ways to play. The Classic Game steps through 110 different puzzles, with levels progressing from easy to highly challenging. Or, players can kick back with the Endless Game, where the game serves up hundreds of different challenges at the level of difficulty selected by the player.

Hints are available at any point in the game, for players who get stuck or want to make sure they’re on the right track. Since a puzzle can have multiple possible solutions, Intuition 1.0 uses a sophisticated puzzle-solving engine that determines if the player’s current path leads to the goal, and what the next step should be. If the player’s current path will not lead to the solution, Intuition backs up to the last line where the player was on the right track. Players can even select the amount of assistance they get, from a hint that tells players only if their last move was correct, to a hint that fills in the next line for them if they are really stuck!

Features Highlights:

1. Two different ways to play: Classic Game and Endless Game

2. Hundreds of different puzzles constantly supply new challenges

3. High-resolution graphics adapt to any window or screen size

4. Hints revealed in stages so players who get stuck don’t get the answer all at once

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Pricing: Free trial, $14.99 to purchase

The Logic Behind the Game

Intuition is a series of moves (formal rules) that you use to manipulate rows of chips. In this screenshot you will see that the top row is Yellow-Red. Move #1 in Intuition states that if you have a Yellow chip, you can double everything that follows. So, you can turn Yellow-Red (line 1) into Yellow-Red-Red (line 2); and you can turn Yellow-Red-Red (line 2) into Yellow-Red-Red-Red-Red (line 3)!

Move #2 in Intuition states that if you have a row ending in a Red chip, you can append a Green chip. Again, in this screenshot this move is applied to row 4 in order to get row 5. There are seven different moves in Intuition (don’t worry, you are introduced to them gradually, and one at a time)!

You can see that Intuition is closely related to natural deduction, and implements a formal system. This system is called a Semi-Thue or String Rewriting System (SRS), and solutions to puzzles may be computed using something similar to a Lindenmayer or L-System. So, in addition to being fun, it can be used as a way to introduce logic proofs (since each puzzle is a proof) and formal systems!

Deductions 1.2 is out. This version sees the addition of 45 new rules and aliases, to bring the total number of rules supported to 85 (!), with each rule being able to be turned on and off individually. Also, we have expanded the number of textbooks supported “out of the box” to ten:

(1) The Logic Book (Bergmann/Moor/Nelson, 2008)
(2) A Serious Introduction to Mathematical Logic (Roy, 2009) (Free online)
(3) A Modern Formal Logic Primer (Teller, 1989) (Free online)
(4) Logics by (Nolt, 1996)
(5) Symbolic Logic by (Jacquette, 2000)
(6) A Concise Introduction to Logic (Hurley, 2008)
(7) Introduction to Logic (Copi/Cohin, 2008)
(8) Logic and Philosophy (Hausman/Tidman/Kahane, 2009)
(9) The Power of Logic (Howard-Snyder/Snyder/Wasserman, 2008)
(10) Modern Logic (Forbes, 1994)

Fuzzy string-matching has also been implemented when citing rules, to make it easier to enter justifications. Documentation has been updated across-the-board to reflect these major changes.

This release is accompanied by an entirely reworked website with more obvious navigation buttons and a simpler presentation.