I’m in London for a few days and I couldn’t avoid paying a visit to the Regent Street Apple Store. I’ve been in the market for a laptop for some time now and while my plan since late last year has been to get a Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro (C2D MBP), as soon as they were released, reason prevailed and I decided to wait until the first few months of next year to get one.
Visiting the Apple Store in London reaffirmed my decision to wait; I’ll admit I was curious to see those new MBPs up close (as well as anxious to get a new machine); I was willing to shell out and get a Macbook Pro now had my quality-related concerns been offset by my experience at the store.
Alas, they weren’t. As I wrote earlier, my machine of choice would be the new Merom (Core 2 Duo, or C2D) Macbook Pro; the ‘consumer’ Macbooks lack a decent graphics chip — something I need for my visualisation software if not for many other applications/games that require ‘fast’ graphics performance. I also want the real estate offered by the MBPs. The new Macbook Pros are indifferent to the longtime Mac user in every single way, but for their raw CPU performance. Their design is practically the same as the 2003 aluminum powerbooks, with the exception of the built-in iSight and the IR port at the front; nothing new or spectacular there. Their features are — again — more or less unchanged: 802.11g (ok they have a 802.11n-pre chip, but it’s not supported at this time), Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, decent hard-drives and average graphics cards. Their build quality however has definitely changed. For the worse.
I’ll start with the keyboard. The new MBP keyboards suck. They lack the quality and feel of the Powerbook keyboard, something I noticed straight after returning from the Apple Store and powered on my trusty 17″ to write this post. They are mushy and seem ‘fragile’. Indeed, two machines (out of approximately 20ish) in the store had broken keys. While the Macbook keyboard seems ‘weird’ due to its design, I found it much better than the Macbook Pro keyboard.
Then there’s the display. Damn, has Apple really screwed up there or what? Remember, this is a Pro laptop. It’s supposed to be used by professional photographers, DTP people, video editors/directors on the field etc. Display quality matters. Colour accuracy matters. High quality panels and coatings matter.
Now, you can get yourself a ‘nice’ consumer glossy display to watch your movies, and browse the net. The glossy displays on the (very few) Macbook Pros in the store were OK — for what they are supposed to be, consumer displays: Even backlighting, quite bright, reasonable viewing angle. Sure, it’ll look ‘saturated’, ‘vivid’ and ‘crisp’, but the colours will not be accurate and that’s a major showstopper for any graphics person. That’s why all professional displays are never glossy, but matte. That’s why all high-end HDTVs are matte. That’s why Apple has kept the option there in the Pro line whereas its ‘consumer’ Macbook portable is available only with the glossy screen.
So, enter the good old matte display. I take photographs (quite a lot of them) and do graphics as a hobby and information visualisation professionally. I like matte displays and I strive for quality every single time I buy a new display, be it on a laptop or desktop.
I think my opinion of the new MBP matte displays goes somewhat like this: I wouldn’t buy them for $100 five years ago. Or, if you prefer a single-word summary here’s one: crap. Apple has clearly screwed up big time with the MBP display; the viewing angle is a joke. My 15″ Titanium from 2001 had a better viewing angle than some of the laptops at the Apple Store this afternoon. And my Titanium screen was not that great either. Then the backlighting on many of them was very obviously uneven. Even the salesperson agreed when I showed her a couple of machines. I haven’t noticed the ‘grainy’ effect that some are claiming on the Apple forum, but then again I only had 10 or 15 machines of that type to examine while there. The colours did not seem that great either on my quick-n-dirty gradient test. Brightness was nothing to talk about. Most machines in the Apple Store were manufactured on the 42nd week of 2006 and a few on the 43rd and 44th. All of the Macbook Pro laptops had displays by vendor 0x610, model 0x9c60.
There’s a lot of noise in the Apple forum on this. A lot of noise. There’s even a short post on French rumour site Macbidouille, where it is claimed that Apple has stopped production of the Macbook Pro line of computers for a few days to investigate the issue. I reckon having hundreds, thousands of people returning their brand new MBPs and asking for replacements is more costly than stopping the production line for a few days. On the Apple Forum some people have claimed that they’ve had 2 or 3 replacements this past month due to display issues. I’m not sure how many of the Core 2 Duo Macbook Pros are suffering or whether this is an isolated incident affecting a few batches. None of the matte (antiglare according to Apple) C2D Macbook Pros had good displays. None. While some did not suffer from the uneven backlighting issue, all suffered from bad viewing angles and mediocre colour performance.
I asked the salesperson to get me one of the ‘newest’ Macbook Pros from their warehouse; I explained what the problem was and why I’d need to make sure I got a good MBP as I lived in a country with a barbaric Apple IMC. She was cool with it. The warehouse people did not let her choose one for me. I had the option of ordering one, checking the serial on the box, returning it on the spot and asking for a replacement. Or I had the option of getting a glossy one, seeing that those are much less affected. I decided not to do either and just wait.
Apple has screwed up on its displays in the past. While their iMac displays (20″ and 24″) and their stand-alone, professional displays have been good in recent times, older Apple Studio Displays have had their share of problems. For example, the ‘transparent’ plastic 17″ Apple Studio Display had an inverter that died shortly after the warranty had expired. Sure, someone with elementary experience in electronics could find the part and replace it, but how many of us with that kind of knowledge are there among the Mac populace? Mind you, this was a very widespread problem at the time — we know, we had two of them in our research group in use daily between 2002-2004. Titanium Powerbook displays were also pretty notorious for their horrible colour gamut and bad viewing angles as well as their low brightness. Aluminum Powerbook displays were generally good, with the exception of the first Aluminum Powerbook 15″ in 2003 which exhibited white spots that progressively got worse — probably due to bad assembly rather than a bad panel per se. iBooks have also been notorious for their low quality displays; although it is more reasonable to expect Apple not to pay attention to colour fidelity, brightness and overall quality in their ‘low-end’ series than their professional laptop series.
All in all, I am very disappointed by the new Macbook Pro. In comparison to the high-end laptop offerings by Sony, Toshiba etc. it is certainly lacking in quality, although its features are on par. Apple will have to really try improving their manufacturing and step up its quality assurance processes instead of maintaining an army of marketing monkeys that generate an endless stream of catchy one-liners for everything between salesperson t-shirts to TV ads. Being a ’boutique’ firm does not mean giving up on quality or performance. On the contrary. The comparison between Apple and BMW, Porsche or other expensive (or ‘exotic’ if you prefer) brands is common. Sadly, Apple has been forgetting that its niche market is not just about design, it’s also about quality, high-end, easy to use products. And quality seems to be something that has eluded its latest Macbook Pro computers.
So until early 2007 when my next visit to London’s Apple Store will take place (and when I’ll hopefully purchase a Macbook Pro that does justice to the ‘Pro’ in its name) I’d advise people to stay away from those machines unless they can be certain that they will function to their satisfaction before getting into the whole buy-return-replace process that seems to have troubled many. They are just not worth it.