A Year with the MacBook Pro

It’s been exactly one year since I bought my MacBook Pro. So how’s it going?Generally, everything is fine with it. There are some problems, but they’re just small common issues that most MacBook Pros come to experience. I’ll start off with what I’m happy with.

Before I owned my MacBook Pro, I had a Dell XPS M1530 that literally drove me nuts. It had a slow, 1.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor running Windows Vista Ultimate, and an Nvidia Geforce 8400M that wasn’t powerful at all. Despite that, I used it to edit my videos and do the stuff I needed to. Eventually, I sold it and bought my MacBook Pro because I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

There were several problems that my Dell had that my MacBook Pro didn’t. The keyboard on the Dell was very flimsy; after only a month, the space bar became loose and the keys felt squeaky when pressed. The touch sensitive controls weren’t sensitive enough, and the trackpad had many software glitches. And finally, the brushed aluminum palm rests showed two large dots where my palms rest when typing.

Although I hammer on my MacBook Pro’s keyboard everyday (well not exactly hammer, but still..) none of the keys has loosened. It feels the same as when I first got it, a very sturdy keyboard that was extremely comfortable to type on. The anodized aluminum on the MacBook Pro shows no sign of wear, the trackpad is much bigger and works just like when I had gotten it. And the MacBook Pro doesn’t use touch sensitive multimedia controls, so I had no problems with raising the volume, unlike before when I had to hold down the button for a long time just to get the volume up.

To summarize all of that, basically, the MacBook Pro is a much more durable and solid laptop than the Dell XPS M1530 was, which is why it doesn’t show the same kind of problems that the Dell had. That wasn’t the only improvement I had though; the MacBook Pro is much more powerful than the Dell. With a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4MB of L2 cache, and an Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT, it made the Dell look redundant.

Some of the problems with the MacBook Pro were rather annoying. The biggest issue is definitely the heat; other problems seem to be related to it. The Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT and the Intel CPU are definitely “egg cookers” and heat up a lot with redundant tasks. The genius at the Apple Store tells me flash causes the heat, but basically he’s telling me watching Youtube is going to overheat my Mac. Which is, frankly, ridiculous. Especially watching HD content on Youtube, heats the thing to 70ish degrees very quickly, and using it on your lap hurts quite a bit. The new Nvidia Geforce 9400M integrated chip is less powerful than the 8600M GT, but it also produces MUCH less heat.

The top case of my MacBook Pro also gets slightly loose, to the point that I can press down on the sides and feel it move. Although this isn’t really a problem with normal usage, something makes me feel that the top case will just pop off someday. Hopefully that won’t happen.

The fans in the MacBook Pro are definitely more tired than when they were new. You can hear a kind of buzzing from them that wasn’t there from when they were new, and this is, of course, expected. The heat kicks the fans up quite a bit, and there’s usually never a day when the fans aren’t spinning high when I’m using it.

Overall, the MacBook Pro has been a very excellent experience. Some problems plague it, but it’s definitely in a class higher than most laptops. Although it doesn’t have the extreme performance of a 17″ gaming PC laptop, it definitely is very powerful, especially considering it’s only an inch thick. And the new version eliminates some problems such as extreme heat, and the unibody enclosure which wouldn’t have the problem I’m having.

If I were to rate my MacBook Pro, I’d give it a 4/5. The heat is something that, I feel, Apple should have spent much more effort on fixing. Other than that, it’s almost perfect.