My MacBook Pro Experiences

Question

Hey Guys,
Since theres a lotta negative and positive stuff flying around here about everyone's MacBook Pro issues, I thought I would post with some of my experiences.
Firstly, whenever I got to buy something, I always research it a LOT and since this is the first Mac laptop I have ever bought, I made sure I did a LOT more!
After a lot of reading, I decided that the upcoming 17inch at the time was not for me, (student after all so way out of my price range) and since the graphics memory wasnt a huge issue for me, I decided to look further into the 1.83GHz version of the MBP.
As I'm a music student and I run a lot of applications like Logic, Reason, Ableton Live etc, processor speed is a small issue, but is not paramount as 95% of the time the devices I use such as Audio Interfaces will handle most of the stuff the processor normaly would.
This then brought me to memory. Astounded by how much the Apple Store wanted to put an extra sim of Memory into the MBP (£140 for a 1Gig) I decided to look around. First port of call was Crucial (www.crucial.com/uk) and lo and behold, they had the same stick delivered for £114 - I could do with that £26 quid!
Reading further, I found that Apple are nice and release some documentation on adding your own RAM to the MBP. This is helpfull, and means that I could actualy do it myself to get a REAL increase in speed for the machine.
(1Gig of RAM and above is the real sweet spot for MacOSX Tiger it seems)
So that aside I decided to order the 1.83GHz beast. I had to wait a while for some money to transfer from my acount, but in the mean time I rang the Apple store to find out some information about ordering the unit.
The guy i spoke to was very helpful and emailed me with his details saying, as soon as I was ready to order I should email him back and he would phone me to complete the order. Very nice.
I had to wait a couple of extra days for the money to transfer to my acount - it was going from one bank to another, but in the mean time I was able to email this guy back and have him reply with lots of details about my order and the unit itself.
The day finally came to order the beast. My money had successfully transferred, and I was ready. I emailed the guy from Apple at 7am. At 7.40 he rang me and we started the order. (20minutes before the Apple store is supposed to open to customers)
The order was simple, and I was able to obtain my student discount meaning I had the init for £1214.95 delivered. I also bought a mighty mouse as I'd had one before and they were great. The guy also informed me about the student diascount I could receive on the Apple Care plan. This meant instead of £279 it would cost me a mere £50 for the same thing. Bargain, and well worth it.
The order was completed, and although the product did not arrive the next day as I'd expected I was informed by them that it would take slightly longer as they had some problems and had longer lead times at the moment. Ordering on a wednesday I wasnt holding out for getting it by the end of the week, but I actualy did!
I got a phone call from home whilst I was out at my University saying that my package had arrived, but no one was home (DOH!) so they left a note.
I furisly rang up the company, and found out if I could go and pick the unit up, to which they told me yes. I would be able to go and pick it up from Oxford. I was all but racing down the motorway on my way home, before I got another call from home, saying "The delivery guy came to the door and said 'i heard you were going to go all the way to oxford for this, so i thought i'd bring it to you on my way home'" how very nice!
So my unit arrived and i rushed home to "play"
The box was very swish, made it look lovely - typical apple design.
Got it out and first thing I noticed were a couple of cosmetic damages to the front of the unit, on the keyboard, and to the right hand side on the speaker grill. Ignoring this I continued to boot it up and have a play.
Setup was really simple, configured my network and user acount flawlessly, without the need to plug it on once.
the mightymouse that also arrived that day and plugging it in during the setup process it simply worked. Lovely.
In a couple of minutes everything was up and running, I was browsing the web, listening to music from my windows computers and typing an email to Apple about those **** cosmetic issues. :-P
I have to say, I havent had any real problems with the heat issues. If you sit the unit on bare skin, maybe then it would hurt... but it's not burning hot, its warm.
As for the noises, yea, it has made some, but to be honest, I can barely hear them most of the time unless it's deadly silent in the room, and when is it ever in my line of work as a musician :P If I want to get rid of the sound, I can simply open the Mirror widget and it goes, simple as that. I havent tried any of the hacks and workarounds that people have been offering around on here, because I havent found it a big issue yet.
Screen problems - I hold my hands up right now and say that the ONLY screen problems I have found with my MBP is when I have used Windows on the machine. the rest of the time (In MacOS) it is FLAWLESS.
I do have to say though, the resolution is lovely, being able to have so much desktop real estate is fantastic, and the DVI to VGA adapter is brilliant for when I want to show things off, or use a second monitor with the laptop.
BootCamp - Afraid that someone might throw something Windows only at me one day at uni I decided to have a go with BootCamp on my box. Worked fantastically well. No problems whatsoever. (However I must add I almost never boot Windows on the machine just cos Mac OS is so useable for me!)
My only one gripe is that the @ and the " keys are in the opposite positions from where I wouild like them to be. But who cares.
I would highly recommend one of these machines to anyone who is looking at getting one... I have stopped using my desktop for good now. It's just pointless.
I'm sure you'll love it
Thats the end of my story.
Really I just wanted another excuse to use this baby :P

Answer 1

I just checked and I have a Week 14 model.
The scratches - apple told me about the process for sending it back... waiting, getting a new one etc... and i said what about compensating me, as otherwise the machine is fine. They agreed to give me a case for the machine and £50.
Thank you very much Apple!
Heat - it gets warm, thats it. Not scalding. Warm. I can quite nicely put it on my bare legs and stomach if i'm lying down and its just "comfy" warm
Whine... i had a VERY slight hi pitch noise, but as i mentioned, it's NOTHING really... can barely hear it. No one else but i can actualy hear it (my young ears) and i can fix it by running and then closing the Mirror app if its really an issue.
As for anything else. It's perfection.