The new MacBook Pro 2011 is very aggressive in some of it’s features. Some off its spec also changed including the CPU that’s new: Apple’s also launched the new Thunderbolt high-speed interconnect, and there’s been a change to an AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU paired with Intel’s integrated HD Graphics 3000. This should provide both better graphics performance and a longer battery life.
Look and feel
It’s been nearly three years since the MacBook Pro last had a significant design change. Not much have changed from previous models.
The question that you can ask yourselve is, will it really kill anyone to throw in a couple of extra USB ports? And maybe space them out enough to allow for both a thumb drive or wireless card and another device without an extension cable?
The Macbook Pro does not have a Blu-ray option and many critics will frown at this.
To sum this up: it looks and feels exactly like a MacBook Pro. It’s still the industry standard in terms of design and quality, but after three years some of the competitors are pushing hard at the Macbook Pro.
Performance, graphics, and battery life are of the most important aspects of the new MacBook Pro. The Macbook Pro is argueably one of the fastest laptop tested.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro does have a 2.2GHz quad-core Core i7-2720QM, 4GB of RAM, and AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 RAM. This exceeds any previous Macbook Pro.
Graphics
The Radeon HD 6750M performs reasonably ok but seems to run a little hot. It does have a capable GPU and the HD Graphics 3000 is an improvement, but it’s still to slow. Apple says that the Intel integrated graphics performance should equal or exceed the previous Macbooks integrated NVIDIA GeForce 320M, but some sources found this to be the opposite although not to much.
It’s not a huge problem on the 15-and 17-inch Pros, since you can fall back on that Radeon, but you shouldn’t try to do more than average HD media playback or casual gaming on the entirely-Intel 13-inch model. You can configure the Macbook Pro with a 128 GB SSD for an additional $100.
FaceTime HD
Apple’s been chugging along with VGA webcams on their machines for so long we were actually shocked when we found out the new MacBook Pro has an upgraded 720p FaceTime HD camera in the lid.
Image quality is obviously improved from the previous generation, and we noticed a slightly cooler cast. We’d love some fine-grained image controls at the system level for this camera — even just white balance and exposure sliders would go a long, long way. Although FaceTime now supports HD calling, Photo Booth weirdly hasn’t been updated and still takes VGA shots. Same with Skype, which only supports sending VGA video on OS X right now — we’d imagine an HD-ready update is a much higher priority now, though.
Thunderbolt
There’s just not much to say about Thunderbolt right now –yes, the port is there, but there aren’t any peripherals that use the new 10 Gbps dual-channel interconnect just yet.
LaCie’s announced a dual-SSD Little Big Disk and Promise has announced a Pegasus RAID, but neither of those are shipping yet. Of course, Thunderbolt also carries Mini DisplayPort video, and we were able to drive an external 24-inch monitor without any issues, using an existing Mini DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter.
Conclusion
The Macbook Pro might be easily mistaken for the previous MacBook Pro. However once you start it up, you realises how fast it is compared to models of the past.
It’s 2.5 times as fast as the model before that, and almost five times faster than the 11.6-inch MacBook Air.
Apple Macbook Pro 2011 does provide battery life up to seven hours. That’s fantastic.
The Macbook Pro is expensive and some people may ask if that is reasonable for two USB ports and no Blu-ray drive? However if you’re a purist and want top speed plus all that you do expect from a new Macbook, silence drops over any discussion about the price topic.
The design did not change much.
The Macbook Pro 2011 represents a blend of power, portability, and battery life that is rare to find.
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