Not to mention that the discrete GPU running full tilt causes temperatures to hit their highest and the fans to really spin. Even Portal 2 slows down a bit if I'm looking through a portal. The new 27-inch panels started to address those concerns for me so I made the switch last year.ĭespite having the upgraded AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB of dedicated GDDR5, the 15-inch MacBook Pro just isn't fast enough to drive the 2560 x 1440 external display when playing most modern games. The only complaints I had about 30-inch displays were unimpressive pixel density and a large desktop footprint. I never really used the second display enough to justify its existence, it just made me less productive given my workload (I'm more efficient if everything I need is on a single physical screen vs. I was an early adopter of a multi-monitor setup, but ever since 30-inch displays hit the market I went back to a single display. A lot of this has to do with my workload, I just always have things open that keep the CPU just busy enough that the fans need to work harder. It doesn't matter if the display lid is open or closed, my fans are always annoyingly audible. Correction, it's a thermally constrained platform that's always running way too hot.

While my Mac Pro had beefy heatsinks and fans that spun so slowly you could count their fins, the MacBook Pro is a thermally constrained platform.

Being able to pull an all-nighter testing, grab my notebook and head to the airport without worrying whether or not I forgot to copy something over is pretty sweet.įirst, this thing isn't quiet. Normally I'd have to frantically copy articles, benchmarks, notes and other important documents between machines before I left home for my next flight.

I switched from an 8-core Mac Pro to a 4-core Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro and have stuck with it for two months now.īy the end of this month alone I will have been in the air for 90 hours. Twice as many cores and much faster ones at that seemed to be a better recipe for success. Try number two came earlier this year, with the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro. I gave it a try for less than a day before having to switch back to the Mac Pro. The first Arrandale MacBook Pros hit the market and I thought, why not give two cores and four threads a try. A year ago I tried the notebook as a desktop experiment.

Apple mac 27 inch