The weekend after a big exam is always most enjoyable. I have a chance to catch up on email, projects, and best of all, play with my (new) computer. The “MacBook Pro”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ is lightning quick: I setup “MySQL”:http://www.mysql.com/ and “PHP”:http://www.php.net/ to allow me to develop web stuff locally, and in using “phpMyAdmin”:http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ to peruse my databases, the query times were astonishing. Of course, my old 600 MHz iBook did the trick, but with two Intel cores running at 2 GHz, wow!

There have been some reports of display and sound issues. On the first, some have noticed a band of slight darkness near the bottom of the display. I have no such problem. In fact, this display and brightness is absolutely gorgeous. There are not enough superlatives to bestow onto my new computer to do it justice. With every new portable computer I have owned, the display has been brighter and brighter, and up until the MBP(MacBook Pro), there were still instances where it was not bright enough. That is, it did not match desktop LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) displays in their quality or light output. The MBP now claims to be as bright as any desktop LCD monitor, and I find this to be completely accurate.

On the second issue reported, “the sound problem”:http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=286970, I have become aware of it, but only after explicitly listening for it. Apparently, the sound, which is of a whining or high-pitched character, originates from the power supply. The sound is intermittent, but hardly noticeable.

To further test my new computer, I put it through the paces of running my custom-made AppleScript to resize photos from iPhoto and output them for my web site “photo gallery”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/. This entails resizing to two different sizes and applying an unsharp mask filter to counteract the softening that occurs when down-sizing an image. With the iBook, this was a slow, arduous process. The MBP, however, performed swimmingly. Even though Photoshop CS was running under emulation via “Rosetta”:http://www.apple.com/rosetta/ (Apple’s PowerPC binary translation engine), it was still faster than my old iBook.

To round out this mini-review of sorts, I should mention the other goodies Apple gave MacBook Pro owners: built-in iSight camera, MagSafe power connector, Front Row and remote control. For the first, I have found the iSight to be of superior quality to the older, bigger iSights. Next, the MagSafe magnetic power connector is sturdy and works just as advertised: it pulls out when enough force is applied. As an example, just the other day, I was pulling my computer forward on my desk and the plug was stuck behind my desk, yet the MagSafe adaptor disconnected. Nifty. Finally, Front Row, which gives users a full-screen interface into their movies and DVDs, music and photos, is handy and fun to sit back and browse. I have found meda on my computer to which I was completely oblivious before running Front Row. Naturally, the IR remote will be nice during “Keynote”:http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/ presentations.

Go check out the “unpacking pictures”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/macbook-pro-unboxing/ I shot of my MacBook Pro.