Six months living with a Macbook Pro Part 1

19Oct06

I’ve been wanting to write an acticle stroke review about my transisition from Windows based PC to OS X based Macbook Pro ever since I made the bold move about six months ago. I want to share my experiences, both good and bad about this platform, tell you what I hate, what I miss and what I love.
I won’t be giving you the exact numbers and figures or writing things to conform to the ’scientific method’, I’m not one of those geeky types, well I am, but I’m not… if you get my drift? It’s just going to be an overall rough idea and it certainly wont contain numbers and MA like MFLOPS and DDR2 etc…

For comparison, and this is going to be a basic and maybe unfair comparison, I’ll be using my old Acer Windows XP based laptop to do some crude benchmarking. It’s a 2+ year old workhorse Acer Aspire 1502LMi which comes with, sorry I’m breaking my rules of geekyness already, but I think you ought to know:

• Acer Aspire
• 2GHz AMD Athlon 64bit cpu
• 768MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM
• 60GB 7200 RPM HD

• Apple MacBook Pro
• 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo cpu
• 1GB PC2-5300 (667MHz) DDR2
• 100GB 7200RPM HD

So you can see that they are fairly equally matched in terms of numbers. The MB (I will be using these meaningful acronyms for the rest of the review. MB = MacBook & AA = Acer Aspire) is only clocking in at 160Mhz more than the AA, but it’s a Core Duo so it’s running with two processors, so in theory doing twice as much work in the same time, but software has to be written or updated to take advantage of this. It’s called Multi-threading. Apps such as Photoshop and all the Apple Universal Binary apps take advantage of this. (I’m writing all this from memory, so please SHOUT at me if I’m getting it wrong).

There is obviously more RAM in my MB than my AA, 256MB more and it’s running at blazzing speeds and there’s two years of technological progress between them and that’s a veritble lifetime. The hardrives are practically the same, as I upgraded the AA a few months before I bought my MB.

Pheeew, that was a bit of a mouthful but I think necessary for me to continue with this review.

I’m a graphic designer / web developer and as such I use all the obvious and essential software:

• Adobe Creative Suite 2 - Illustrator & Photoshop
• Macromedia (Adobe) - Dreamweaver & Flash
• Microsoft Office Word & Excel (for business needs)

Herein lies my first problem with my MB, these ESSENTIAL applications aren’t running natively in the OS X environment. What I mean by this is that these and all applications that were originally written for the PowerPC processor won’t run on the new Intel processor. There are my many reasons for this, but put in it’s most simple terms means that the instructions written for the PPC are not understood by the Intel x86 processor. To combat this, Apple wrote a translator or emulator, which they have called Rosetta (after the Rosetta stone) that sits in the background of OS X and only loads up when it’s needed.

Because of this, performance within these applications is SERIOUSLY hit and NOT in a overstated ‘I just want to make a point’ kind of way.
Here are some examples of speed. Launching of what I consider some essential software. Here are the times:

• Photoshop CS2: MB 48.5 sec. AA 20.1 sec
• Illustrator CS2: MB 44 sec. AA 30 sec
• Bridge CS2: MB 25 sec. AA 17 sec
• Dreamwaver 8: MB 25.5 sec. AA 17 sec
• Microsoft Word: MB 12 sec. AA 21 sec

Here you can obviously see the differneces in performance. They may not be massive, but for Photoshop on the MB it takes 2.4X longer. This on a machine that is over two years younger, with two more processors and double speed memory.

Things get even worse when you’re using more than one application in emulation mode. One of the most common combinations for me is to use Dreamweaver and Photoshop, as I’m sure it is for most web designers. When photoshop is loaded my mouse does a strange and bloody annoying thing, it’ll randomly left click whenever it wants.
Overall, the system speed feels sluggish and un-responsive, much like how I used to think the AA was.

I’ve overcome the degrade in performance in photoshop by buying an external USB2 HD, this makes it speedy, but only about 10-15% faster than my old AA and I’ve had to pay a premium for this privilige.

Here are some more tests: This time I’m using a couple of Photoshop actions to test performance. (Bare in mind that I’m not using my external HD, all tests here are executed on the bare machine). I’ll be using the DIY Photoshop torture test. Please feel free run the test yourselves and post the results here, I would be very interested to see them. Download the files directly from here 2.27MB .zip.

• Test 1 (Rotate)
• MB 1 minure 41 seconds. AA 1 minute 48 seconds.
• MB with EX HD 1 minutes 21 seconds

• Test 2 (Scale)
• MB 7 minutes 30 seconds. AA 8 minutes 20 seconds.
• MB with EX HD 9 minutes 37 seconds

These times are actually in favour of the MB (apart from test 2 with the external HD), but I would bloody expect them to be, and as I mentioned above this machine is 2 years 7 months younger, so it should be faster. I’m deeply anoyed by the bollocks his royal arse Steve Jobs and his marketing army sold me “The fastest laptop ever” & “Push the envelope of pro performance”, when it actually turns out to be just fast enough to keep me from ditching it and returning to the PC. What pro wants this kind of performance?! I’m unhappy and I want an appology.

OK, this isn’t Apple’s fault I hear you Apple avangelists scream, BUT and it’s a J Lo sized but, Apple and the OSX operating system are known to be used by creative professional the world over. I’m very dissapointed with Apple for allowing the creative community to buy newer inferior products for higher unjustifiable prices when the software we all use is below acceptable performance levels. They are a big enough corporation, surely they could have funded the transition for Adobe.

That leads me to Adobe and I shouldn’t let them get away with this either, without at least a small telling off too. It’s totally unacceptable for them to not release Universal Binary (sofware that is written to run natively on PPC and Intel) updates for their flagship applications, when almost everyone else is. I suppose that’s the beauty of having a monopoly on the market: where else can we go? Back to the PC and Windows are my initial thoughts.
I can see that this transistion would cost, and that taking resources away from the CS3 development team doesn’t make financial sense to Adobe at least, but for Apple the cost of subsidising them would have been benificial.

I’m a fair person and I would have even quite happily paid a crossgrade fee of say £50 for the whole suite, just to cover costs to Adobe. But sigh, no such luck.

These are my only major gripes with my transition to the Mac OS so far, but they are pretty big ones and at times of heavy workload I really think twice about my purchase. Things are looking up, Adobe has announced that the Universal Binary of CS3 should be with us by Q2 2007. This is when I will be able to really test and hopfully verify Apple’s claims. Until then we all wait, disgruntled and bitter.

That’s it for Part one of the review. In the next part I will looking at the better and more enjoyable sides of my transition.