OSNews

I hear ya. As a paying customer of Apple for God knows how long (actually... since System 7.5.x days, casual user since 7.0.x), I felt kind of entitled to take a walk on the grey area and check out how the "Hack OS X" would run on the refurbished HP laptop I bought earlier this year. While keeping the iMac with the bought copy of Tiger shut down, of course, so my shade of grey remains as light as possible. </tongue-in-cheek>

Apart from not supporting the memory card reader and the Intel 3945ABG adapter, it works almost great. QE/CI works with Titan/Natit/LD (strange combination, but necessary to enable dithering on the 6-bit LCD), although the display blacks out if sleep is enabled, and won't come up again unless I manage to put the entire system to sleep and force it to come back.

But what surprises me is how cool the laptop remains during regular use, whereas under Vista (which came bundled, Home Premium) it gets really hot, really quick, then the fan goes crazy. Which prompted me to buy one of those aluminium laptop stands with a pair of fans. I have to use NHC (http://www.pbus-167.com/) to force Vista to use the battery-optimised settings and keep the processor at minimum frequency. HP's default settings don't work well at all, still I don't want to disable its settings, then Vista, so wisely, doesn't show the battery-optimised settings anymore. Brilliant, Microsoft. Under OS X I don't even need to enable the battery-saving options... Not to mention how there's no UAC to first inform me that on the coming screen I'll have to allow some app I just downloaded to run, then proceed to the next nagscreen telling me to finally allow it to run... o_O


I'm piling up some cash to get myself a 17" MacBook Pro mid-2008, when the Penryn mobile version is out. One thing that this HP laptop taught me is that debugging on 1280x800 is a pain; I'm so eyeing the 1920x1200 BTO MBP, preferably with LED-backlit goodness

Edited 2007-10-21 20:05

I was going to purchase a MacBook Pro but retailers within NZ have been experiencing difficulty sourcing them - so that might be a message that it could be updated soon as Leopard is released.

What are you intending to use the laptop for, I've found to my surprise that the Macbook is more than sufficient for everything I need - in some cases I think even this might be an over kill - but how can someone turn down a sexy black laptop

Side note, compared to my HP laptop, this computer is built extremely robust - everything seems to be built and assembled with some effort to detail vs what I saw with HP; flimsy plastic, parts not properly tacked down etc. etc.

With Penryn set to debut early 2008, I find this extremely unlikely. Unless it's something like LED backliting the current 17" models. But I still find it extremely unlikely. Significant introductions of Apple notebooks happen consistently at Macworld Expo, in the second week of January; and I kind of find LED backliting in addition to a new CPU core (as opposed to the regular speed bump; Penryn will boost battery times significantly, along with improved virtualisation enhancements and SSE4, which will practically close the gap between AltiVec and SSE) very significant.



By carrying around a sexy 1" thick aluminium "slate" instead?

WRT my usage patterns: programming and debugging, mostly (and I like big screens on resolutions that "normal" people find unreadable); entertainment (TV replacement) too (now that the nvidia accelerator they're using is HDCP-compliant, I'm hoping external BluRay/HD-DVD players become cheap enough in a timely fashion; or is it at all possible to use some of those cheaper SATA(PATA) to USB2 adapters and standard BR/HD drives? I'm guessing a "yes" here); drawing, 3D modelling and film editing (my hobbies ); and gaming (yay for BootCamp). I'm fully aware of the weight of this beast, it's like carrying a sheet of steel on your backpack Still I don't think anything less than a 17-incher will suit me. Max 1440x900 on the 15" model won't cut it for me anyway. Too bad the 17" one won't fit an airplane tray, but then again, it's so rare for me to travel by plane that this is not a deciding factor in any purchase I make.



Strongly agreed WRT flimsy plastic on most notebooks from other vendors. But the dv6000 line is pretty well built (the ones with "piano-black, zen-garden finish"), and mine is a refurb dv6275, which, except for the heating issue and abysmal vertical viewing angle, is pretty decent. I checked the 17" 1680x1050 MBP on FNAC the other day, and the vertical viewing angle on the MBP beats the one of the HP hands down.

>> paying customer of Apple for God knows how long <<

As a non-Mac-owner, the Email-todo-etc looks slick from afar, etc, but I'm just fantasizing. I believe I skimmed all the comments and no one else discussed this in detail - is Email/Spotlight indeed that cool, for the everyday routine of rummaging around for dimly remembered stuff ?