First experience with the MBP (late 2008)

This weekend I had a chance to sit down and do a little more with the new MBP. This is the late-2008 model with the unibody design. I got the 2.5GHz version, 4GB memory and 320GB 7200RPM HDD to replace my current 3GHz Pentium 4 desktop.

There were two things about the new MBP that I was worried about. First, the keyboard didn't feel as good as the previous MBP keyboard. However, since I don't plan on using the built-in keyboard most of the time (I use an external IBM Model-M keyboard) this isn't as big of a deal. When I do need to move around with the notebook, I can live with the keyboard.

The other concern was the glossy screen. I already had a glossy screen Vaio so I used that to see how would it bother me if I used a glossy screen all the time. After a few days, I didn't find myself too bothered by the reflectiveness of the Vaio, so I decided to go with the new MBP. Now, I'll just have to say that this screen is even more reflective then I expected. In the morning with the sun shining through the window behind me, I can use the screen to shave! Yet, I noticed that it didn't bother me (and my eyes are very sensitve) because choosing a different background will help reduce the problem. Also, I don't find myself working with the sun directly behind me most of the time and the positive of the screen outweighed the reflectiveness. The glossy screen looks very very good. The colors are sharp and vibrant. The whites are more white and black is more black. It's very obvious next to my matte LCD. Ultimately, both matte and glossy have their own pros-and-cons, but the glossy screen has become a non-issue for me.

I had complained about the blurriness with OSX 's handling of anti-alias fonts. On my work MBP, I installed TinkerTool to disable it for most font sizes and installed some Windows fonts to replace the default OSX fonts. I was going to do this also with my MBP, but the problem wasn't there! The fonts looked good on the new MBP. I initially thought maybe Apple did something, but once I move to a dual monitor setup I saw the fuzziness on the external matte LCD. So it seems that the same light diffusing property of a matte screen also is the contributor for making the font look fuzzier to me.

In the end, configuring everything was pretty easy. Most of the time was spent transferring data from the old machine to the new.