Yesterday, my new Unibody 15″ MacBook Pro arrived. Like last time, there are stats to be had, but they won’t give you the big picture. (I’ve placed them at the bottom.)
I ordered it with a 256 GB SSD, and I don’t think I’m ever going back.
- Spotlight is instant. It’s so instant that you see the menu flickering as it is being redrawn continually. It appears that the search results come in at a steadier clip and with a lower latency than with hard disk drives.
- Xcode builds are very fast. Adium 1.3.5 builds about 1.6 times faster, but a simple project like Hex Color Picker that took 13 seconds to build from scratch on my previous MBP now take just over one second. If I were to second-guess this startling advance, I’d say that with an SSD, going to disk and seeking wildly is no longer the issue it once was. It’ll still be redundant once we get smarter compilers, but reading a number of blocks randomly scattered across the storage is the kind of thing SSDs were built to do.
- Time from bootup sound to usable desktop: 14 seconds. I shit you not. I know of PC laptops that have a hard time waking up in 14 seconds.
- Everything is much snappier even under load. Apps load up much faster because their databases can be read faster, so you’re not waiting on disk.
I started fresh this time (migrating by hand) and the CPU is also a healthy 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, so a fresh system and a better CPU can obviously rig the results. However, there are plenty of findings to suggest that the gain is systemic and prevailing. Mail never loaded its main window so fast, and Mail needs to load a database. Many apps that for a few months with a fresh system would start in one dock icon bounce now start immediately, even before their first bounce has really taken off.
I’m also getting 8 GB RAM from OWC; partly to create a better environment for running Windows simultaneously, partly to stave off unnecessary swaps from the not-infinite SSD, but mostly because you can never have enough RAM.
Lastly, I am absolutely in love with the quality of this enclosure. The earlier MBPs will still beat many laptops, but they now seem like dinosaurs, made of damp cardboard and duct tape. The new MBP is solid, the rubber bezel around the very edge of the screen helps make the magnet latch snap the lid shut slightly less bewilderingly than for my old white MacBook, the speaker holes are small enough to impress (and avoid being filled by stray crumbs) and plenty enough to fill the Albert Hall, the glass trackpad is nice if equipped with a slightly too noisy click and the keyboard is the same I’ve loved since the MacBook. I still don’t like the black bezel around the display, and I don’t like the glossy display, and I still think it’s worth it because this is such a solid computer in every possible sense of the word.
| MacBook Pro Early 2008 (discrete enclosure) | MacBook Pro Mid-2009 (unibody enclosure) |
|---|---|
| 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (64-bit) | 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo (64-bit) |
| 3 MB L2 cache | 6 MB L2 cache |
| 800 MHz FSB | 1066 MHz FSB |
| 4 GB RAM (OWC) | 4 GB RAM Waiting on 8 GB (OWC) |
| 250 GB HDD (5400 rpm) | 256 GB SDD |
| 8x SuperDrive | 8x SuperDrive |
| NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT (256 MB GDDR3 RAM) | NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (siphoning 256 MB RAM) —and— NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT (512 MB GDDR3 RAM) |
| 15.4″ anti-glare display 1440 x 900 | 15.4″ glossy (reluctantly) display 1440 x 900 |
| iSight | iSight |
| FireWire 400 + 800 | FireWire 800 |
| 2 x USB 2.0 | 2 x USB 2.0 |
| Optical digital/analog audio in/out | Optical digital/analog audio in/out |
| Gigabit Ethernet | Gigabit Ethernet |
| 802.11n Wi-Fi | 802.11n Wi-Fi |
| Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR | Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR |
| DVI + DVI-VGA adapter | Mini DisplayPort |
| ExpressCard/34 slot | SD Card slot |
| Kensington lock slot | Kensington lock slot |
| Trackpad with multi-touch Up to 3 fingers supported by 10.5 | Glass trackpad with multi-touch Up to 4 fingers supported by 10.5 |
| Backlit Aluminium keyboard | Backlit roundrect-style Keyboard |
| 300-cycle battery Up to 5 hours (advertised) | 1,000-cycle battery Up to 7 hours (advertised) |
| 2.45 kg | 2.49 kg |
I received a BTO MacBook pro with a 256 GB SSD on Monday. I’d agree with all your observations. Wil Shipley posted in an article about his MacBook air that he could compile Delicious library on it faster than his MacBook pro.
By Matt J · 2009.07.02 09:29
Have you sold your early ‘08 machine? How well does it hold up on resale value now that two newer generations of hardware are out? (I just bought a new 15″ unibody as well, and am absolutely loving it, but haven’t had much luck selling the old laptop yet).
By Christopher Bowns · 2009.07.02 17:04
I haven’t sold it, and I don’t think I could wrangle enough money out of it to make it worth my while. Better to have it as an extra box around the house when in a pinch. It’s still not bad, it’s just not… well, this.
I read Shipley’s post back when he wrote it and it gave me some pause. I wasn’t completely sold on SSDs back then, and I knew that he had a tricked-out MBP, which is a tough match for anything. I understand now that C language-genre compilation, despite many workaround hacks over the years, is ridiculously ineffective and can be sped up many more time yet.
Cocoa and Carbon both have huge includes that expands to, I think, 10 MB of post-preprocessed source that you have to pull in for every file, and the compilers have to stat every one of those files within files. Basically making away with access times is a huge performance boost.
By Jesper · 2009.07.02 19:13
I presume you’ve been fiddling with the trackpad options in the last week – I find that with the various tap-to-click, drag, etc, things in place, I rarely have to actually click the trackpad at all.
You may be pleasantly surprised by the resale value of your old MBP – I sold my black MacBook just as the first Alu book came out and got well over 50% of the price back on an 18 month old machine.
I’m now torn between upgrading it with an SSD, or moving to a machine that could support 8Gb of RAM (as you say, you can never have too much RAM) and more battery life than I possibly need.
By JulesLt · 2009.07.12 12:36
I still hate tap-to-click with a passion — I have for years, because it’s not tactile. It’s not apparent at all when a touch turns into a tap. This hasn’t improved with the glass trackpad; rather, it’s more defendable than ever to use the click because you can click on the lower 70% of the surface. (It’s progressively harder the higher up you get, though. At the bottom, it’s easier (though louder) than the old button; at the top, you have to put your weight into it.)
I know that I’ll probably get more value from my old MBP if I keep it, even if it fetches 50% or more of what I paid. The money would of course be welcome, but it’s also a lot of work to get the machine in order and sell it, and I have some use for it already.
By Jesper · 2009.07.12 12:48