The web is rife with posts about MacBook and MacBook Pro annoyances. (No links given because the point of this post is to combat the echo chamber effect the ‘net is currently demonstrating.) There are things from the whine to heat to swollen batteries to bad sound. And I don’t doubt that one or several people has experienced each of these problems. Nor do I dispute their right to rant on the internet about such. That’s one of the things that I love about the near zero-cost soapbox provided by a globally interconnected network. But the complaints of a few seem very amplified these days. It seems that the people who link to experiences about these issues seem to be linking the same handfull of sites over and over again.

With that, I’d like to rave about my MBP. It’s fast as blazes. With a 2.0GHz core duo, it’s far and away the fastest laptop I have access to. It builds software much faster than most any machine I can currently get my hands on personally. The OS X on intel experience is fantastic. There’s no question, this is a real, first class Mac. I had one of the first generation Power PCs (the 7100 for those that remember such things). The transition is way better this time. PPC software, by and large, feels every bit as usable as it did on my PowerBook with a 1.3GHz G4. Quite a contrast to the 68k emulation that lagged a midrange 68030 in 1995. My Mac doesn’t wine. It does run a little hot. I can still use it on my lap when I’m on battery power, though, and it does not feel dramatically hotter than the P4m Thinkpads floating around the office. Sound is about what I’d expect from laptop speakers. And, since I added another 1GB DIMM, Parallels runs like a dream. My windows and linux installs zip right along, in windows on my Mac desktop.

This is not buying advice. My buying advice would be to wait if you’re currently happy with your machine. The intel-based Macs will only get better and better as more software goes Universal and the motherboards trend more toward Apple-developed innovations and away from reference designs. The next version of the OS will be even better, too. I took the plunge myself because I had given my PowerBook to Molly to replace an iMac that had recently begun to panic and my old Linux laptop was beginning to show hardware issues. I don’t regret it.

Oh, and buy AppleCare if you get one. It’s just good policy with laptops and their $900 screens :)