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Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro(mid 2009) User Review

by Buddy Sun

Apple updated its line of MacBook and MacBook Pro on June 8, 2009 with faster processors, SD card slot, better battery life and better display. This review is the upper standard 15-inch MacBook Pro purchased in the UK(model number MB986B / A), and carries over to other computers and MacBooks, and the advantages and disadvantages of these new changes.

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standard upper Macbook Pro has the following requirements:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 2.8GHz(6MB cache, 1066MHz FSB) Memory: 4GB(2x2GB) PC3 DDR3 SDRAM -8500(1066) GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB of GDDR3 SDRAM(dedicated) and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM(shared) Display: 15.4 LED-backlit glossy widescreen TFT active-matrix(1440900) HDD: Hitachi 500GB 5400rpm SATA II Battery: Integrated 73 / Hr Lithium-polymer(up to 7 hours) Optical Drive: 8x DL-loading SuperDrive(DVD ± R DL / DVD ± RW / CD-RW) Keyboard: Full-size, illuminated keyboard(UK) Mouse: Multi-Touch trackpad Style: unibody aluminum case with a magnetic snap Catch-less Ports: Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800 port(up to 800 Mb / s), Mini DisplayPort(up to 25601600), 2x USB 2.0(up to 480 Mb / s) SD card slot, audio line output, Audio(Intel HD Audio) Kensington Lock socket Wi-Fi: AirPort Extreme(IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n) Bluetooth: Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR Camera: Built-in iSight webcam Size: 0.95in x 14.35in x 9.82in(2.41cm x 36.4cm x 24.9 cm) Weight: 5.5lbs(2.49 kg) OS: Mac OS X 10.5(Leopard) Warranty: 1 year worldwide AppleCare how to set up Price: £ 1699 / 2299 dolar

Construction and Design

Since their introduction in October 2008, unibody MacBook Pro have been produced from a single sheet of aluminum. Apple has improved on this project with the latest Macbook Pro battery by removing the panel underneath the laptop. The result is a perfectly smooth finish on the bottom of the Macbook, but also allow the user to remove to remove the battery.

smooth, seamless bottom Macbook Pro

Production of the entire laptop with a single sheet of aluminum results in a rigid chassis combines invalid. This means that there is less likely to fracture or break in this developing case. Because of the properties of aluminum, the laptop is very unlikely to crack or break. However, aluminum is relatively soft metal, so it can deform heavy pressure should be applied to how physically sits on the laptop. Aluminium is a conductive material, so heat is spread throughout the computer, providing more efficient cooling, but also making the entire computer is moderately warm to the touch, after long-term intensive treatment. This is especially true when running Windows.

MacBook Pro Microsoft Windows Vista

in hand, believes Apple Macbook Pro, portable and convenient. This is mainly due to the texture of aluminum, and the fact that the laptop is less than 1 inch thick. But weighing less than 2.5 kg in 15 MacBook Pro is light on the 15.4 laptop.

Outside frame and glass covering about glossy display MacBook Pro laptop is not very sensitive to fingerprints and smudges. However, the hinge connecting the monitor to the base laptop from time to time is not sufficiently rigid to hold the screen in place when laptop is worn with the screen open. It is therefore not recommended to laptop around in this way.

Display and Sound

Apple claims that appear on the new 15 Macbook Pro has 60% more color range than the previous generation, which means that the new MacBook Pro display, you may receive a much wider range of colors. New 15 Macbook Pro now rival monitors are perfect for 17 Macbook Pro, with darker blacks for a brighter white. Viewing angles, especially the horizontal, are also impressive at 15 Macbook Pro, as can be seen on the pictures below:

viewing angles the screen Macbook Pro. Horizontal viewing angles are impressive, and vertical angles are as expected from the notebook screen. Please note that the brightness is not turned to the max the maximum brightness was a little too much for my eyes

Of course, the MacBook Pro display still falls short in comparison with self-MVA, PVA, IPS, or display. But the laptop is certainly one of the best on the market to so far. particularly useful feature of the MacBook Pro as you adjust the display brightness according to ambient brightness. This feature is available from Apple has released MacBook unibody models, and can be turned off in System Preferences.

speakers to Macbook Pro, like the speakers in most notebooks, have not improved significantly in recent years. They are louder than their 13 counterparts, but a decent pair of stereo headphones or speakers dedicated sound much better.

Keyboard and Touchpad

15 Macbook Pro has a full size backlit keyboard Chiclet. I personally enjoy a Chiclet project, and that is very easy and quiet to write on.

MacBook Pro keyboard and mouse.

As a user of Apple keyboard for a few years, I have overcome the initial difficulties I had when I first turned on. However, some users may need to get used to the narrower Return or Enter, and the lack of dedicated forward Delete key. However, when new users are aware that the Command press your thumb instead of their little finger, should have no difficulty in adapting to the MacBook Pro keyboard.

keyboard backlight activates automatically in low light, illuminating the entire keyboard. Just as the automatic adjustment to the backlight, automatic keypad light can be turned off in System Preferences and Brightness can be controlled using the keyboard on the fly.

Macbook Pro

multi-touch trackpad on the 15 Macbook Pro has no physical buttons. This is because the lower part of the trackpad, you can press down, acting as a physical button. This project, which was introduced with the unibody MacBooks, received mixed feelings from users, some praising it, while others find it impossible to use. I personally think its no different from conventional trackpad with physical buttons, and think it is a very good way to achieve the aesthetic design without compromising on functionality.

As for performance, trackpad works flawlessly with Mac OS X. There are also a number of options to exercise, right-click, choosing from the trackpad with two fingers, physically pressing on different areas of the trackpad.

In Microsoft Windows is a completely different story. The default Boot Camp drivers offer very limited or non-standard configuration for the trackpad, and the sensitivity of the trackpad is slightly queasy, as weak to work. This problem can be fixed in the version of Snow Leopard and the new Boot Camp drivers, but in the meantime, I can only recommend users to use an external mouse with two buttons for Windows.

Heat and Noise

MacBook Pro has the perfect temperature management in OS X. It will be almost silent all the time and cool down quickly after idling. This is a completely different story with Windows, however, if the laptop works much warmer, even when idling, and it takes longer to cool. Nevertheless, two fans in the Macbook Pro is very quiet because it is the default Hitachi 500GB hard drive.

MacBook Pro temperature in the light load

When in heavy load conditions over a long period time at the bottom of the Macbook Pro does not become uncomfortably warm enough to use on your lap. At the top of the laptop is gently warm in such a situation, due to the conductive properties of aluminum.

Obtaining accurate temperature reading of a laptop under stress was rather difficult due to the highly efficient cooling system. The screenshot below was obtained immediately after the restart after running several performance tests on Windows.

MacBook Pro temperature following performance tests on Windows

Ports and

ports on the left side of MacBook Pro.

on the right side of MacBook Pro, showing Kensington Lock port and slot loading SuperDrive

Front Macbook Pro, showing the Infra Red sensor and the power indicator

Back side of the MacBook Pro with display hinge and has a port

For 15 laptop, MacBook Pro, surprisingly few ports and some ports were not very strong and mixed with the opinions of the users.

Apple also includes an SD card slot in Macbook Pro models. It is very friendly to users who request a function for many years, but the slot is not universal and only supports cards full size SD. The 15 Macbook Pro models, Apple has removed the ExpressCard slot. This enraged many users who rely on devices Expresscard expansion.

Firewire in the Macbook models has also been changed from the FireWire 400 to FireWire 800 Increased speed is a welcome change, but the FireWire 800 port is not directly compatible with FireWire 400 devices. Additional converter is required to connect the FireWire 400 FireWire 800 devices, and this with great criticism from many users.

Mini DisplayPort port on the MacBook Pro supports external displays up to 25601600. This means that you can connect a 30 Apple Cinema Display to MacBook Pro and run it at full resolution. But Mini DisplayPort is licensed by Apple, and therefore requires an additional adapter to convert to other more common interface displays, such as VGA, DVI and HDMI.

All MacBook and MacBook Pro has a slot loading optical drives, which means that the mini-disks can not be used on the MacBooks and become stuck in the drive. The battery indicator on the side of a laptop is ridiculous features , although their usefulness is rather limited.

two USB ports on the 15 Macbook Pro is on the left side of the laptop, which would significantly impaired users who require a port in a more convenient location on your laptop, as well as and right handed users wired Apple Mighty Mouse. The only area in relation to ports, where the 15 MacBook Pro improves on the 13 Macbook Pro is the presence of separate Audio-In and Audio-Out ports.

At home, I personally have my Macbook connected to a Gigabit Ethernet network, connected to a 24 monitor which has a built-in USB hub and wired for 2.1 sound system. In this regard, having all the ports of one hand it is useful. However, those with slightly different requirements than mine may have problems and limitations when expanding their Macbook Pro with peripheral devices.

and reference values

Here some results of performance tests run on the 2.8 GHz 15 Macbook Pro.

Xbench:

In OS X, Xbench test was run several times with both the NVIDIA 9400M and 9600M GT from nVidia.

From 9400M performance peaked at 151.41 points and the bottom at 138.33. The 9600M GT, performance peaked at 151.77 points and the bottom at 147.92. From the results, it is clear that the factor bottlenecks Macbook Pro is its 500GB hard drive. For 9400M, there is no clear effect on memory as it is shared with the GPU.

Overall, the 2.8 GHz 15 Macbook Pro shows an overall improvement of 4.34% at the end of the previous advance(2.66GHz) 15 Macbook Pro(145.43) and an overall improvement 7.53% over the next configuration(2.66GHz) 15 Macbook Pro(141.14).

interesting anomaly results from Xbench results are graphics tests. The results between the 9400M and 9600M GT are surprisingly similar , possibly an indication that the research carried out by graphical Xbench is not the full load GPU nVidia MacBooks.

XBench benchmark results 9400M

XBench 9600M GT Benchmark results

Further tests were carried out in Windows to get more accurate and comparable results in the performance of MacBook Pro. The following tests were conducted on Windows Vista SP1, nVidia drivers 186.03 installed mobility.

PCMark Vantage:

PCMark Vantage yielded a result of 4304 PCMarks. This is a significant improvement of 22% from 3,525 PCMarks scored the next configuration(2.66GHz) 15 Macbook Pro, and a huge 19% improvement from the previous upper PCMarks 3606(2.66 GHz) 15 Macbook Pro.

3DMark06:

2.8GHz 15 Macbook Pro scored a total of 5978 3dmarks. It is a small 2.70% improvement compared to the previous upper(2.66 GHz) 15 Macbook Pro3. This result is hardly surprising, since both GPU notebooks are the same. The reason is a slight improvement, with the acceleration.

3DMark Vantage:

W 3DMark Vantage Macbook Pro Score 2045 3dmarks with the 1602 GPU and CPU Score 12011 assessment.

Resident Evil 5:

Running at a resolution of 1280800 in DirectX 9.0cz Motion Blur enabled, no AA and all settings High, Macbook Pro managed an average of 27.8 fps on the benchmark set, and 26.7 fps on a variable performance.

In DirectX 10, the same settings, MacBook Pro, managed 27.8 fps on a permanent basis and interesting benchmark 27 fps on the variable performance.

These figures may seem a bit small, but the demo looked excellent on-screen Macbook and was comfortable playing. Its just a shame people in the demo as unskilled.

Macbook Pro running Resident Evil 5 benchmark in DirectX 10

wPrime:

wPrime had conducted a number of times the benchmark CPU performance by calculating the square root of 32 million numbers executed in four separate threads.

wPrime results were very similar, with the fastest score in 28.222 seconds and 28.781 seconds in the slowest. These results are the average results for the T9600 CPU(the fastest registered hwbot.org is 26.74 and 31.10 is the slowest).

HDTune:

HDTune was made several times to obtain a fair comparison of performance 500GB 5400rpm Hitachi HD.

Average transfer rate peaked at 63.3MB / s, and at the bottom of 62.8MB / s. The lowest recorded was the transfer of 28.2MB / s, with the highest recorded in 83.6MB / s. These results are very en par with other 5400rpm 500GB mobile hard drives.

HDTune tests your hard drive

Battery Life

Apple boasts that the battery 73W/hr the MacBook Pro is capable of running machine for seven hours, from what Ive seen so far, this claim is surprisingly accurate. Battery Macbook Pro battery is by far the longest Ive ever seen in a notebook of this size. With special 9600M GT enabled, I personally have about 4 to 5 hours of light using WiFi and Bluetooth, and without reducing the display brightness or the backlight keyboard. With 9400M, I have about 6 to 7 hours, which is very impressive. In moments of inactivity, the battery indicator on the MacBook Pro displays up to 9 hours of rest.

In Windows, the battery life is limited, but getting three up to 4 hours using the 9600M GT in the light of the use is still possible.

SATA Limited

When Apple initially released Macbook refresh in June 2009, all models were your hard drive SATA II is limited to 1.5Gbps(150MB / s), as opposed to 3.0Gbps(300MB / s) throughput. Although this does not affect anyone using a mechanical hard drive SATA II is limited to 1.5Gbps(150MB / s), as opposed to 3.0Gbps(300MB / s) throughput. Although this does not affect anyone using a mechanical

Via:

Apple 15-inch MacBook Pro(mid 2009) User Review

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Are these good specs for the Mac I'm getting?

I am buying a Mac Pro and these are the specs on it after I configured it.

Processor: Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

Memory: 4GB (4x1GB)

Raid Card: Mac Pro RAID Card

Hard Drive: 750GB-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s

Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB, Stereo (2 x dual-link DVI)

Display: Apple Cinema HD Display (23" flat panel)

Wireless option: Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme

Apple Keyboard and Mouse: Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple wireless Mighty Mouse

By the way I was also thinking about putting Windows Vista on there using Boot Camp (and yes I know you have to have a Windows Vista installation disk to put it on the Mac) and was wondering how Vista would run because I intend on playing games that require a very good computer and only work on Windows.

So yeah just tell me if those are good specs and how Windows Vista and games for Windows Vista would run.

It's good specs for the system itself, but you might want to look at upgrading the RAM to 8GB once you get that machine home, if you plan on doing anything that's heavily media-production intensive in Mac OS (such as Final Cut or Logic). Don't waste money on Apple's 750GB hard disk; for what you'd spend on it, you can go online and buy a pair of 750GB or even 1TB drives (and unlike PCs, Macs always come with restore disks).

The Quadro FX is only a good card if you plan on doing anything with engineering graphics or 3D rendering, like AutoCAD on Windows and Maya3D on Mac; the Radeon X1900 is only around 2% slower overall for general and gaming use, and you can use the extra money to get the 30" display if you want it. The Mighty Mouse sucks...not very ergonomic with the button placement and its actually kinda ugly; your money would be better spent on a keyboard and mouse set from Logitech or Microsoft (with bluetooth technology to connect them; either company's mouse will also give you more buttons). Make sure you do keep an Apple keyboard though; you never know when you'll need it for troubleshooting.

As far as Windows Vista for gaming, you'd be better off with a copy of Windows XP if you can find one. XP is more stable, gives better frame rates, has better driver support, and none of the Mac Pro video cards at this time are DirectX 10/Shader 4 compliant (and Mac video cards have historically been more expensive than PC video cards for the exact same thing, either directly from Apple or from ATI). If you do go with Vista, I would encourage you to keep an eye on http://www.themacelite.com/; this website and forum focuses on turning PC video cards into Mac video cards (I've converted a GeForce 6200 and a GeForce 7800 to work in my PowerMac G4, thanks to them). As Mac versions of the GeForce 8000 series and ATI X2000 series cards come out, they'll have how-tos of making them work with Mac Pro.

BTW, the post before me stated that Boot Camp is a Virtual Machine; it's not. Boot Camp allows Windows full access to an Intel-based Mac's hardware, and not emulated access. You have to restart to go between Windows and Mac OS, and you're given a start-up menu to boot either operating system. Parallel's Desktop and VMWare Fusion, on the other hand, allow emulated environments for Windows to run in. You can verify any of this information on CNet.com, PCWorld.com, and MacAddict.com.

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