An Alternative MacBook Pro Review

The MacBook Pro. What is the first thing that pops into your head when you hear the name of Apples long awaited notebook? Say it out loud “MacBook Pro“… For me it prompts the question “Would you like fries with that?” Yes, Apples latest edition to its notebook range sounds like it’s named after something you might expect to find on the menu at McDonalds, except with less calories, and probably better tasting! That said, what’s in a name? And isn’t there a saying about a rose by any other name smelling just as sweet? Well I intend to find out, by giving this particular rose a damn good sniff.

If you’ve stumbled across this article in search of an informative MacBook Pro review, the chances are that before you got to this one you had already read a fair few well written and helpful pieces along the way. They all mention and demonstrate benchmark tests and comparisons, they have pretty pictures and graphs to show you how good the MacBook really is. Some tell you about the snazzy ‘Two Finger Scrolling‘ technology and the easy release magnetic power supply. I think that all the other reviews have covered almost everything there is to be mentioned about the new MacBook Pro at this point, well, almost… Now what was that saying again? A rose by any other name would…

SMELL

An element which is often overlooked when buying, and indeed reviewing a new laptop, is the smell or “Cyber Scent” as some people like to call it. Honest! Opening the MacBook Pro for the first time, I can report that there isn’t a particularly prominent odour of any kind. On closer inspection, pressing ones nose against the keyboard, like this hyghdddddddc, and taking short, sharp sniffs, does reveal a very light fregrance of circuit boards, but that is all. The monitor and outer casing offer nothing in terms of “Cyber Scent”. I would say that the MacBook Pro compares well to other laptops in this area.

Earlier on in this review I made the claim that the MacBook Pro probably tasted better than a McDonalds burger. This all down to personal prefrence of course, but it would be foolish of me not to put my theory to the test, the taste test as it were.

TASTE

Licking the aluminium outer casing I found to be a bland and tasteless experience. Further disappointment followed with the nibbling of the corners, sucking of the keys and biting of the cursor pad, all of which yielded nothing in terms of taste. I decided it was safer not to put the power supply anywhere near my mouth, certainly not while it was plugged in anyway. Overall the taste test returned pretty poor results. The MacBook Pro was bland, tastless and had no significant nutritional value. So we’ll call it a draw with McDonalds then.

SUMMARY

To conclude, I found the MacBook Pro to exceed other laptops in its range, but could only manage to be on par with a McDonanlds burger in taste test. So, my advice. If you’re looking for both a powerful and fairly odourless laptop I would certainly recommend Apples’ MacBook Pro. Even if it has got a silly name!

Return of the Mac (Apple Mac that is!)

Around ten years ago my parents bought me an Apple Mac to help with my college work. I was studying Graphic Design at the time and even though money was tight they knew that it would be a valuable investment for a budding designer like myself. The Mac was one of those old beige Performa’s and at the time I was rather pleased with it. So you can imagine how gutted I was to find that just a couple of months later all those beige, box like Performas’ in the local computer store (PC World) had been replaced by snazzy, curvey and extremely cool looking iMacs!. I had never seen a home computer like it before, no one had.

Fair enough, my old, dowdy Performa done it’s job. I had the imaging software I needed installed, and without it I no doubt would have found college a lot more of a struggle, but I couldn’t help feel that little bit dissapointed, and some of that dissapointment, rightly or wrongly, was directed at Apple. If I’d known the iMac was just around the corner I would have waited that little bit longer.

Gradually, a couple of years down the line and I started to find that the Performa could no longer hack the pace, it simply could not provide the sort of things I now expected from my home computer. My friends all had PC’s, they were playing the latest games with impressive graphics, they were surfing the internet, they were downloading music, they were watching movies, and a few of them were running the latest versions of Photoshop and Illustrator too. I couldn’t do most of that stuff on my Mac, it was very frustrating.

When I graduated from college, I was lucky enough to find employment straight away, literally the day I left. I already had plans for my first pay packet, I was going to spend the lot on a new computer. But what was it going be this time? Was I going to stick with Mac or make the switch and get myself a PC? As it happens I ended up choosing a PC over a new Apple Mac, and that’s what I owned ever since. that is, up until now!

Faced with the problem of moving to a new house, which is so small that I don’t have the room to fit a desktop computer in, I decided I was going to have to buy myself a laptop and get rid of my old desktop PC. I started browsing through the Dell website and perusing the Sony laptops online, weighing up all the pro’s and cons, and trying to figure out the best deals. Out of curiousity more than anything, I payed a visit to the Apple Store webite, just to see how things had progressed since the days of my chunky, beige breeze block, I had absolutely no intention of buying anything at all. Things had moved along just fine, impressively so infact, and much to my own surprise I found myself uncontrolably drawn towards the MacBook Pro 15.4″ with 2.16Ghz Core Duo, it looked so good, a lot of thought and care had so obviously gone into its design and the same could be said for everything in the Apple range… It had me under its spell, one click of the mouse, and £1,699 later, I had ordered myself a brand, spanking new MacBook Pro. I had returned to Mac after all these years in the PC wilderness, and my poor credit card was feeling rather battered!

Was it worth making the swap? Was it money well spent or have I just made a rather bad financial decision at a time when I need to be counting the pennies?

I will tell you when I give the full MacBook Pro Review next time…

The Review. What’s it all about?

Hmm… My first entry on this new blog of mine, but what will be the point of its existence? Well, I’ll keep this short. You can probably guess by the title that I intend to Review. I haven’t any particular criteria as to what will and what will not be reviewed, so expect to see a wide variety of everyday things, from Films to TV shows, Laptop Computers to Smoothie Makers! It’s pretty much anything I use in my everyday life that I think could be of benefit (or detriment) to someone elses.

I’m by no means an expert in any particular field, I have my interests and hobbies but I won’t be appearing on MasterMind any time soon! I hope this will work in my favour, as I plan to give a more user friendly, laymen’s view of things.

that’s it for now, see you soon.

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