Three weeks with a MacBook Pro laptop

I have been using my MacBook Pro for the past three weeks. The MacBook Pro is a great laptop, perfectly suited for development work. The laptop delivers incredible performance, thanks to its Core Duo Intel CPU and the high-end ATI X1600 graphics chip.

After using an iBook G3 for the past four years, I am blown away by how fast things get done with this new laptop. What used to take minutes (for example, restarting Tomcat 5.5 under NetBeans 5.0) now completes in a matter of seconds. The boost in performance has put the fun back in programming, as I now spend more time writing and testing code than waiting for the computer to complete an operation. Geert Bevin reports that his newish Acer Ferrari laptop is shamed by the performance of the MacBook Pro—the MacBook Pro compiles programs about 30% more quickly.

Developers had to make the switch to Mac OS X in order to use a Mac in the past; now with an Intel CPU driving the MacBook Pro and the possibility to run Windows on it, they no longer have an excuse not to switch. With the MacBook Pro dual-booting Mac OS X and Windows, they have the best of both worlds: the availability of Windows software and the build quality of Apple hardware and the robustness of Mac OS X.

If you are looking for a new laptop, you should seriously consider the MacBook Pro.

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