Apple MacBook Pro MB076LL/A 17-inch Laptop Review
Apple MacBook Pro MB076LL/A 17-inch Laptop Review from James W Picht. beautiful and sexy, with brains, Let me stress at the beginning that I am not a Mac fanatic. I work with PCs and find them much less annoying now than I did 10 and 20 years ago. I’ve owned an iMac for four years and find it nice but imperfect. Macs and PCs are converging when it comes to reliability and ease of use, but Apple products are much more elegantly designed than most other computer products, and the Mac OS is still cleaner and more stable than Microsoft’s product. I doubt the price premium makes Macs worth it for everyone, and in some ways Apple computers are like luxury cars that aren’t designed either for stellar performance or to make things easy for the home mechanic, but rather to make driving as easy and comfortable as possible for people who don’t much care to change their own spark plugs. They aren’t for everyone, but they’re definitely for those of us who want things easy and want our toys to have some style.
I like my new MacBook very, very much. It’s thin, light, clean, and oh, so simple to use. The screen is brilliant, the keyboard feels nice (and I love the back-lit keys). Without subscribing to a service or dealing with any settings, I turned it on and had immediate wireless access to the Internet. I plugged my camera into it and immediately downloaded pictures – no mess, no software to install. The included software that loads and edits pictures, music, and video is all nicely integrated and very easy to use, and also more than adequate for the casual user. I’m a little more than a casual user of photo software and will install Photoshop, but for most of my pictures I’ll probably stick with iphoto. I popped in the disc for my four-year-old version of Office for the Mac and in a few minutes had smoothly functioning word-processing and spreadsheet software running the files I brought in from my office PC. Easy, easy, easy.
(This does lead me to note a negative that isn’t minor: Apple computers used to come with a decent word processing and spreadsheet package, AppleWorks. That’s no longer included. If you want to do word processing, you must buy some other software to do it. The absence of AppleWorks is unfortunate.)
I bought this computer for my wife (yes, I called it mine – she may have to pry it from my hands) and opted for the MacBook Pro over the regular MacBook. She plans to use it on her sabbatical this year, toting it around to various libraries and archives and writing a book. I tried out my brother’s MacBook and liked it very much, but I think the MacBook’s chicklet keyboard would be annoying and uncomfortable if I had to type long or quickly on it. If this computer weren’t destined to be used for long keyboard sessions away from home, I’d have been happy with the MacBook. If it were destined to be used mostly at home, I’d have saved a few hundred dollars and just bought a plug-in keyboard. But for our purposes the better keyboard and brighter screen really matter, so I spent the extra money on the Pro. If you don’t plan to do a lot of typing, or if you plan to use it mostly at home, I don’t think the extra expenditure would really be worth it.
As another reviewer pointed out, this thing gets hot. Very hot. I’ve always found laptop computers to be a bit warm for laptops, but this one would be painful on unprotected flesh. The magnetic connection for the power cable is very nice. The battery life isn’t bad, nor is it great – surfing the net and word processing, I’ve managed a bit over four hours. I haven’t watched an entire DVD on it, but that seems to drain the battery more quickly. The kids have already videoconferenced with their grandparents, and the built-in camera is very nice for that.
Overall, this computer reminds me of my iPod – sleek, sexy, uncomplicated but sophisticated, fun to be with. How much extra expense that’s worth to you will decide whether this is the computer for you.
To check price or purchase Apple MacBook Pro MB076LL/A 17-inch Laptop.