Apple Intel MacBook Pro 15.4in review

AlThough Apple has long scoffed at the Intel processors that run many Windows PCs, it recently made a complete U-turn and decided to use the new Core Duo in its latest Macs.

The new MacBook Pro has a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor, so we thought it would be interesting to include it in the group test for comparison purposes.

Stylish design

The MacBook Pro is almost identical to the 15in PowerBook it replaces. There are some cosmetic and small design changes, but essentially the laptop retains the thin aluminium styling. A webcam is built into the lid above the screen and the power cable clings to the socket magnetically, which means it breaks away should someone trip over it, rather than yank the laptop onto the floor.

The 15.4in widescreen display has a resolution of 1440 x 900 and there's a DVI output that goes as high as 2560 x 1600. Graphics are handled by an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics chip with 256MB of its own memory, which is sufficient to deal with even the most demanding applications. The screen is exceptionally bright and crisp, and even mundane tasks such as web browsing and word processing look lovely.

The MacBook has with 1GB of memory as standard, along with a 100GB hard disk and multi-format (but not dual-layer) DVD writer. There's built-in 802.11g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but while there's an Ethernet port for wired network connections, you don't get a built-in modem (though a USB one is available an optional extra).

Reworked operating system

Since the Mac operating system, OS X, was originally designed to run on processors made by IBM, it needed to be completely reworked to run on Intel chips. It still looks and works in exactly the same way, but not all Mac programs have been updated accordingly and so cannot be used. New versions will eventually appear, of course (and are unlikely to be made available for free), so in the meantime, Apple supplies an emulation program called Rosetta. This fools programs into thinking that they're running on the old version of OS X and thanks to the extra performance of the Core Duo processor, this temporary solution works well, although it is much slower than running the programs 'natively'.

Apple's own iLife suite of applications, supplied as part of the price, have been rewritten for the Core Duo chip and they're impressively robust and capable. They include programs for composing music, editing videos, creating DVDs and organising your pictures. The programs are all aimed at consumers though, and embarrassingly for Apple, its own professional applications have yet to be updated. So, if you're contemplating an upgrade, it might be worth waiting off for a while.

Comparing a Mac's performance to a PC isn't easy and the Computer Buyer benchmarks are Windows-only. Compared to the outgoing Mac laptop though, the MacBook Pro is much quicker and just about everything ran twice as fast.

Power at a price

The MacBook Pro is typical of laptops from the Apple stable. They look spectacular and have some very neat touches. Compared to a Core Duo laptop PC, however, they're very, very expensive and the fact that professional users need to rely upon Rosetta software emulation for the time being is a distinct drawback. There's no denying that the MacBook Pro is a capable and fast notebook computer, but there are just a few too many loose ends for us to recommend it to the non-Apple Nerd.