The first MacBook was great, but it had a tendency to turn leg skin into chicharon what with its searing hot plastic shell. After a few revisions each of which successively cooler in temperature, the unibody MacBook came out. It was great too, but its combination of price and features was confusing – it was called MacBook, but looked like a pro and was priced somewhere in between the two.
Now we have the MacBook Pro 13″ - it is priced like a Pro, spec’ed like a Pro and looks very Pro. It also makes the plastic MacBook about as desirable as a nasty case of Climydia (is there such as things as a mild case?).
It also shows us some rare product mix mis-steps from Apple. A rare bout of indecisiveness on their part about where this product should fit in. Let’s not dwell on it too much, but for about a year the lower half of Apple’s notebook assortment was a mess, and in some ways it still is (i.e. if you want an inexpensive Mac portable a hackintosh is your best bet).
Back to the subject of this article, this particular MacBook Pro is your standard article available at any Best Buy. No built to order options here (or BTO as the cool kids say). Just the following specs:
- Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26 Ghz CPU
- 2 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 RAM (2*1 GB)
- 160 GB HDD 5400rpm
- SuperDrive DVD-R (8x)
- Nvidia MCP79 chipset featuring the 9400m IGP
- 13″ LED Backlit LCD Screen (1280*800)
- Airport Extreme 802.11n
- OS X 10.5 Leopard with $13 upgrade to Snow Leopard
- iLife09
Looking at the hardware, it is the chipset that really stands out. Nvidia cracked Intel’s dominance of the notebook chipset market with the MCP79, at least in terms of performance. Hopefully they will take the whole market because this is a great solution and finally delivers usable integrated graphics performance, something that Intel has promised for 3-4 generations of mobile chipsets but has yet to deliver.
Performance is great for an IGP. Light gaming such as World of Warcraft, World of Goo or even some old PC games wrapped in delicious Cider Game wrappers (Knight of the Old Republic) work fine. In Boot Camp I found that tougher games like Mass Effect struggled to run smoothly when powered by the Nvidia 9400m and the latest drivers. It may be a good chip, but it can’t work miracles. This is after all still an integrated graphics processor.
