I picked up a 15" MacBook Pro on Sunday after struggling with this decision for about 8 weeks now. I figured I’d just have to dive right in.
First impression: wow. Just opening the box was a great experience. There was: 1 laptop, 1 DVI to VGA converter, 1 power cord. It took me about 5 minutes to unpack, plug-in, power-up, and get on my home network.
The laptop itself is just awesome. I’m still getting used to the Apple OS, but I also picked up VMWare Fusion, which I’ve been told is better than Parallels. I installed XP as a virtual machine and am now in the process of installing all the other necessary software. Tomorrow I leave on a 15 day trip to Barcelona and my goal is leave my ThinkPad at home and only bring my MacBook. The MacBook is lighter than my ThinkPad and the screen is bigger, so that’s another plus.
Suffice to say, I’ve got a lot to do in the next 24 hours to ensure this isn’t a disaster as I’m presenting at TechEd Europe!
My concerns with the two-mouse buttons was easily resolved. Turns out you can configure the touch pad to detect a right-click when you clicking using 2 fingers instead of one.
I’ll be interested to see how it goes in Barcelona for ya! My big question is what is the advantage of the MacBook Pro over the regular MacBook besides the bigger screen? Is there an advantage?
Rob,
I made the switch like yourself a little over 6 months ago. I’m using Bootcamp to boot directly into Vista most of the time. Learning the couple little mouse pad tricks helps, like if you have a long web page open, use two fingers on the mousepad to scroll the page down. Actually, once you get used to this type of behavior, you’ll want it on standard Windows laptops.
When I purchased my MacBook Pro, I went the Parallels route, but it never panned out for me. I wanted to be able to boot Vista from Mac OSX inside Parallels and have it point at my Bootcamp partition, which Parallels said could be done. It never work, even after several new version. I’d like to hear about your VMware Fusion experience in the future.
Good luck and have a great trip.
Well, congrats with your Apple Rob! I’ve also a Macbook Pro (17″) and I’m using Parallels with Windows XP.
I tried VMWare Fusion, but it was too slow, compared to Parallels. Also going to suspend mode and vice versa is slower in Fusion.
Well, I’m still on OSX 10.4. If you use Leopard, then it is better to use Fusion, since Parallels isn’t that fast in Leopard. (but I think it’s because of Leopard
)
I did some presentations with use of Pages (iWork) and that went very well. Using the remote to browse through the slides etc.
Well, good luck and enjoy your MAC.
@Daniel – I am surprised by your thoughts of Fusion being too slow. I own both Parallels and Fusion and decided to go with Fusion because it was faster than Parallels run Vista or XP. Since Parallels doesn’t support multicore, I assumed that was the reason.
Another one drinks the Kool-Aid®.
Welcome to the cult, er, I mean, club.
I’ve had my 15″ MacBook Pro now for about a year and a half, and I absolutely love it. Yes, I bought the Leopard upgrade. I never leave home without it.
I use Parallels, throw a gig of memory at it, and can’t say I’ve had any real issue running the whole VS2005/SQL routine. Now if I open Photoshop CS3 on the OS X side at the same time, it can get a little sluggish if it’s a big file. More RAM I suppose would help.
I have a Mac Pro on my desktop as well (quad-core 2.6 GHz with 2 gigs of RAM and extra drives). That thing is ridiculously cool and quiet, and it’s the first true “workstation class” computer I’ve ever had. Love it.
If you like to use IM, try Adium (www.adiumx.com). Try not to waste too much time on trying new Dashboard widgets.
Welcome to the club, Rob! You will be surprised how easy it is to switch to the MBP! One thing I recommend, is to find an application to re-map some “windows specific” keys (like right-alt) to an alternate key on the MBP’s keyboard.
For example, I use SharpKeys to map the right-alt to the “enter” key on the Macbook. This is great when you’re trying to do VPCs.
Welcome to the club Rob. I picked up my first mac on Saturday and have been enjoying just about every minute of it. Like you I also picked up VMWare Fusion, but only because I’ve been using VMWare on Windows for so long.
My MacBook is replacing a personal laptop so I haven’t really given it a workout yet, but maybe I’ll convert it over to a work laptop once I feel comfortable with it.
Hi,
I recently installed Leopard and used bootcamp to natively install Vista on my macBook Pro. I love it! Only thing to check out is to get all the keys correct but there’s a nice program by Microsoft that should be able to accomplish this task.
Grz, Kris.
I would like to know the reaction of the people the next time you visit Redmond…
Hey Rob – great to meet you in Barcelona.
How did the presentation go?
Tom