Macworld.Ars: First impressions of unibody 17" MacBook Pro

We stormed the Macworld Expo '09 showroom floor immediately after the Philnote to get our hands on the only tangible product Apple announced today: the new unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro. Clearly, the built-in, longer-lasting battery technology that Apple designed for its largest notebook was the cause of its delayed release, as the rest of the notebook line was revamped in October. The new unibody structure and aesthetic that the 15-inch MacBook Pro and 13-inch MacBook gained a few months ago looks great on the 17-inch, so check out a few photos and some brief first impressions.

Strangely, the 17-inch MacBook Pro almost didn't look like it was 17 inches, so we tossed an iPhone in for size comparison. Perhaps the size of the Macworld Expo hall was dwarfing the machine a bit, but the trademark wider speaker grills are still the best indicator that this is indeed Apple's largest notebook.

A side view of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which maintains one more USB port than its smaller brethren and completes Apple's abolishment of FireWire 400 from its portables.

The 17-inch's display is thinner than ever now that the machine lost .02" in thickness overall.

The 17-inch MacBook Pro's right side almost seems barren, sporting nothing but a DVD/CD slot and a notebook locking connector.

Update: The bottom of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, sans the removable panel on the 13-inch MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro.

A comparison next to the latest 15-inch MacBook Pro, on the right, helps to put the 17-inch model into context.

One final comparison that gets down low to the bodies of both machines.

After playing with the 17-inch MacBook Pro for a couple of minutes, it pretty much feels like one would expect. Apple's new unibody construction makes the machine feel even sturdier, and its slight loss in weight is an appreciated, though hardly noticeable, bonus. Look for a much more thorough Ars review with performance tests in the near future.

But something a true Unix geek would understand.

I don't know if you've been on the geek humor threads here, but they're good and cover the spectrum. We apparently have a good number of true geeks on FR.

"God is real, unless declared integer."

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who know binary and those who don't."

"There's no place like 127.0.0.1."

I'll add an extra UNIX-specific one just for you. Ask your shell a question, get an answer (you'll have be in csh or tcsh on your Mac for it to work):

% If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.

but I’ve been wondering how in the heck Hillary Clinton got selected to become Secretary of State after all of the State Department scandals by the Clinton family

No such thing as a scandal in the eyes of the sheep when it's the Democrats. They didn't call him Slick Willie for nothing. Wait for the uproar if a Republican farts in the wrong direction though.

These issues should be raised in Hillary’s confirmation hearings.

Do we have any Republican senators with any balls left?

Mac's NetInstall/NetBoot sucks. Especially if you have a mix of PowerPC and Intel Macs. You need separate server partitions and images, and you can't run the services for Intel/PowerPC at the same time as the multicast conflicts. Each image takes up a huge amount of storage space. Transfer isn't optimized on the network either so loading more than just a couple machines at a time will slam your network.

Novell's Zen at least works. Even if that isn't saying much considering how much of a PITA Novell is.

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