Yes the rumors are true, I purchased a brand new MacBook Pro in all it’s back-lit LED Glory. Speaking of the technology driving the screen let me tell you, it is GLORIOUS. I have yet to see a laptop that can compare in either brightness or quality. And on top of that, battery life is still great! Better than my Powerbook was new.

I got the top of the line 15.4” model, 2.4 GHz Dual Core, 2gb RAM. Let me tell you it is fast. In fact, it’s faster than the Dual 2.5GHz G5 I normally use at work, though if I need a lot of RAM the Dual 2.5 now has the advantage since we just upgraded it to 4.5gb.

But to give you a real life example of the speed, a video export that took 50 minutes on my 2.33GHz G4 Powerbook, and about 15 minutes on the Dual 2.5 took only 8 minutes on my MacBook Pro. Talk about a big boost to productivity!

And yes, I do have Windows installed via BootCamp, and the beauty is that Parallels Desktop recognizes BootCamp partitions so I am able to run Windows inside OS X when I’m designing Websites and need to test in Internet Explorer since that is what 90% of the world uses (it’s a horrible browser, do yourself a favor and download Safari if you are forced to use Windows), and it is fairly fast in Parallels. And, as weird as it seems, Windows boots right up and runs all by itself if I ask it to…

I did have to upgrade some of my software that I had been holding out on. PowerPC only versions of system level utilities just don’t play nicely on Intel Macs, but I knew that when I purchased the computer. I also knew that the Universal Binary upgrades were available for all my necessary utilities so I just had to bite the bullet and purchase the upgrades.

I got about 3 years out of my Powerbook, let’s see if I can get that much out of this MacBook Pro.