MacBook Pro in hindsight
Posted by Anticitizen on August 6, 2007
With my MacBook Pro missing, I actually have been thinking more and more about the machine itself and how it is built. I thought of the Intel processor and Intel SATA crap that sits under the hood of my beloved Mac.
I thought to myself: “Why do I love this thing?”
Sure, it has an Apple branding on it. Sure, it runs OS X like the wind. But strip away the silvery stuff, and you pretty much have an ordinary PC that has an EFI instead of a BIOS.
While the MacBook Pro looks, feels, and operates like the Powerbooks before it, I can’t help but feel like I’m using some cheap piece of machinery rather than something totally awesome. When I fired up the MacBook Pro for the first time, I didn’t feel the rush, the excitement, the awesomeness that was when I first booted my PowerBook 3400 about 3 years back.
But when I fired up that PowerBook, I had a lot of joy in using it. Even though I had a pretty modern PC at the time, nothing exactly matched the PowerBook experience. Add that to the fact that I could actually use it on my lap for extended periods of time, because back then, people actually cared about how much heat these things put out.
Nowadays, no one cares about how much heat these monster laptops can output. I know if I never ran SMCfanControl on my MacBook Pro, it could easily hit 130F idle. The only people who really care about the heat output of these laptops seem to be AMD, whose Turion64×2 Processor (As I’ve seen in a HP laptop) managed to stay only comfortably warm under full load. While the performance is lower than that of the Core2, I’d prefer lesser heat output. Because laptops are meant for field work, not desktop replacements, as sadly, many companies (including Apple), are advertising their laptops for.
