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Wednesday, June 16, 2010


Apple has recently upgraded its Macbook Pro line of laptops. Among the most noticeable improvements, there's the Intel Core i5/Core i7 Processor (CPU), the discreet Nvidia GT 330M graphics processor (GPU) and an even longer battery life (increased by 1hr to 3hrs, according to Apple -depending on the model). The old Macbook Pro laptops have been removed from the shelves, so there is little point in spending too much time comparing. This review might be most useful to very old Macbook owners, potential first-time Mac Buyers who wonder which Macbook Pro they should get (13, 15 or 17). We have not forgotten Windows users who could be lured by the great aluminum industrial design, so we will tell you how it behaves under Windows 7 and what's in it for you. In this review, we will use the Macbook Pro 15.4" with Core i7 and we will compare it with its peers. Ready?
Context: We all use laptops for different purposes, so before you dive into this review, let me tell you where I come from: I mainly use laptops for productivity use (writing, email, browsing, light image resizing). Some gaming from time to time doesn't hurt, but this is not a priority. "Productivity use" means MS Office (Outlook, Word) and lots of web (
Firefox, Chrome). I try to use my laptop as a companion computer only (I have a beefy desktop PC), so I don't have all my media files (music, videos, photos) in there, which is why I have plenty of storage left on the hard drive. In the past two years, I have used a Sony Vaio SZ , a Sony Vaio SR and a Macbook Pro 13" (year 2009, on Windows 7) as work laptops -- yes, I'm a "PC" guy too. I often use Mac OS X for my personal stuff, but most of the tools that I work with run on Windows. From this review, I hope that you can extrapolate what your experience of the 15" Macbook Pro (Spring 2010) would be like.
Industrial Design (Excellent) Configuration tested:


Macbook Pro 15.4" 1440x900 (model 6,2)
Core i7 2.67Ghz (model 620M)
4GB of RAM (1067Mhz DDR3, 2x2GB)
Mac OS 10.6.3 (and Windows 7, via BootCamp 3.1)
NVIDIA Geforce GT 330M, 512MB

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