Loading Twitter updates Loading...
Follow me on Twitter
Main | Next day (Mar 3, 2009) »
20090302 Monday March 02, 2009

New 15" MacBook Pro with SSD Just over a month ago, I reduced my computing machinery from 3 to 1. Since I was running to work, this quickly presented a problem of how to get my laptop to/from the office. I decided to go for the "no home computer" about half the time and it was a fairly pleasant experience. It's hard to stay up late and hack away on open source when all you have is an iPhone.

To be perfectly honest, I only made it about 2 weeks before I ordered a new laptop, but I cancelled the order shortly after. Last weekend, I re-ordered and my new 15" MacBook Pro arrived this past weekend. Here's the specs:

  • Processor: 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
  • Memory: 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

I also chose the solid-state drive (SSD) because I'd heard it's faster. I did some rough performance comparisons against my old laptop (a 2-year-old 17" MacBook Pro) and found it's quite a bit faster.

For these tests, the computers have exactly the same software and OS (I restored my new MBP from my old one). For the tests below, I used Java version "1.5.0_16" and had JAVA_OPTS set to the following: 

-Xms512M -Xmx768M -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Djava.awt.headless=true -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC.
ComputerOperationTime (mm:ss)
New MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5.6 (2.8 GHz, 4 GB RAM)appfuse: mvn install3:23
cp -r appfuse appfuse20:28
gwt-project: mvn install1:24
Old MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5.6 (2.33 GHz, 3 GB RAM)appfuse: mvn install4:11
cp -r appfuse appfuse20:56
gwt-project: mvn install2:21

From these numbers, you can see that it's around 20% faster for building AppFuse (2.1-SNAPSHOT) and almost twice as fast at copying files and building the GWT project I'm working on. Needless to say, I'm impressed and pleased with my purchase.

Update: New MacBook Pros came out today with a faster CPU (2.93 GHz) and 256 GB SSD. I was able to call Apple and get a full refund on mine. Thanks Apple! Posted in Mac OS X at Mar 02 2009, 07:24:28 AM MST 14 Comments