It's only a $200 price difference from the regular Macbook 5, 1? Wow, I should've gotten the pro instead. Is the Macbook Pro capable of running decent FPS games without lag? Right now, I'm satisfied with my regular Macbook, just daily regular use, 6-8 hours a day left running, still working fine.

I should also add that unless you colour calibrate the screen, you will almost never have accurate colours. This applies to any screen, laptop or desktop. The colours might look okay out of the box, but in reality, they're not. Laptop screens are almost always a bit too blueish...not good if you edit photos or video.

I get about 50fps playing WoW on my 17" Macbook Pro with all of the graphic options turned to full and with the dedicated graphics card enabled.

I disagree. With that money it's far better to buy a 13.3 MB air, the higher res screens is great.


It's a bad time to buy MB Pro stuff, it will all be refreshed in just a few short months. If you can, hold off.

I had my mbp 13" for about 5 months now and the battery health is down to 87% (according to istat). Is this normal?
I get nowhere near 10 hours of battery life too.. more like 5-6 hours (med brightness, wifi on, just internet browsing or word processing.).

^ Try doing a battery calibration to see if it helps?

^ I did one on the weekend and it dropped from 90% health to 88% health. Today its 87% Health. :(

Maybe im calibrating it wrong?
I did a full drain
-left it off for 24 hours.
-Then plugged it in,
-left it plugged for 24 hours,
-then turn on.

Hmmm...you do have a point there, but the 13" MBP screen still has a higher gamut screen, and when doing pure number crunching tasks like Photoshop, the MBP is slightly faster. The screen resolution differences between the 13" models would be the deal breaker for me personally - If I had the chance to do it over again, instead of a 17" MBP, I would get the 13" MBA and a 27" iMac. It would be about the same price as what I paid for the 17" MBP.

Would the battery health decrease if the charger is constantly plugged in?

^MB Air has no ethernet or dvd drive so it's basically useless to a lot of people. There's also only 1 USB port. It's not worth it IMO

One big gripe with the new MacBook's are that you can't remove the battery easily. If you are the type that uses it at a desk often, plugged in - the battery life will go down quite a bit even if you aren't using it. My Netbook - which I had plugged in at a desk most of the time, using it maybe once a week on batteries - still has a good 6 hrs battery life 2.5 years later.

BTW - there's a new Samsung 13" laptop that's supposed to rival the MB Air in weight, thickness and battery life, AND it has an i5 processor. Just throwing that in.

Apple claims it's battery technology makes the battery last mch longer than other laptop batteries - up to 1000 charges vs. about 300 charges before capacity drops to 80%. We'll see if this claim is true in a few years I guess.

The new MBA has 2 USB ports, btw...and who uses Ethernet anyway? I never do. With the MBA you can either buy the external DVD drive or use that program that let's you commandeer another computer's drive and use it.
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Damn how many cycles have you logged on istat? I've had my MBP about 6 months now and logged 118 cycles on my battery and it's still at 95%

Only 114 =(

Take your Macbook to Apple repair they can tell you if the battery is faulty or not - they will replace it if it is. It sounds like your battery is a bit gimpy to me.

I have 296 cycle counts and the battery has 12,345mAh at full charge, so about 95%.

Macbooks have advanced circuitry that prevents premature battery death - they're smarter than Windows PC's. The non-removable battery is a major gripe with people who need to be out in the field, but a company called Hypermac makes external power supplies for laptops that are quite nice.

These days I don't think a lot of people use Ethernet or disc drives.... And in an ultraportable don't really see why you would need them.
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Actually with the flash SSD day to day tasks are actually faster! The only downside vs the 13.3 MBP is storage space but I just bring a portable HD with me. Things like photoshop and web browsers and rebooting are faster on the air than MBP but applying complex Photoshop filters MBP is a bit faster. The next gens of MBPs will prObably be all SSD which would be pretty amazing.
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an ssd swap is actually very easy to do on the current gen. can even use carbonite copy cloner to mirror/clone your existing hard drive, just put the new drive in a 2.5" enclosure or a usb-sata adapter.

my friend got one of these and i installed it for him on his previous gen mbp. it replaces the optical drive. totally breathes new life into the machine.

- i don't think purchasing any machine w/o at least an i5/i7 in this price range is sensible
- macbooks were never ahead in the graphics card game
- i can't imagine how ppl use the non-removable battery models as their main computer. i leave my computer on 24/7 to d/l stuff or to encode sometimes. do u guys leave the battery plugged in? i actually baby my older macbook and take the battery out when i use it for an extended period of time.
- still love the build quality of the machines overall, and how in general they treat their customers. totally curious about the app store jailbreak scheduled for next month.

+1 I've only used the disc drive three times to burn some mp3 cds for my car and installing office, but that's mostly stuff you do at home, on the go I really don't see the point. Besides you can torrent most of the applications anyways which kinda defeats the purpose of the disc drive.

The only occasion I'd see that you might need the ethernet and is plausible is if you're going away on holiday and the motel/hotel only has the ethernet cable, but I find most have switched to wifi anyways so NBD. I kinda regret not waiting for the MBA the MBP is a little heavy to be bussing with along with a textbook + notebook. :(

Is there anything on appstore you guys would recommend looking into? I only opened it once and found it kinda pointless so I removed the icon from my dock lol

Exactly. I don't see why ppl are so hung up about optical drives. I've never needed to use one on any of my laptops. In fact I hardly ever use the one on my desktop. And if I do need to I'll just transfer it to the desktop for burning over my wifi N network.

The iMac displays use 8-bit IPS panels, are calibrated from factory, and use a superior gamma for photo-editing ...

The vast majority of all-in-one desktop PCs use shitty 6-bit TN panels, little-to-no calibration (or calibrated for vibrancy, not for accuracy), and uses a different gamma, which generally isn't as good for photo editing (depends what you're doing, there are some cases where it's better).

If you do your research, get a good IPS or *VA panel LCD monitor, and get the proper calibration tools for Windows, then it's equal. Most people are too ignorant or lazy to do such a thing, though, especially when Apple actually does it cheaper in this case, at least on the 27" (though I'd still recommend getting calibration tools for the Mac to match your printer; no point in having a calibrated monitor without a calibrated printer if you're doing this stuff).

That said, I much prefer Windows over Mac, but I don't really do this type of stuff very much. I have 2 Macs and they barely get used by me. GF uses them the most, primarily for Facebook, Graphic Design, Website Design, and random artistic projects.

If you're comparing laptops, all laptop screens suck for photo editing, anyways (6-bit TN, terrible backlights, terrible colour gamut). You really need to get a good external monitor, anyways, in which case you may as well go w/ Windows 7 as you can get more power for a lot less unless you need the battery life, in which case the Macbook Pros are quite competitive.

Still can't figure out why i only get 2 hours max out of my MBP its the late 2008 version. Wifi and bluetooth is on..

how do you check how many cycles u had on ur battery?

^ System profiler.

I got 127 cycles 4230 mAh at full charge. Condition is normal. :confused:

iMac screens are nowhere near calibrated from the factory.

Macbook Pro screens (especially the matte screen option) are more than adequate for photo editing. Of course, an external monitor like an Eizo or NEC is much, much better, but most non-commercial clients won't know the difference between sRGB, Adobe 1998 & CMYK prints anyways.