17" is here

Question

All my griping and complaining got me nowhere with Web orders, so I got one from the local Apple Store. Put my name on their list back in October, never thought I'd hear from them - but guess what?
Anyway, 17" c2d 233, glossy, this and that. I've been fooling with it since yesterday, transferring whatever from my Powerbook G4. So far the news is good. Yes, I'd even give it a REAL good (what? Buckwheat says something good?)
Ok, I like the glossy. No, it doesn't really make that much difference, but enough to make me a fan. One of the few faults on the machine is the proverbial light bar all the way across the bottom of the screen - you couldn't do color matching on this display. It's a backlight leak they haven't come to terms with yet. Then again, almost every C2D 17 has this problem, I'll deal with it later. It doesn't matter right now. This will annoy the **** out of some of you, but I don't care. And like all the other 17 C2Ds, the lid doesn't fit flush. Sticks up about 1/8" around the sides. Again, I don't care, and I'm not going to bend it back into shape either.
How does it compare to my 15" G4? It doesn't blow you away, and no it's not 10x faster or whatever they're claming. But it's quicker, maybe 2x-3x across the board. Keyboard feels different - maybe just a tick stiffer. CD is certainly quicker, on reads AND writes. Boot time is about the same. As mentioned display is so much better on this 17 glossy, and remember I was coming from one of the best screens made by Apple (the late model 15" G4).
No sleep problems at all - it behaves just as it's supposed to. And no, it's not hot. It's been on my lap for about 3 hours, and I've even say the old G4 runs hotter than this thing. I pitty all you original dual core owners because they fixed this heat thing on the C2D's.
Apple order fulfillment is still problematic. The stores are filling the gap.
My copy of Office went down like a charm - I really thought there would be a problem going from PPC to Intel but nope - click bang.
Wireless is nothing to get excited about - behaves like m G4 (which is no problem at all). Wireless is wireles, circa 1999 house-phone technology at best, you'll be lucky to get a good circuit more than about 20' away anyway.
Oh - here's a big gripe. The "new" PCMCIA micro slot thingie. Who is really using this slot? Who has actually made any cards to that standard? My Sprint card of course will not fit, Sprint has no idea what Apple is using - as PCMCIA is the standard, so tough. I'll have to junk my card and figure out a way to use my cellphone as a modem/router. IMHO Apple was trying to get ahead of the tech curve and while they're usually right on, they blew this one.
The new C2D power supplies are only 65 watts, where the Core Duos (lap heaters) were 85 watts.
It's heavier than the G4. Noticeably. Apple Genious told me that since it's got 3gb of RAM, all those bits are heavy and add up lol.
Speakers are so much better than the 15s. Very glad Apple took this opportunity to get away from cell phone speakers so common on all laptops.
Mousepad is actually a little bigger - I kind of like it.
Would I drop $3k on another one? Probably, but I'd gripe about that too

Answer 1

PowerMac G5 Dual 2.5 to compare....
Results 131.14
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.4.8 (8L127)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model PowerMac7,3
Processor PowerPC G5x2 @ 2.70 GHz
L1 Cache 64K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 2.70 GHz
Bus Frequency 1 GHz
Video Card ATY,R481
Drive Type Hitachi HDS724040KLSA80
CPU Test 159.07
GCD Loop 123.52 6.51 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 178.24 4.23 Gflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 353.29 14.08 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 142.21 4.69 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 127.18 22.15 Mops/sec
Thread Test 139.10
Computation 141.63 2.87 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 136.67 5.88 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 105.74
System 106.38
Allocate 150.21 551.63 Kalloc/sec
Fill 132.49 6442.11 MB/sec
Copy 71.45 1475.72 MB/sec
Stream 105.11
Copy 98.41 2032.52 MB/sec [G5]
Scale 100.59 2078.06 MB/sec [G5]
Add 110.49 2353.73 MB/sec [G5]
Triad 112.35 2403.50 MB/sec [G5]
Quartz Graphics Test 140.10
Line 135.80 9.04 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 140.27 41.88 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 144.46 11.78 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 133.23 3.36 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 147.75 9.24 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 175.35
Spinning Squares 175.35 222.45 frames/sec
User Interface Test 155.71
Elements 155.71 714.61 refresh/sec
Disk Test 57.99
Sequential 90.58
Uncached Write 82.58 50.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 91.41 51.72 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 85.82 25.12 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 105.71 53.13 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 42.65
Uncached Write 15.74 1.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 86.54 27.71 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 90.11 0.64 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 131.87 24.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]
17" 2.33GHz C2D MacBook Pro, 160GB, 2GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  
17" 2.33GHz C2D MacBook Pro, 160GB, 2GB RAM   Mac OS X (10.4.8)