I got my new MacBook Pro 15-inch on Friday, several days earlier than I was expecting. Overall, I have to say that I'm quite happy with it, although Friday evening was a bit on the frustrating side. I learned the hard way that this new machine is not compatible with my old Netgear WGR614 router. It connects, but the connection is unreliable, drops a lot of packets, and makes for an otherwise unpleasant experience. I went to the Apple store Saturday morning, and picked up an AirPort Extreme, which was easy to set up, and works quite well.

I special ordered the machine with the higher-resolution screen (non-glossy, I'll get to that in a moment), and a 256GB SSD. I haven't really decided if the SSD is really worth the $600, but it certainly is nice. It boots almost instantly, and operations such as installs and such are much faster. It also makes for a very quite machine, and one that I don't have to worry about moving around. The higher resolution screen is very nice. I can get a lot more on the screen, but it also just makes images look nicer.

As far as glossy/non-glossy goes, this is a complete scam. The non-glossy screen is beautiful, hardly distinguishable from one of the glossy screens, except for the fact that I don't have to try to see past my own reflection in order to read the screen. I guess I do miss out on being able to see the aliens sneaking by behind me while I'm working, though. I really think this whole glossy screen business is a way to make the displays cheaper, and a bunch of marketing spin to convince people that the inferior screen is actually an advantage.

The keyboard on the machine has a fairly nice feel. I was a little concerned about the caps lock key (which I configured to be a control key), since my BT flat keyboard has problems missing that key. The keyboard on the MBP has a much smoother feel than the BT keyboard, and I really haven't had any problems with it. It's definitely better than the keyboard on my 2008 (with Santa Rosa). The keyboard is the one thing I miss from the ThinkPad, though.

Setup

Once I got networking, I did some significant setup. I booted the install DVD, and shrank the OSX partition by about 32GB to make room for a native Linux partition. I used parted to make a swap and root filesystem for Linux, and then booted into rEFIt and used it's partition fixer to fix the legacy partition so that the legacy bootloader could easily boot Linux. I installed Arch Linux without any real hitches, using the wired ethernet. The built-in wireless ethernet seems to be a very new device, and even the Broadcom driver didn't seem to work (it talks to it, but won't authenticate to the base station). I'm sure this will get working at some point, and it probably won't be long before I can use the b43 driver in the kernel.

I installed Virtualbox, and also put Arch Linux in that. It's a bit slower, but does integrate nicely with the OSX environment. That will probably be the normal environment I use Linux from on the machine.

As far as OSX software goes, I installed MacPorts to be able to easily build packages. I found a version of mplayer-enhanced which seems to be mostly as good as the Linux version. It's the only program I can find on the machine that will play 10Mb/s H.264 streams without glitching.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the new machine.