Macbook Pro pictures, reviews, and issues

With every new gadget or device, the first few days or weeks are bound to be really busy. This entry will be for this week's Macbook Pro buzz.

The Macbook Pro cometh
MacBook Pro pr0n are now being shown on the Internet. One from Jason O'Grady, one from UneasySilence and another from some guy who I think uses iWeb. Dan Pourhadi is also celebrating the arrival of his MacBook Pro, though no pictures yet.

How's the juice?
O'Grady has posted benchmark and battery updates. On initial testing, the MacBook Pro went to involuntary sleep just after 2 hours and 38 minutes. This is with the wireless options on and the screen a near full brightness but pretty much nothing else was happening. O'Grady said he will perform more real world tests. He's also noticed that the MBP is generating as much heat as his old Powerbook.

Macworld's Jason Snell posts his impressions on his new 15" Macbook Pro after using it for twenty-four hours. He first transferred his files from his old Powebook using Migration Assistant. He then noted that his new system was bogging down. This turned out to be the fault of Spotlight, which at that time was still indexing all his files. After Spotlight has done, the Macbook Pro was much more responsive as compared to the Powerbook. Applications like Microsoft Office and Eudora which were running under Rosetta seemed to suffer no perceptible slowness when being used. Tests using Adobe Photoshop CS 2, however, revealed the Macbook Pro lacked speed as compared to the Powerbook doing the same task. O'Grady also had the same findings with his Photoshop CS 2 tests. Macworld also tackled one of the hot issues regarding the new Mac portables: battery life. A quick test of playing a DVD on both the Macbook Pro and the Powerbook with the Energy Saver preferences turned off, showed the former lasting 2 hours and 3 minutes, while the latter died four minutes later. More tests and benchmarks from Macworld soon.

Update: Macworld gives the 15-inch Macbook Pro a four out of five mice. Battery life remains at par with the 15-inch Powerbook. Issues include Migration Assistant transferring some unwanted files, the same uncomfortably warm underside, video and Front Row quirks, and the humming, whining noise. Overall, for Jason Snell, the Macbook Pro is a Powerbook all throughout. It's just the Intel inside that's different. Macworld editor Phillips Michael, he's not worried that Adobe has not decided to jump in the Universal Binaries band wagon this year.

Geek Patrol compares the benchmarks of the new Macbook Pro 2.0GHz and of the Powerbook 1.6GHz. Geek Patrol used Geekbench Preview 2 for their benchmarking. Geekbench showed the Macbook Pro outperforming the Powerbook in all but one benchmark. TUAW disregarded the one benchmark where the Powerbook outperformed the Macbook Pro, averaged the rest of the figures, and the results showed the Macbook Pro, on average, was 4.26 times faster than the Powerbook.

Apple has stopped selling the 15" Powerbook G4.

Whine, whine, whine.
Dan Pourhadi has noted something wrong with his Macbook Pro. One, is the a stripe of the LCD at the bottom which is brighter than the rest of the screen and two, a persistent hissing noise located at the back of the unit which is first attributed to the LCD but he is no longer quite sure where it's coming from. The whine or noise are also discussed in the Apple discussion forums and in MacInTouch.

Update:
Pourhadi thinks he might have figured out where the noise is coming from. Using Apple's CHUD tools, he found out that when he disabled the Core Duo's second core the noise went away. Is this really where the problem is? Can this be fixed with a software update or are several Macbook Pros doomed to have to go back to Apple to be replaced?

Barely a week has gone by and problems with some Macbook Pros have begun cropping up. Macfixit.com lists problems like the noise, poor sound quality and some Macbook Pros arriving dead.

Open wiiiide...
Other World Computing (OWC) has posted pictures of a dissected MacBook Pro. More reviews and tips from OWC here. Tom Bridge does an analysis of the pictures.

Ifixit has a guide for performing a complete disassembly of the MacBook Pro.

Just a piece of advice
O'Grady's written tips and strategies on migrating your files from one Mac to another.