Apple's MacBook Pro: Using it as a Mac and a PC

Final Words

Computer makers have for years sought to have customers view PCs much like cars, wanting to upgrade to get a later model year and not necessarily focusing too much on the specifications. Aside from the Intel Core Duo processor, the design changes to the MacBook Pro are highly reminiscent of what a car maker would introduce over the lifetime of a vehicle. There's a handful of incremental changes that individually are relatively minor, but in the aggregate make you want to upgrade more than ever.

With the MacBook Pro the desire to upgrade is even tougher to resist because Apple switched to a significantly faster processor than what was in the outgoing PowerBook G4. Honestly, as tempting as this new model may be to upgrade to for existing PowerBook owners, I would recommend waiting for a Merom version if you can. By the time Merom is introduced later this year there will be even more Universal Binaries available for the platform and hopefully by then all of the issues with the current MacBook Pros will have been worked out. Remember that when Merom is introduced it will be a drop in replacement for the Core Duo processors, not requiring a brand new design, hopefully meaning that you won't have to worry about new bugs being introduced with the new processor.

Early on in my Mac experience I would've done anything to be able to run Windows, and I've heard the same request from many users looking to give Macs a try but are worried that they won't be able to do everything they do today with their PCs. Boot Camp and Parallels' Workstation 2.1 are the best transition tools you could hope for, so now there's really no longer an excuse not to give it a try. While I'd like to see a more polished set of drivers for Windows XP included in Boot Camp, it's a start. To Apple's credit, the application is still in beta and isn't supposed to be released until OS X 10.5; that being said, it seems like the problems that do exist with Boot Camp wouldn't take much time to fix at all.

Parallels' Workstation holds far more promise in my opinion than Apple's Boot Camp, but for a VMM to truly be the perfect solution we will need support for virtualization from companies other than CPU manufacturers. ATI and NVIDIA are already working on the problem but obviously virtualization is far more important to the CPU makers at this point. We are still at least a couple of years away from a VMM solution that's as good as natively booting an OS, but Parallels' solution in beta is already amazingly close.