MacBook Pro (April 2010) Review - Part 1/3

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.