2011 MBP 17 so far (mini review)...

[JuanSOLO]

Yeah that sounds nuts, iTunes crashing a MBP. DAMN, completely outrageous.

Please keep us up to date here on your findings etc.

[Khazul]

Touch wood...

the expression is "knock on wood". at least, that's what we say in the states.

touching wood seems like something entirely different.

'Touch wood' is what the rest of the world use and probably used long before the USA as a nation ever existed

I think the knocking on wood came from people taking the piss out of each other and realising that touching american skulls in place of wood just didnt work as they were too thick, and so knocking was required

[Machinesworking]

Touch wood...

the expression is "knock on wood". at least, that's what we say in the states.

touching wood seems like something entirely different.

'Touch wood' is what the rest of the world use and probably used long before the USA as a nation ever existed

I think the knocking on wood came from people taking the piss out of each other and realising that touching american skulls in place of wood just didnt work as they were too thick, and so knocking was required

No, it's because in the USA we use the term getting "wood" for them there jokes about boners! So saying you're touching wood sounds like wanking it to us.
Kind of doubt the saying is that old by the way, seems like an industrial revolution era thing rather than a common phrase when literally every fucking thing was made out of wood.

[Machinesworking]

Touch wood, I havn't had and freezes since installing the update and removing all 3rd party fan control stuff, and itunes is quite happily sending audio to the apple tv box and local sound.

Been running some quite cpu heavy projects through live and logic and left the live perf test project looping over 64 tracks (select all tracks and duplicate 7 times) for 15 mins- that used to cause a freeze in seconds.

Good lord! 64 tracks in the live performance test?
I get about 18 on my core2 duo mbp!

Shit, time to order one of these puppies. I'll finally be able to use alchemy and aether together as much I'd like.

Yeah, I'm jealous, I've knocked this old dual core around so much it's literally hanging on by a hair. Think I would just go for the 15" quad 2.0 though. Roughly $950 cheaper! and I'll bet not 35% slower.
Bingo! Benchmarks from slashgear! Looks like roughly 15% faster, for me not worth the larger screen and speed.

[Machinesworking]

Sorry, it seems the Brits have us beat by 6 years

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-tou1.htm

Slightly after the industrial revolution. I always think of it as being around 1900 though.

[queglay]

regarding heat, is anyone using the app coolbook here? i wonder if it lets you just controll the fans, rather than just clocking down?

[Silence]

Touch wood, I havn't had and freezes since installing the update and removing all 3rd party fan control stuff, and itunes is quite happily sending audio to the apple tv box and local sound.

Been running some quite cpu heavy projects through live and logic and left the live perf test project looping over 64 tracks (select all tracks and duplicate 7 times) for 15 mins- that used to cause a freeze in seconds.

Good lord! 64 tracks in the live performance test?
I get about 18 on my core2 duo mbp!

Shit, time to order one of these puppies. I'll finally be able to use alchemy and aether together as much I'd like.

Yeah, I'm jealous, I've knocked this old dual core around so much it's literally hanging on by a hair. Think I would just go for the 15" quad 2.0 though. Roughly $950 cheaper! and I'll bet not 35% slower.
Bingo! Benchmarks from slashgear! Looks like roughly 15% faster, for me not worth the larger screen and speed.

ok, me = tilt

Why is the 17" (with the 2.3 ghz processor) faster than the 15" (with same processor)

[Simbosan]

cos the larger screen acts as a bigger heat sink

*crosses fingers behind back*

S

[Silence]

hahaha...



but i still wanna know

[Breaks Dude]

I'd love to know if people who already bought the new MBP, are finding the issues resolved by the update.

http://www.dailytech.com/New+MacBook+Pr ... e21184.htm

Update: Monday March 21, 2011 6:00 p.m.

Late today Apple rolled out an update to OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", which included a number of updated features and fixes. A special version of the update was crafted for the early 2011 MacBook Pros (discussed in this article). While ostensibly to fix other issues, many believed that this update would fix the freezing problems.

It appears it did not, at least not for all those afflicted. Writes one user on the MacRumors forums:

this still does not fix the issues on the new MacBook Pro 2011 models (15" 2.3ghz) - just tested on the two machines we have here. Still they are getting too hot, constantly the fans are blowing (testing with Transmission/Bittorrent downloading the Ubuntu DVD). Also we had two freezes already (only under heavy load). I am posting updates on our findings to our blog ( http://j.mp/dLSqgy ) - and we are still waiting for replacements from apple.

Users are also reporting that the update fails to fix another crucial problem, blackouts when connecting to Apple's 24-inch Cinema Display. Writes another user:

Still experiencing blackouts. No graphics glitches but definitely got 2 blackouts post update...albeit less frequent. Back to the drawing board i guess.

In fact, the update seemed to cause crashes/freezes when using Apple's iTunes. Writes one user:

I'm on a new Macbook Air (13" maxxed out) and the update seems to be causing iTunes to freeze the whole system - clock, mouse, keyboard, etc. It happens about 5-6 seconds after I launch iTunes. I can start a song, and it will continue to play after the system locks up, but otherwise I'm stuck with a hard reset. I tried clearing the preference files in \Users\[me]\Library\Preferences, but that didn't help. I repaired disk permissions before and after the update. Any suggestions?

Adds another:

Since the update I've had 3 crashes with iTunes.
2011 15" 2.2 MBP.

Not sure its related to the update, but in the space of just over a year, I've never had a crash with iTunes on MacOS

In other words, it appears that the update not only failed to fix existing issues, but caused additional ones.

That's strange since every person who's installed the update so far from that 60+ page thread on the apple forum has said that the update solved the problems.

Just watching a Twitter feed and that popped up a few times.

These machines are impressive. I'm trying to justify the cost in my head.

[McQ714]

ok, me = tilt

Why is the 17" (with the 2.3 ghz processor) faster than the 15" (with same processor)

that doesn't seem to be just a CPU benchmark.. looks like a benchmark on the entire system. something else must differ in the two systems.
not sure if it would be the screen resolution making up the difference of the scores.

[Silence]

according to the geekbench webpage they only measure ram+cpu.
they dont even measure gpu

[Khazul]

Sorry no help with the 15" vs 17", but thought this may interest some people to give some sense of change between older i7 and the new i7.

Just ran geekbench (32 bit mode as its the trial version) on both my PC and MBP to capture the summary screens.

Basically its a comparison of an 4Ghz i7 bloomfield on 1600Mhz memory with Win7/64 vs 2.3Ghz sandybridge on 1333MHz memory with OSX.
So, obviously the PC wins on integer and memory access performance, though not by as much as you might expect on the integer side.
The MBP however wins by quite a margin on floating point performance.

Ive also been running the live perf test, but multiplied up for 64 tracks.
MBP: 64 tracks - 75% or so in Live CPU meter and about 69% cpu utilization in activity monitor on OSX.
PC: 64 tracks - 70% or so in Live CPU meter and about 50% cpu utilization in windows task manager.

In both cases, the load spread across the available 8 cores seems fairly even, however I notice on OSX it tends to favour the 4 primary cores a little more which I would expect on something fp heavy.

What most sticks out is not so much that the MBP seems to be able to roughly match the PC in terms of plugin within a few points, but that Live seems to get more out of the MBP for the available performance vs what it can get out of the PC. I dont know if this is a processor thing or a OSX vs Windows 7 thing.

At stock speeds on the MBP, then thing swing much further in the new processors/OSX favour.

The best I could do for comparing the GPUs (Radeon 5770 in PC, Radeon 6750M in the MBP).
In general, PC is far more responsive to UI when runnign Live and noticably more responsive in the one games Ive tried. In Starcraft2 on the PC, I run it all at 1920x1200 on ultra and its very smooth. On the MBP, I have to drop it all to medium and its playable at the same resolution, but I wouldnt say perfctly smooth. Become smooth and playable on much lower resolution, but High graphics setttings.

MBP:


PC:


Re heating etc - yes this thing still runs hot under heavy load, and Im sure the fans should be running faster than they are (max out at 5500rpm, whereas alot of people seem to see 6000rpm or more), but it does seem stable and has now had several crash free days of heavy studio use.

[JuanSOLO]

...but it does seem stable and has now had several crash free days of heavy studio use.

Good to hear. Thanks!

[ovorigin]

cos the larger screen acts as a bigger heat sink

*crosses fingers behind back*

S

I hope that was a joke? Though I have always thought the screen should be used as a 'radiator' removing the bulk of the heat away from the user.

Ive seen these stats around the net and wondered why its faster too, I did a bit of a test on a 17 2.2 the other day, I let it idle for 5 min and it did this at 33c, then I played a HD 1440/1.4 gig mp4 movie with vlc for 10 min. and the temps only got up to 40c and fans at 2000rpm the whole time, very impressive. I did the same test on a 15 inch and all the temps were a bit higher.

I really need a new machine and have been waiting for Sandybridge for over a year but there are just so many ppl complaining about the heat/noise of them and Im already writing this post with a hair dryer, if the new ones are noisy now then what are they going to be like in a year or so when they get even hotter like all laptops do over time.

like many here I use my laptop to record in a semi studio set up so it needs to be able to run at stock fan speed quietly, at least with a low track count!

Anyone able to run at Lower Latencies with the 2011?