lol funny article! but I have a confession to make-in october, I was finally able to buy myself a laptop, with a little financial help from family. up until then, I had been using a 1999 IBM, which despite being old and the previous owner knowing nothing, was in great shape, clean as a whistle, and with it's 6 gig HD, 16 mgs of ram or something like that, ran very well. I was even able to run soundforge 6 decently on it! so anyway, I went online, looked at all the main pc companies dell, hp, etc. I ended up finding a great deal. HP dv6052cl, 160 gig HD, 2 gigs RAM, NVidia graphics card (only 64 megs of vram, forget how much shared) webcam, AMD Turion X-2 running at 1.66 or so. all for $1,199. pretty good deal, I thought. basically what I wanted, as I wanted to have the option of doing some casual gaming, but really needed a pc with enough ram for intensive audio processing and editing (cubase sx 3, wavelab, etc). and I wanted to be able to upgrade to vista ultimate eventually. well, after a month of it working pretty well, good audio work, although not great video editing despite having Vegas 6, the thing stopped turning on. now, I'm not a true expert, but from fiddling around on our family pc and my last laptop, I'm pretty competent. after a while, it just refused to turn on, unless I took out the battery and waited for several hours. eventually, I figured out that it was the ram pci controller (pci or something, don't remember anymore) and my thoughts were ah fuck, no way I'll be able to fix it. luckily I bought it at costco rather than a pc store, so I just returned it and got my money back, no questions asked. and I decided, against all odds, to beg, borrow and steal until I could afford a mac book pro. now, I had never bought in to the whole mac thing. sure, they looked good and were probably pretty good machines, but why switch? after all, I had several thousand dollars worth of pc software that I didn't want to give up. but by then bootcamp had been released in beta, so, after figuring out how to afford the damn thing (yes, I'm still repaying my grandfather the $1000 he lent me), I went to the apple store to check things out. well, I ended up getting the higher end 15", 2.33 GHz C2D, 2 gigs ram, 256 ATI 1600 video card, 120 gig HD, etc. and bloody expensive. basically, after using windows for as long as I had been using computers, I decided to switch. here's what I think after having the MBP for 3 months:
It's very fast-C2D is MUCH better than AMDs briefly tops-of-the-pops AMD X-2 series. obviously, this has nothing to do with macs vs pcs, but it has stood out to me in video and audio processing and general multi-tasking.
iLife IS very good for the average consumer, very easy and intuitive to use. it took me 5 minutes to set up firewire video transfer from a sony DV Camcorder, versus more than an hour (admittedly when I didn't know anything about working with video) to set things up with vegas 6 on my HP, using a separate account on the computer specially set up for audio and video work.
and the final video was in higher quality than in vegas, without me having to delve in to the settings everywhere I turned like I had to in vegas.
physically, the MBP feels high-quality. the body is very sleek, just an inch thin, and feels great. in terms of build quality and feel, it's like the difference between a mercedes and dodge. and I know that people will say as long as the thing works well, then the "feel" is unimportant, right? well, yes, that's true. the whole "luxury" thing is nice, but by no means necessary. BUT! I could go to the dell online store, get as close to the overall specs as possible, and get a great computer I'm sure. and I checked out that option, and guess what? a similarly configured dell e1505 costs almost as much or more, and while the pc would probably be well built, but it wouldn't match the mac in terms of feel, looks, and overall build. that said, I realize that this is more important to some people and less so to others, but for the same price, I go for the better design.
Bootcamp: the first thing I did was get bootcamp, and do my best top get windows (at the time I thought I would be using vegas a lot). bootcamp worked great, although I hate installing any operating system, it went pretty smoothly. which is great, now I have all my old windows software when I need it, and FIFA 07, which I just got. bloody sweet if you ask me. yesterday I cracked parallels and windows, so I now can run both OS's at the same time when I speed isn't a priority. in other words, I'll be able to run microsoft office while in OS X, as well as TVU player, a great windows-only streaming TV app that I use every time I want to catch a football game. it was annoying as hell before having to quit everything in OS X just to restart in windows and catch a game. problem solved
one thing that is annoying is that the MBP GPU is under-clocked, only slightly in the C2D version, and I haven't found a way to raise the over-clock in OS X, but in windows it's pretty easy. usually it doesn't matter, but when I'm playing games, particularly when I'm playing them on my aunts 32" HDTV, I wish I could easily raise the clock speed. minor gripe however.
what else? firefox 2.0 isn't as good in the mac version, but I still use it over safari, partly b/c I'm more familiar, and also because at this point I don't want to go through the trouble of exporting bookmarks and the like. Another thing, my IM app of choice, Fire, is inconsistent. some aspects are nice, some things just aren't as good as trillian, mas, or aim. Battery isn't too impressive, but it's ok. I generally don't run it on battery, and when I do I know it wont be too long, so I don't do too much to save battery life. Another thing I like that most people wont really care about is the combo audio I/O, as both are in addition to using regular 1/8 plugs, they are also optical, (S/PDIF) taking the TOSLink mini I/Os. great for playing through a high-end system, or for transfering to and from minidisc or the like without losing quality. so, I would say that at this point, if you're looking for a great overall laptop for power use, gaming, audio, video, the MBP is pretty great. if gaming is your main thing, then you'd probably better off with a dell XPS laptop or the like, which while more expensive, has the edge on the graphics cards, although an XPS with similar specs is definitely more expensive! and the MBP has an express card 34 slot, and while I don't know the possibilities of adding a better graphics card when one comes available, it seems eminently possible.