Thinking of buying a MBP

Well, it's scholarship time from Uni so I'm considering treating myself I'm looking at the 13inch MBP (at the education store it's £780), so it seems pretty cheap. Anyway, I have a few questions:

1: Does the battery life really live up to claims (7 hours)? My current laptop (Samsung NC10) lasts about 4 hours which is fine for me, so if the MBP's real life usage (brightness around half on, wifi on, and sometimes doing some CPU intensive tasks such as Photoshop) is around 4 hours I'll be very happy.

2: Is there any new revisions coming up in the next 1-2 months? If you guys know that. I'd obviously like the newest and most powerful model.

3: I'll of course run Snow Leopard, and my friend (who has an old Unibody Macbook) has trouble running Boot Camp with Windows 7 on it. Can anyone testament that running Snow Leopard and Windows 7 in bootcamp works fine?

Thanks!

Answers:

1. If the battery doesn't really last 7 hours (but maybe 5.5-6.0 hours)...will this change your purchase decision. Battery runtime really depends on what you're doing.

2. Nobody really know but Apple.

3. Personally I'm not 100% sure. Search the site, I'm sure this has already been covered.

HTH,

- Nick

1) The battery will last 7 hours if the brightness is all the way down and you are doing simple tasks but it will usually last less than 7.
2) There should be a new line of macbook pros coming out soon but nobody is really sure about this.
3) Windows 7 should run pretty smoothly from what I have heard.

Thanks for your replies, I know that I won't get 7 hours if I use it all the time, but is it fair to guess I'll get around 4-5 hours from Internet usage and some Photoshop work? I've looked up rumors online and it seems a refresh is due, so I'll wait til end of January.

Yes, you should be able to get about 5 hours out of your battery doing those tasks.

vitaminz said:

Thanks for your replies, I know that I won't get 7 hours if I use it all the time, but is it fair to guess I'll get around 4-5 hours from Internet usage and some Photoshop work? I've looked up rumors online and it seems a refresh is due, so I'll wait til end of January.

Click to expand...

You'll probably be waiting a bit longer than that. I would guess it won't be until around the end of February before we see a new line of MacBook Pro machines. But it's only a WAG from me so take it with a teaspoon of salt.

Regards.

Hey
I am doing similar stuff to you, photo editing in both photoshop and lightroom, and im using a less powerful white macbook.
I generally get around 4 hours easily using photoshop and lightroom, swapping between the two, but this includes general internet usage, iPhone syncing etc...
So for the MBP should be a piece of cake.
Truthfully only Apple knows, but id get the one now as it's had time to settle and have bugs etc worked out of it so id say its pretty solid
Hope that helped

Kris

chscag said:

You'll probably be waiting a bit longer than that. I would guess it won't be until around the end of February before we see a new line of MacBook Pro machines. But it's only a WAG from me so take it with a teaspoon of salt.

Regards.

Click to expand...

I've read a few online news stories (including NYT) that March is most-likely the ship date for whatever it is that Apple is announcing at the end of this month. But, most likely that is the tablet/slate and may or may not include a refresh of the MBP line. Can't hurt to at least wait until the announcement to know if they're refreshing MBPs or not.

Im running snow leopard and windows 7 through bootcamp and a lot of big programs in windows like pro e and orcad and it's really smooth... no problems yet.

Ya you should get at least 4 to 5 hours EASILY doing that type of work out of a new MBP. JUST REMEMBER TO CALIBRATE it to keep it in shape from time to time.

No clue when the new MBP line will be coming out...hopefully soon enough but I'm perfectly happy with mine that I got a few months ago. Just an i7 processor wouldn't be nearly enough reason for me to switch because even with the heavy tasking I do on my MBP now a 2.8 core 2 is plenty. I would just waste the i7.

That being said....I would still LOVE to have one

I think probably before the end of the month they are releasing the new macbook pros with a new chip in it or something.. maybe you should look into that and wait if you can, but if you are on a tight schedule, you will still be fine with the purchase you make...

I can get about 6-7 hours if I'm on itunes, skype, and safari just browsing through pages on average with the backlight just around 70%... I love the battery life and thats why I prefer the macbook and pro lines then to regular windows laptops