MacBook Pro (April 2010) Review - Part 2/3

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.