It was around this time two years ago when the last MacBook Pro move was made by yours truly. The MacBook Pro has come a long way!
The best improvement is the new unibody design machined out of a single piece of solid aluminum. The new MacBook Pro is solid as a rock yet seemingly slimmer and lighter in the hand. It also runs cooler; have yet to hear any of the fans.
The main drawback is the glossy-only display, which doesn't get along with overhead fluorescent lighting. Ordered a NuShield AG Antiglare Screen Protector Film to try out, but concerned that it'll detract from the otherwise gorgeous LED display in non-office space settings. It would have also been nice if the stock MacBook Pro model came with a 7200 RPM hard drive, but upgrading the HDD is now super easy. Popped in a 320 GB Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ASG, which can be had for about $100. It runs faster and quieter than the old Hitachi Travelstar 5K160. Gotta love the pace of technological advancement!
Apple offers a 7200 RPM HDD upgrade for only $50 BTO. However, ordering a stock unit from Amazon saved some money thanks in part to their $100 rebate. The stock 2.53 GHz model already includes the max 4 GB of RAM so there's no need to upgrade memory. VMware Fusion is much happier when it doesn't have to swap to disk. Apple's awesome Migration Assistant made it super easy to move between MacBooks. The process would have been perfect if it recreated the BootCamp partition. Found a nifty donation-ware utility called Winclone to take care of that part.
Overall, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro kicks ass, especially for someone moving up from a 2.16 GHz Core Duo system. Looking forward to a future system update, which will hopefully enable GeForce Boost, or at least eliminate the need to logout in order to switch between discrete and integrated graphics. The 9400M alone appears to dramatically improve the performance of features such as Exposé although it could also be due to the combination of upgraded hardware specs in general. It'll be cool to find out how much faster HD video editing happens once time permits…
