More About That Box

A closer look.

Get It Try It

To paraphrase Bill Pullman and Meg Ryan, the one's too little and the other's too big but the one in the middle's just right. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro.

The Price

A $1699 price tag for a professional Apple laptop sticks out. So far so good. But things take on another colour when one investigates prices outside the US.

Perhaps the idea's to take pity on the poor people of North America and Hong Kong? Or penalise people everywhere else? Currencies do fluctuate but this is ridiculous - there are penalties even within the EU.

The same table again but sorted according to markup.

Clearly one wants to buy the new MBP elsewhere than Scandinavia. Or the EU. Or almost any country. Save for Canada, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan where one gets hit by at most a 7% markup.

Something's very wrong.

The Box

The frame of the MacBook Pro is a single piece of aluminium. The battery (not replaceable save by Apple) holds a charge for up to 7 hours. The NVIDIA card combines with a backlit LED display for a crisp (and fast) viewing experience.

The 15-inch MBP weighs 2.49 kg, is 2.41 cm high, 36.4 cm wide, and 24.9 cm deep. It has a MagSafe port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a FireWire 800 port, a Mini Display port, two USB 2.0 ports, an SD card slot, audio lines in and out, and a Kensington lock slot.

It comes with built-in AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi based on 802.11n, built-in Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and built-in 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet.

It can operate at 10°-35° C and at an altitude of 10,000 feet.

The base processor is a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3MB on-chip shared L2 running 1:1 with the processor speed. The base 4GB is provided by two 2GB SO-DIMMs of 1066MHz DDR3 memory. Two SO-DIMM slots support up to 8GB.

The base HDD is a 250GB 5400-rpm Serial ATA, the external drive an 8x slot-loading DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW SuperDrive.

The keyboard is (of course) backlit with 78-79 keys and the Multi-Touch trackpad supports two-finger scrolling, pinch, rotate, swipe, three finger swipe, four-finger swipe, tap, double-tap, and drag capabilities.

The display is glossy with maximum resolution of 1440x900. The docs say 'support for millions of colours' but that may in practice only be ~200,000 as before.

The MBP can be purchased with a Juniper Visa Card and 0% financing for 12 months.

Considering the rickety Wintel hardware where everyone recommends another operating system for home or business use, this 15-inch MBP is going to be hard to beat. Now just get the prices inline at the 30 online stores and things will be peachy.

See Also
Apple: The New MacBook Pro Family