Mac laptops forum: NEW MACBOOK PRO 2010. BUY or WAIT?

If you need a new MBP now, buy it. But the rumors are circulating. Also, Apple will; need to update them soon, as the Core 2 Duo chips will be out of production summer 2010.

I expect they will release new ones in June/July, like they did last year. So, if you need one right now, go ahead and buy. Say what you will about "outdated hardware" and "overpriced"; the MacBook Pro is the best out there to date.

The CPU is but one aspect of what makes for a good laptop. Apple's displays are simply gorgeous, there's no two ways about that. They make almost everything else look like something from the bottom of a murky well. And there are a number of under the hood enhancements about Mac OS X 10.6 which really make the most of dual, quad, sextet, octal, whatever core CPUs. Microsoft has admittedly made some pretty impressive strides on that front with Vista and Windows 7, but it doesn't quite scale as gracefully as Mac OS X. Windows' process scheduler still likes to dump a bunch of processes on one core while another might be sitting completely idle.

You may have a Core i7 and someone else may only have a Core 2 Duo, but if 40-50% of the potential of that Core i7 are being wasted because of an inefficient process scheduler, it's really not going to seem to be that much better than a lowly Core 2 Duo being utilized to it's full potential.

Then there's the fact that a lot of the companies stuffing i5/i7 CPUs into laptops had some SERIOUS hardware issues. Like the CPUs were literally melting the cases and burning out in very short order. You may not have all the latest and greatest bells and whistles with an Apple product, but whatever bells and whistles they DO have, will generally work, and work well... Consistently... Over long periods of time. You can of course make the walled garden argument, and I won't disagree, but not everyone is interested in the amount of effort it takes to contend with the additional freedom or Windows or Linux.

So when we really get down to it... I have to ask: Who are you trying to convince more? Me or you?

Bugger... You're right... And another early morning post, so at least I have that to offer up in my defense. Until about noon, certain parts of my brain just don't seem to function well, like looking at dates for posts.

Not that it makes a whole lot of difference, but I'm not intentionally digging these things up, they pop up as having a new post. Starting to think there's some kind of database issue with the "new and improved" Cnet forum software. That, or maybe someone screwed up one of the SQL queries that is used to generate the topic listings. One or two could be written off as spam having been removed from the topic, but this is starting to become a bit too frequent to be something like that.

Translation: Someone screwed up the SQL query.

Working on it my arse though. There's only a couple of possible places where this bug could be, so sorting it out should be MAYBE an afternoon's worth of work to find it, and fix it... Maybe a day or two to test it on a non-public server, then roll it out. That is, unless when they were building this forum software they failed to take this fairly regular contingency into account and are now trying to retrofit it. That could take some time, and would also be a sign of very poor project management at the outset. I know hindsight is always perfect, but not properly updating the modification date of the thread when removing spam, or a post for any other reason, really is pretty inexcusable.

As a workaround, until it actually gets fixed, it might be a good idea for someone to leave a message saying they deleted a post. Especially if it's a particularly old thread. Think I saw Mark Flax doing that on some other forum.

All non-Sandy Bridge Core i7 systems, and probably i5s as well. Any gaming laptop should also be avoided like the plague, Sandy Bridge CPU or no. Where I work we have had HUGE problems with Toshiba's Qossimo line. I don't work on those, so can't really give you much in the way of specifics, just that what must truly be a "Duh!" moment, the problem is almost invariably that they have two discrete video cards sandwiched one on top of the other, then they overheat, die, and Toshiba's had a real hard time keeping those parts in stock.

I think it was some HP systems that were literally melting. Don't know any specific models, but HP was the moron OEM stuffing desktop CPUs into laptops.

And the walled garden argument can be extended beyond just software. Your hardware options are fewer with Apple. You have basically 6 computer models to choose from, and a limited number of hardware configuration options within each one. More than that, you can't just go out and buy any random video card, printer, or several other things because you need the Mac OS X support.

There are certainly some compelling arguments for both sides of that particular argument, but it's a matter of choice. What you're looking to get out of the device/computer will ultimately decide what works best for you. I let the people with no life spend their time arguing the various merits of either side.

they are very outdated.....you would need to be a apple lover or only
use macs because thats all you know how to use if you do pick a mac book
over a core i5/i7 for the same price thats really what it comes down to.
^^.