Dr Gadget - Gadget Shop - Apple MacBook Pro 15" 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo/2GB/200/SD/AP/BT

	List Price: Our Price: £1,251.13 Your Save: £ ( % ) Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Manufacturer: Apple Computer
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Binding: Electronics Brand: Apple EAN: 0885909212255 Feature: MACBOOK PRO C2D-2.4GHZ Is Autographed: 0 Is Memorabilia: 0 Label: Apple Computer Manufacturer: Apple Computer Model: MB133B/A Publisher: Apple Computer Release Date: 2008-03-02 Studio: Apple Computer
Features MACBOOK PRO C2D-2.4GHZ 200GB 2GB 15IN DVD¦RW OSX IN
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Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Awesome Comment: Very nice. I only got it on friday but my god is OSX ever better than Windows. The battery life runs about 3.5 to 4 hours, and when you close the lid it goes in and out of sleep mode quickly and without errors, very nice. The keyboard put me off at first (tiny return key) but it only takes an hour to get used to it and then it comes into it's own, very good keyboard indeed, a breeze to use a great size, and the light sensitive backlighting is a stroke of classy genius. One of the main reasons I went for a MAC is the last powerful laptop I got was a Rock Pegasus TI99 2.0 GHz, back in 2004 and the fan noise from it was unbearable. I want a machine I can take into an office, or work away on while my wife watches a bit of telly without having to leave the room, and with MAC having such tight control over their own hardware I figured this would be better built. Wasn't wrong, it's very, very quiet, and it runs very cool even if you're multitasking quite heavily. Interestingly, the only time it's gotten hot was last night, when I installed the Parallels VM and got Windows XP installed. OK, it's two OS's running simultaneously though I wonder how much of it was just XP's bloaty old fault? I'll do an Ubuntu VM as well and see! MAC OS X is just fantastic, never used it before and it was a bit confusing at first, but after a couple of hours everything just falls under your fingertips exactly as you would want it to, and it is blindingly fast. It could be having two gigs of memory but there was virtually no paging happening, everything just blinks into view, and the eye candy is great, it just looks and feels super sweet to use. It doesn't get in your way in the slightest. The whole OS just seems to be designed to get you working quickly and efficiently while it retreats discreetly into the background like a good waiter! Oh, and the multi-touch touchpad is a stroke of genius, not least because you can right click one handed (something which kept me away from MACs for years). You just tap two fingers together on the pad and a context sensitive menu pops up. It works beautifully. And the wi-fi is very fast, it's twice as fast downloading as my other two laptops (The Rock, and a Thinkpad X31) I downloaded a 720MB image file for Kubuntu in under half an hour, no sweat, over my 8Mb connection. I can't think of any cons, it's just a great machine, with a lot of thought and attention put into it. I know it's a few hundred quid more than an equivalent Windows specced machine, but it's the little things that just set it apart, and make for a really pleasant user experience, far better than any windows box I've ever had. It Just Works, is an apt motto. As an aside, I got this because I didn't want to buy a new machine with a strong spec, and then have Vista smother it with it's enormous code base. I was going to get a 600 quid laptop and install Ubuntu, but I just didn't like the idea of kludging around getting the new hardware to work. I have an ultraportable that also needs replacing, and I'll get an Asus eee pc for that. Oh, and the reason it gets four stars? It's not really the laptop, it's a swipe at Mac themselves, their product lines seem to have been designed by an evil scientist. I ended up spending far more than I really wanted to, because the normal Macbook and the Air both have little features missing that would otherwise have had me buying them instead, and saving myself about 300 quid. Bottom line, you want multi-touch, backlit keyboard (shallow of me I know, but before you cast stones tell me why you don't have a pink laptop boys.... uh huh, you see my point) good connectivity, a Matte screen that doesn't reflect everything behind you, and a deicated graphics chip, then you HAVE to get this, which is a shame as I was very close to getting the Air.... Still, you pays your money, I've paid mine, and I am in love with this damn thing more than any other system I've owned. Customer Rating: Summary: Great machine, with reservations! Comment: Firstly, where I'm coming from: I'm an IT administrator, looking after a heap of Windows servers, LINUX boxes & 40-50 'personal' machines, all these Windows (XP & Vista) running on a pretty large range of hardware. I also do photography & graphic design so use a fair few 'design & editing' packages. The reason for the launch into Mac-land is I have become bored with Windows & intrigued by Mac since it finally came up with a functioning operating system (UNIX). There's also the chance that if these things are as pleasant & easy to use as Apple claim, I could then run them out company-wide & have happy users (always something to aim for for a stress-free life!). So I got one... The hardware: Excellent - a masterpiece of ergonomics. Great screen, great battery life, quick enough for a 'heavy user', and given these features/performance, pretty light. Very pleasant keyboard, excellent touchpad. Haven't found a single thing I'd change! The software: Hmm. Very nice to use, which it would be, being Gnome running on X11. But there are a couple of critical problems which - to me - mean that this laptop can't really be used as a laptop, nor make for 'happy users'. One is that the system isn't particularly stable, at least not compared to the more recent versions of Windows. I'm pretty sure it's a program I'm using that's causing it rather than a hardware failure (wrong type of crash!), but it's taking out the OS too: this should never happen. Next is the wireless: it's not very good. It all starts peachy but the bandwidth drops to a trickle (maybe 250kbps over an 'N' wireless) after a short time. There's an error in the OS - the hardware is definitely fine as Windows runs perfectly on it - for which Apple is taking its sweet time fixing. There is quite a hullabaloo within the various forums about this & Apple is doing a 'LA LA LA, I can't hear you' at the moment. This is not the sort of behavior that companies advertising 'it just works' as a slogan should be displaying, and is a bad move if Apple wants to move in on Microsoft in the corporate market. As a 'decision maker' in purchasing this sort of kit, there is no way I could work with a company that goes 'LA LA LA' whenever a fault is identified with one of their products (it may surprise you to hear that Microsoft is very good in this area!). However... I am quite happy to work with these problems as the machine is a pleasure to use. The crashing OS I imagine most people won't suffer as they probably don't try to do quite as many things as the same time as I do, but the wireless is a common & well-known problem. I'm guessing they'll fix it eventually - it's a Leopard problem rather than machine one, so can be fixed with an update & for now there are a raft of work-arounds if you're willing to put the time in mucking about with a BASH shell. I'd still buy this machine again given the choice, so can't not recommend it! More Reviews
Editorial Reviews: Multi-Touch technology from iPhone, iPod touch and MacBook Air comes to MacBook Pro in an amazing Multi-Touch trackpad. Now you can pinch, swipe or rotate to enlarge text, advance through photos or adjust an image. MacBook Pro has a standard hard drive up to 250GB and up to 4GB of RAM. So theres more room for even bigger ideas. The Intel Core 2 Duo processors run at speeds up to 2.6GHz on a groundbreaking 45-nm process technology with up to 6MB L2 cache. And the powerful NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics pr...