MacBook Pro Blog

The MacBook Pro’s new design aesthetic and its new GPU solutions make it a good, but not great, notebook.

At first glance, it appears nearly identical to its predecessor, but it’s not. Inside and out, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops–with speeds of 2.4 GHz and 2.53 GHz–have been remodeled, redesigned, and reengineered. (Note: On December 10, Apple released firmware updates for its new notebooks; this review doesn’t cover those updates.)

While all the previous Macbook Pros felt rock solid, these models seem even more so, due to a new manufacturing process introduced with this generation of MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Instead of assembling the laptops piecemeal and splicing the components together, the new models sport a unibody architecture that constructs the entire machine out of a single piece of recyclable aluminum. Continue reading »

I’ve run into my fair share of computer bugs from time to time: kernel panics, blue screens of death, even corrupt RAM. But I’m not sure that I’ve ever run into computer bugs (though, if you’re a student of computer history, you’ll know that the first documented computer “bug” was in fact a moth stuck in Harvard’s Mark II).

Sixty years later and apparently they haven’t quite worked those bugs out yet. That’s what Mac user Sam discovered when he sent his MacBook Pro in to Apple to be repaired. Turns out somehow a few ladybugs had found their way into the notebook, where they were chilling out on the logic board. Odd. But what’s odder still is Apple Care at first tried to claim that Sam must have put the ladybugs there himself. I mean, how else could they have gotten there, right? Continue reading »

I’m the proud owner of an original MacBook Pro—the early model with “only” a 1.83GHz Core Duo processor. Overall, I’ve been quite happy with it; it’s been problem-free and a pleasure to use. That said, like many owners of this model, I’m beginning to get a mild case of upgrade-itis. The latest models—which are likely to be replaced by even newer models in the near future—sport 802.11n wireless, larger hard drives, faster optical drives, and faster processors.

What’s a tech geek like myself to do (other than buy a new machine)? Why, upgrade, of course. Although owners of older portables are stuck with the stock processor, a number of vendors have recently introduced products for upgrading the MacBook Pro (and MacBook) to the latest and greatest in mobile technology. As your dedicated Mobile Mac Weblogger, I’ve, ahem, volunteered to test some of these upgrades for you, including: Continue reading »