I would have crowed about it earlier, but I've been sweat-drenched and headachy with the flu ever since it arrived on Tuesday. It's here, it's here! My MacBook Pro arrived!

Pics

I refused to lovingly (and medical examiner-ly) photo each and every stage of the unpacking process. I left that to others with more restraint. Instead, I wrestled it out of the box and started the transfer right away. While it was occupado, however, I snapped some comparison shots:

ExpressCard/34 is really tiny compared to PCMCIA. Like, it could almost be a holder for the Apple Remote that came with it.

The power adapter is really big compared to the one from previous PowerBooks. It's even bigger than the Airport Express.

The box is ridiculously small compared to the sarcophagus they shipped my 17" PowerBook in.

Transfer

The transfer of all my old junk went painlessly (if slowly - about 3.5 hours if memory serves). Strange that some things made it (my entire darwinports installation in /opt), but some things didn't (/etc/hosts, /etc/httpd/httpd.conf and my virtual_hosts.conf customizations).

Speed

The thing is zippity zoom! I took part in Luis de la Rosa's subversion benchmarking exercise and the numbers were amazing. The PowerBook clocked in at:

Before reboot:
real    12m4.215s
user    6m53.185s
sys     4m12.204s

After reboot:
real    11m53.103s
user    6m52.887s
sys     4m3.256s

While the MacBook Pro screamed:

Before reboot:
real    2m17.511s
user    2m26.707s
sys     1m26.770s

After reboot:
real     2m8.036s
user    2m26.848s
sys     1m12.446s

It certainly holds its own with the desktop intel offerings (iMac Core Duos), and beats even the dual G5s!

More important to my day to day operations was how well it performs with Python. In the Zope world, pystones have traditionally been a not-too-bad test for how Zope is going to perform on a given platform. On the PowerBook, a native build of 2.4.2:

~/python2.4
zbir@Gorilla $ bin/python
Python 2.4.2 (#1, Feb 24 2006, 14:28:33)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1809)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
~/python2.4
zbir@Gorilla $ bin/python lib/python2.4/test/pystone.pyc
Pystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 2.75
This machine benchmarks at 18181.8 pystones/second

While on the MacBook Pro:

~/local_python2.4
zbir@Silverback $ bin/python
Python 2.4.2 (#1, Feb 22 2006, 09:32:56)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5250)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
~/local_python2.4
zbir@Silverback $ bin/python lib/python2.4/test/pystone.pyc
Pystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 1.15
This machine benchmarks at 43478.3 pystones/second

Zippity zoom! Nearly 2.5x faster! And a Zope 3 application that took a full minute to start up on my PowerBook now takes 14 seconds. This, I'm sure, can be partly explained by the MacBook's 7200 rpm hard drive, but still. My life's about to get much easier!

Screen

I hear a lot of whining from the peanut gallery over two aspects of the MacBook Pro's screen: the "loss" of 60 vertical pixels in the display, and some supposed backlight irregularities.

The only people "losing" pixels are those who would be trading in their recent (as in October recent) 15" PowerBooks. Such whiners deserve to lose. I'm upgrading a nearly three-year-old PowerBook, and am getting the same screen real estate in a smaller package. Color me super plussed!

I've so far not noticed any strange backlighting issues, but I can tell you, when they say bright, they weren't lying! I have to run it at about 33-50% brightness except when watching movies. Otherwise, it's almost painful to look at. It's really a gorgeous display.

Size

After having been saddled by a seven-pound monstrosity for three years, the MacBook is a feather in comparison. That extra 1.3 pounds is a huge gift. It may not seem like much, but haul it around for a while, and trust me, you'll notice.

Speaking of hauling it around, I took this opportunity to get a new Timbuk2 bag. When I got the PowerBook, I got one of those ridiculously (extra) large messenger bags, which, really, is great, except that it convinces you to take. Along. Everything. So, I downgraded in size to the medium, got a new sleeve, and my shoulders are already thanking me for it.

Rosetta

Haven't even noticed it yet. Things are just that nicely done. Or maybe it's just not much slower in emulation than the PowerBook it's replacing. In any case, except for a few PreferencePanes, everything just works.

PyObjC

Sadly, I've not taken nearly as much initiative as I could have/should have with the guys around the PyObjC project. I just use it, to good effect, I think. But the way Thumbscrew runs is incompatible with the part of py2app that gets wrapped and handled by Rosetta, so Thumbscrew won't currently run under Mac OS X Intel. I'm going to be keeping an eye on all of it, seeing if I can help anywhere, and looking at possibly implementing the part of Thumbscrew that handles the thumbnails as a Universal Objective-C binary.