Santa Rosa MacBook Pro review: The green and gold standard in high-end Intel notebooks

I got stung by my last MacBook Pro review which went to press before the unit started showing problems with build quality and durability. I would not have pronounced it so with confidence any sooner than this, but I can state now that today’s MacBook Pro stands head and shoulders above Apple’s prior flagship Intel notebooks, and sets a standard for performance, features, durability, eco-responsibility and quality that any PC vendor will find difficult to approach for a similar price.

The Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (named for the Intel Core 2 Duo chipset used in the notebook), perhaps also known as the LED backlit MacBook Pro, has earned its stripes. If this notebook had a frequent flier account of its own, it would have racked up enough travel miles in my carry-on bag to qualify for Gold status. I figure that this is a fitting milestone for writing this machine up, because by this point, most notebooks, including some from Apple, would be showing their age. This machine looks, feels and runs like it did when it came out of the box. Considering how sweet it was new, that’s saying something.

Summary

Apple has transcended PC notebooks. The Santa Rosa MacBook Pro doesn’t look or feel like any notebook you’ve ever driven, even if your present notebook is a Mac. It’s built.

The aluminum case isn’t just for style. It’s armor in a meaningful way that practically begs to be used on a film set, on a seat-back table, on an international trip, in a photo studio, in a radiologist’s lab, in an elite developer’s lap or in the field for on-site news edits and Webcasts. The LCD panel doesn’t show rainbows when you press on it from the front or the back. The magnetic lid latch and AC charger connector won’t wear like spring and friction-fit alternatives do. The new LED backlight has wider extremes of dimness and brightness than common fluorescent panel backlights, and the glossy display is sharp and contrasty.

The keyboard is springy and the keys are firmly fastened; there’s no hint of a clatter when you sweep your fingers across the keys. The trackpad is clearly redesigned to eliminate feedback from palms rested on either side. The display hinge holds firm in any position until you intentionally move it. With a higher memory capacity of 4 GB of RAM–I suggest that you take advantage of it, especially if an upgrade to Leopard is in your plans–making MacBook Pro your only computer is quite reasonable. When pricing next to a PC notebook, keep MacBook Pro’s all-important discrete graphics processing unit (GPU) in mind. Integrated (chipset) graphics that use system memory for video RAM are ubiquitous almost everywhere but in MacBook Pro, but frankly, my dear, chipset graphics suck. Try smooth-scrolling a Web page that’s jam-packed with Flash animation on a system with chipset graphics, and then do the same thing on a machine with a GPU, like MacBook Pro. Try doing anything in 3-D (OS X’s awesome GUI is entirely 2-D, so it doesn’t suffer) with chipset graphics. That kind of work will make any notebook run hot, but even when MacBook Pro heats up, it always keeps up. That’s my standard.

There you have it: A true tale of “third time’s the charm” producing a notebook that is the best that any non-tablet notebook vendor could create with Intel parts. You can read on for more details and insight, or stop here and know that the summary resulted from weeks of use in demanding production conditions. I am a MacBook Pro customer.

For those of you who prefer it short and sweet, this review has ended. Go in peace.

Screen time

Like another frequent flier of lore, MacBook Pro is practically perfect in every way. The LED-backlit display is more power efficient, although not as dramatically as I’d hoped, but is infinitely more eco-friendly. LEDs hit their configured color temperature and brightness immediately; there’s no warm-up period. The LED backlight is radiant, paper white at its top brightness, and conference room friendly at minimum brightness. LED is simply a win over fluorescent all the way around.

This MacBook Pro has something else I’ve been bugging Apple about for a long time: A glossy display. I believe that gloss should be standard fare for LCD displays. Matte scatters light in both directions. It doesn’t reflect, but it also blurs fine detail; a matte display, like a photograph viewed through matte-finish glass, never looks quite focused. The combination of white LEDs and a glossy surface give MacBook Pro’s LCD panel the crispness, contrast and color purity that one associates with a perfectly-focused photograph. I can go on and on about the spectacular image quality for photography, video and graphics, but I’ll touch on practical ergonomics instead. I often dialed back the resolution of the previous 15-inch Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro to compensate for eye fatigue after eight or ten hours straight at the keyboard. I haven’t done that since switching to the glossy LED-backlit MacBook Pro. My eyes don’t get tired because they’re not constantly trying to fix focus on a subtly blurry display.

Put more concisely, the combination of the gloss and the Cinema Display-grade panel add up to two things I’ve never seen in an LCD: Black and white. Aperture on this display has reawakened my interest in product photography. I shoot for gloss, but with a matte notebook I waste a lot on preview prints. Now Aperture shows me exactly what a glossy print will deliver.

The LED backlight is brighter and darker than fluorescent. It’s true white. If there is a downside to gloss, it’s the lack of privacy. The display is viewable at any brightness and from any angle.

Build

I had bad luck with the build quality of two MacBook Pro models before this one, primarily related to the keyboard, trackpad and battery. The preceding MacBook Pro, Apple’s first Core 2 Duo model, was most un-Apple-like in its construction, even the battery, arriving with problems and showing extraordinary signs of wear after no more hardship or usage than this MacBook Pro has endured. I’m pleased to report that the MacBook Pro that Apple is selling now is built tight.

Apple doesn’t talk about the things it changes from model to model, but I’m an ergonomics wonk, and this keyboard and trackpad feel nothing like the two preceding MacBook Pro generations. The new keyboard is stiffer, requiring a much heavier touch, but the loose, misaligned keys of feather-touch MacBook Pros past have been replaced by a perfect grid of keys that support the full weight of your hands between keystrokes. The look of the keyboard hasn’t changed a bit. The legends are still large and the backlighting is perfect, illuminating only the legends and not the rest of the key or the key bed. Keyboard backlighting is no gimmick. You realize that its ergonomic necessity once you have it, and I’ve seen no other notebook or add-on keyboard that gets it right.

The new trackpad fixes a problem I’ve found constant all the way back to the final two models of PowerBook. Resting your palm on either side of the trackpad used to result in spurious taps and pointer motion. Apple’s goal of making the trackpad flush with the top surface has been abandoned, and you can now rest your palms anywhere you want.

I get a number of remarks from readers and gate lounge passersby that Mac notebook display hinges are too loose. Apple fixed that with the first MacBook Pro. It remains fixed, and so does the display until you intentionally move it.

Performance

No one on the planet can feel a 200 MHz difference in CPU clocked at over 2 GHz, so I wasn’t floored by the goose from 2.2 to 2.4 GHz when I upgraded to Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. What I did feel, and quite dramatically, is a drop in performance for the loss of 1 GB of RAM. The previous MacBook Pro had 3 GB. My workload is rougher than average, but not atypical for power users. I discovered that for my usage patterns, 3 GB is the sweet spot for Macs. That’s pretty much where Vista sits as well. If you walk away with nothing else, get at least 3 GB of RAM for your notebook.

What most people associate with computer performance is actually GUI performance, and that’s where Apple has always excelled. MacBook Pro has a desktop-grade graphics processing unit (GPU), an NVidia GeForce 8600M GT with 256 MB of dedicated VRAM (video RAM). It’s wickedly fast and unexpectedy power efficient. You cannot get MacBook Pro to drop a frame while playing HD video from disk. Final Cut Studio, which is extremely GPU-intensive, runs beautifully without pushing the CPU to its limits. Unique to OS X, as well as the applications written to use Apple’s Acceleration Framework, is the offloading of selected non-graphics-related math to the GPU. NVidia is pursuing GPU as coprocessor technology on its own.

I did say practically perfect, and that brings up my single complaint with Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. Its power management skills are inferior to my own, which is to say that I can extend running time per charge manually to a far greater extent than MacBook Pro is able to do automatically.

The machine takes a long time to transition in and out of sleep mode, and it sometimes won’t wake at all. Waking is an art for any Intel system. I’ve got a Toshiba tablet that wakes from sleep in one second flat and never fails, and a Fujitsu notebook that’s catch-as-catch-can about it. This is the first MacBook Pro I’ve had trouble with, but then I’ve been through several OS X updates on this machine as well. Software? Hardware? I don’t know, but what instabilities there are I’m sure that Apple can fix it in OS X or firmware.

Running time on battery is the last measure of notebook design excellence, and here, MacBook Pro turns in a top-tier performance compared to most PC notebooks. I judge the average running time, with a productivity workload and Wi-Fi turned off, to be right at four hours. With some careful pruning of unnecessary background processes, such that the CPU is effectively zero percent utilized between keystrokes, I can eke out five hours of typing and reading. MacBook Pro’s power handling of its AirPort Extreme Wi-FI and Bluetooth wireless interfaces is poor enough that manually turning them completely off is a necessity for power conservation. Fortunately, with icons right on the menu bar, shutting down wireless is easy. Apple offers users no control over Wi-Fi transmission power or power saving modes other than an “enable interference robustness” checkbox.

The reach of AirPort Extreme, especially running in draft-n mode and paired with Apple’s current AirPort Extreme base station, is exceptional. A problem that I was having early on with nearby base stations dropping in and out of sight was fixed by an automatic Software Update.

Coarse-grained power management that is largely dependent on direction from the OS is another trait common to Intel systems. I’ve documented the steps I take to extract five hours of battery life from a MacBook Pro. It isn’t easy, but unlike Windows, the UNIX layer transparency of OS X gives users more control over CPU load. And it is entirely scriptable.

One last testament to Santa Rosa MacBook Pro’s excellence is that short of tablet models, MacBook Pro is the best Windows carry-on I’ve got. If Dell made this machine, MacBook Pro would be that vendor’s flagship Vista notebook. Power users who buy PC notebooks ought to look at MacBook Pro even if they’re dead set against OS X because it runs Windows XP and Vista natively, with no compromises, and even with backlit keyboard, special hot keys, frame-mounted Web cam and gaming-grade GPU. I invite you to buy Santa Rosa MacBook Pro (get the optional 3 or 4 GB RAM), and get a copy of XP or Vista. Once you boot Windows the first time, your MacBook Pro can boot it by default. If you get into trouble, you can flip over to the OS X partition to diagnose it.

MacBook Pro is competitively priced even when the additional cost of Windows is factored in. No matter what software you run on it, MacBook Pro is a notebook that you’ll take with you everywhere.