Who says Apple Macs are perfect? (Apple MacBook Pro MA895B/A)

Member Name: Alfettaman

Product:	Apple MacBook Pro MA895B/A
Date:	13/02/09 (210 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Almost everything

Disadvantages: Read on...

There is much well-deserved eulogising on these pages about Apple Macintosh computers, so I will try not to repeat what others have written. All the technical specifications are readily available too, so I won't recycle those here either.

Suffice to say that this Macbook Pro (MBP) is a truly astounding machine, especially for those who want to use a portable computer for some purpose other than learning how to get a portable computer to work properly. As a professional trainer I work on my clients' premises and often have just a very few minutes to get everything working with my laptop. Almost two decades of using Apple Mac desktop computers led me to hope that the MacBook Pro would just do what was asked of it, without it making unwelcome adjustments to my blood pressure at the same time.

The MBP came out of the box, I pressed the power button and 20 seconds later it had started up and was ready to use. Fantastic - and so it should be, at about £1300 this is one of the most expensive 15" laptops you can buy.

The "five star" ratings here reflect my experience with this computer, but maybe it's more helpful for me to be unreasonably critical, and focus on the few things that could be even better:

Audio quality:
Apple has packed so much into this slim machine that they didn't leave themselves a lot of room for the built-in stereo speakers. The grilles look big enough, but they actually have to house two light sensors, a microphone and the power button too, so the resulting sound quality and volume is not so good - and the left speaker seems worse than the right, on my machine and others! This is easily fixed with a pair of Logitech's excellent V20 laptop speakers, which I have reviewed elsewhere.

Screen quality:
First things first: the built-in display is of fantastic quality - crisp, sharp, ultra-high-resolution, big enough, and with beautiful colour balance. But on my machine odd pixels are going out (i.e. turning black) here and there. You have to look for them, but they're there. At this rate, it'll be getting pretty obvious about eight or ten years from now!

Apple Superdrive (optical disk drive):
Mine failed after 10 months. This is a complicated optical disc drive that plays and records all sorts of different CD and DVD formats.

Battery life:
Again after 10 months, I noticed that the battery discharge time had fallen from about four or five hours to just two, or maybe three at the very best.

These last two faults were fixed under warranty without argument by my friendly and helpful local Apple dealer, who replaced the entire Superdrive and fitted a new battery.

I said I wouldn't join the "eulogisers", but there are a few things that especially impressed me about the MacBook Pro, so I will mention them briefly:

Connectivity:
This machine seems to be able to connect to almost anything, so (for example) syncronising the addresses on my Nokia mobile phone, TomTom Satellite Navigation and the Macbook Pro is utterly seamless and completely automated.

Another example: plug in a data projector and switch everything on. You'll find it just works, without having to madly stab at "Ctrl-F5" (or whatever it is on a PC to get it to run an external monitor). What's more, the Macbook Pro attempts to optimise the resolution setting on the data projector if it can, and sets it's own screen resolution to match. Unplug the data projector, and it sets itself back to the earlier resolution that you'd chosen. In my line of work, I really do value that kind of "zero drama" performance.

Illumination:
The first time I moved the MBP into a softly lit room, the screen brightness faded smoothly down, and the keyboard lit up - wonderful!

I could go on. Everything on this machine seems to be painstakingly and intelligently thought through and just works beautifully. If that's made it quite a complicated feat of technology then so be it.

WARNING:
Using this machine is a bit like driving a thoroughbred Italian sports car for the first time; once you've done it, everything else is going to feel somewhere between distinctly ordinary and laughably inept. If someone offers to lend you one (the car or the Macbook Pro) say "no" politely, because you'll probably end up falling in love with it and having to buy one...

Summary: Professional performance, but without the usual drama

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