Otaku Gadgets

Apple has confused a lot of people with the naming scheme of their new line of portables. It seems like they are trying to free up the ‘MacBook’ name for something else. In any case, now we have the 3 MacBook Pro notebooks, and the lowest one is a 13-inch model.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro does not have a dedicated graphics solution like the other two models do. But other than that, this package is really hard to beat. In comparison to the older (white) 13-inch model from Apple, this one has more of everything.

It has more memory, more storage, higher graphics power, stronger casing and a really long battery life. Now with a feature list like that and a price of $1199, the all-new 13-inch MacBook Pro is a really tough notebook to beat.

Let’s start with the thing that makes this notebook one of the hardiest ever (without bringing out the carbon fiber that is). The new manufacturing process that Apple showed off during the launch of the first ‘Unibody’ MacBooks has really made a difference.

For those of you who did not follow MacWorld obsessively – the unibody is a new type of casing developed by Apple, where they carve out entire shells of the casing from single blocks of aluminum. So the screen backing, the keyboard area and the bottom trough are all carved out of single pieces of aluminum, making the pieces very strong indeed. This new casing is unmatched by all others in strength and elegance. The only notebooks tougher than this are the hardcore ones like the XFR from Dell.

The Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26GHz processor on the notebook comes with 3MB L2 cache and a 1066MHz Front Side Bus, making this new 13-inch model from Mac a very powerful portable. The ‘P’ here stands for Penryn core, which are the low voltage versions of the Core 2 Duo line. Intel is not known for having easily comprehensible naming schemes, but at least they make great processors. This chip enables this machine to handle just about anything short of 3D rendering tasks. It comes with 2 GB RAM at 1067MHz.

Next, we come to the new battery. Apple has enclosed the battery within the unibody and that caused some resentment amongst the users at the beginning. But the improved battery life makes up for the lack of a user replaceable battery. The new battery is a 52W per hour battery and gives a battery life that is between 8 and 9 hours. Although a 52W rating is usually taken as an equivalent to a 6-cell battery, the longevity of this battery is closer to the extended 9 cell batteries. The battery life is much lower when running Windows on the MacBook, which comes to about 5-6 hours. Apple can make the Apple drivers for Windows more efficient but it makes sense that they might not want to (winks).

Coming to the storage, this is where there is a minor problem that needs addressing. The 5400rpm 160GB SATA HDD that is provided with the notebook does not do a bad job but there are people who need more speed. For them, a 7200rpm drive may be a better option but it will come at the cost of about 15-30 minutes off the total battery life. For an increased speed and with the already long enough battery life, this is a sacrifice that will be deemed ‘worth it’ by most.

Some people will go ahead and install an SSD storage device and this is where they will be facing the problem. (For some unknown reason, the 13-inch MacBook Pro runs on at SATA 150. So when you have an SSD that can easily push past the 150Mbps mark, you will be stuck with SATA 150 speeds. For now, this cannot be changed. No one is sure if this is a hardware limitation or a software glitch but experts have conjectured that it is probably a software issue that can be solved with an upgrade.) This has been solved with an EFI firmware update.

Embedded graphics is usually a bad thing but with Nvidia’s 9400M (256MB shared), that is not true at all. This MacBook Pro can easily handle last generation games at decent settings with minor tweaks to make it perfect. For uncomplicated games, the FPS can easily go north of 50 but for visually richer games, it will likely drop to 25FPS or less. Thus it can be expected that the average FPS would hover between 30 and 40. Most testers have released 3DMarks scores of above 2000, which is really quite good for an embedded system.

The screen has a 1280 x 800 resolution and is a TFT LED backlit screen. The one gripe here for most people is the glossy glass layer over the screen. But thankfully it is bright enough to be workable even in daylight, as long as you have some shade and are not sitting under a direct glare from somewhere. The colors are much richer on this new version, which makes watching movies a pleasurable experience.

The keyboard is backlit and adjusts itself to the ambient light. It is also manually adjustable. This is a really handy feature because you do not want to light up a pitch-dark room with your backlit keyboard, but you do need stronger light in poorly lit areas that are not pitch dark. The keys are a pleasure to use and the experience is only marred by the sharp edge. The touch pad is amazingly accurate and features no button. The whole touch pad is clickable.

The left side of the body has a handy battery gauge (beside the various ports) that displays the battery life by lighting up part or whole of the line of eight LED lights – a very neat touch.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro does not have a FireWire 400 port but has an 800 port instead, much to the distress of musicians. But it has 2 USB 2.0 ports that are faster than FireWire 400 at 480Mbps. There are headphone/speaker out and microphone/line-in ports. These are also optical ports. It comes with Airport Extreme WiFi (IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n), iSight webcam, 8x slot-loading SuperDrive, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, Mini Display port and also an SD card reader. It weighs 4.51 pounds and comes with Apple’s brilliant MagSafe power adapter.