1. No built in right mouse button. Get’s really annoying when you’re used to doing simple tasks only finding out that you have to use 2 hands to do operations I used to be able to do with one hand. And by the way, I don’t want to buy a 2-button mouse and carry something extra.
2. Shallow cheap feeling keyboard with bad tactile feel. My lenovo excels in this area – I consider it a gold standard for laptop keyboards. You would think something this expensive would get this right. I don’t care about illuminated lighting that drains my battery nearly as much as having good tactile feel.
3. Extreme heat during normal tasks – it will seriously get uncomfortable on your lap. Try wearing shorts and putting your macbook pro on your bare skin – not too comfy. And for the person who defends the macbook pro about changing user habits to work with the machine….you sound like a windows user. Shouldn’t the thing just friggin work? If I want to put the laptop on something soft like my lap or pillow on my lap…I should be able to.
4. Screen does not tilt all the way back flat to 180 degrees, stops at probably 110 degrees. imagine being tall, on the couch, with your laptop on your lap and not being to tilt it back for optimal angle – bc of this the picture looks washed out.
5. Although it is the best looking laptop, being sleek, I find it annoying that the sharp edges dig into my skin while typing and its not very comfortable at all. It made me appreciate going back to a thinkpad because I never realized that thinkpad was smart enough to round their edges.

In all, PCs have a bad wrap for not being elegant looking. But truth be told, regardless of OS, the Macbook Pro is far from perfect and is not at all practical enough for me. For me, my computer isn’t an accessory to my wardrobe. I actually use mine for work.

I have used Macs and PCs (Mac in the office, PC at home) for about 7-8 years, so I’m not an early adopter but I’m not a newbie either. There’s always been problems with both systems but my new MBP really takes the biscuit.

If you list the main issues that even Mac have admitted that the MBP has, what are they – running hot, dropped internet, sticky CD…I’ve had ‘em all. In just under a month.

I haven’t taken it back to the store yet – for what it’s worth, the term Genius to me is the same as calling the guy who schleps coffee at me in Starbucks a ‘barista’.

However, I’ve checked every forum and newsgroup I can find. What do I find? They’re full of the same problems and the same fanboys saying ‘you’re Dell will be worse’. Well I have to tell you that I haven’t had anything like the same problems with either my Dimension 8400 (2005) or my wife’s Inspiron 1300 (2006). In fact, they purr like kittens – nice and quick, hardly an hour glass in sight. Play fps like you wouldn’t believe. I didn’t have a single problem until I had to upgrade the firmware on my router. Why did I have to do that you ask? Because some Mac fanboy I believed told me that was the reason why my new MBP wasn’t picking up a perfectly good signal.

Pinwheel of death? I got it. Especially when switching between home and work Internet.

Noise problems? Nice whine, but I prefer beer.

Heat? Don’t think I’ll be having kids after the last hour of this on my lap.

Battery? I think my Creative Zen packs more punch.

Oh, but I do have the little webcam thing at the top which is cool.

I was really excited about the MBP and after working my G3 till it gave out I was so happy when I took it out of the box. That lasted about a day and a half – would have been shorter only I left it at work the first day.

Oh, and I solved the two-button problem – I bought an i-Rocks optical mouse which is great. One nice thing about the MBP which makes using it alongside PCs a treat.

So 7/10 Mac for the MBP. Fanboys, keep trying.

I’ve been a DOS/Windows user for oh, say 20 years now? – I’ll admit DOS didn’t crash much, but then again people generally didn’t leave their PC’s on (power management what?) – XP is leaps and bounds beyond other MS OS’s I’ll admit, and as a recent switcher it IS a little infuriating until you un-learn windows. I’ve also been a longtime Linux user, and figured that I’d be OK with the Mac UI since I was used to Linux / UNIX / whatever.. wrong… most Linux UI’s are designed to mimic Windows, so what I new from there was totally wrong from a mac point of view. Now that I’ve been using my 15″ MBP for a few weeks I’m feelilng much more comfortable… (try dragging a block of selected text to your desktop, or elsewhere in a document, cut and paste with no extra button pressing.. cool huh?) Also Command-W and Command-Q make a HECK of a lot more sense than alt-f4, and the myriad of keys that windows apps use to control tabs..

Mac OS is nowhere near as dependent as windows on the contextual click, everything is drag n drop and hotkeys… hence no right mouse button. Probobly the most difficult thing for switchers (like me) to comprehend is that you don’t *need* right click in the OS (do need it for games though, I admit, but it’s not like I’m playing RTS’s / RPG’s / FPS’s with a trackpad anyhow.

oh yeah, and new MBP’s – put 2 fingers on trackpad, click == contextual click (“Right Click” is left on my….. oh nevermind) – also there is a piece of freeware that will enable two-finger right click on the 15″ MBP’s also.

My last laptop, a Dell Precision M60 had a screen that smudged if you looked at it funny (some kind of funky coating) – plus it was klunky as hell.. I’m sure that apple could prevent the screen from touching the keyboard if they added another 1/4″ to the case to make it stiffer (and heavier) – but then again, not _everyone_ has greasy hands either? (I don’t personally have this issue) -

As far as heat goes, mine’s a little warm (2.16 15″) – but it’s not hot on the bottom (the area above the f-keys gets toasty) – and yes, the speakers do whine a little while the cpu is throttling.. however.. this machine, even with whining is quieter than my old dell, and while playing games… that dell sounded like a farking typhoon on my desk, yes my mac gets hot while playing WoW, but it’s quiet as a mouse the whole time. I’ve had the secondary fan turn on once in the past 3 weeks I’ve owned this thing. I’m sure someone will come out with a hack if you think you know better than the people that designed the machine, and then you can run the fans flat out and have a cooler machine.

As far as WoW… 6.5 million subscribers paying monthly dues, and new content added every few months… yeah, it must suck really bad, nobody plays it, I’d much rather be playing

Ah well, sounds like you have a lot of angst for a rather expensive laptop that you purchased.. Disregarding comments about researching a platform and it’s hardware before switching, but thats water under the bridge at this point. Why not go ebay your MBP and pick up a nice Dell or something? I hear dell laptops get great FPS on in church…. Granted they’re big hunks of clunky plastic with little widgets stuck to them to make them more appealing.. (how many people actually USE “media keys”) – but it will stay cool (plastic generall doesn’t conduct heat well), and it’ll be much more stable for running XP (keep in mind boot camp is BETA, says so on their site) – hope you find something that’s more suited to your needs!!

Cheers

Now I know your lying. The Mac don’t reboot itself if for some reason it panics. So everything else you said just lost credibility.

N.B., for every complaint michael listed, the opposite is a just-as-valid complaint if you’d switched the other way. Zoom button doesn’t maximize on the Mac? Maximize button doesn’t zoom on Windows! No BIOS for changing settings? Dumb special-case “BIOS” thingy for changing some settings! No games on the Mac? No spyware, either!

I guess if you want to play the latest games in church, the Mac is not for you. So sad.

>I’ve never had to reinstall XP every 3 months. You’ve got to be a computer idiot if you screw it up that bad

IMO, only computer idiots don’t reinstall XP every 3 months. There’s nothing you can do about the slowdown that inevitably happens – and of course there’s no replacement for that feeling of a fresh re-install with everything running 2X faster

I have had to reinstall OS X already once though, so we’ll see if I need to do so again in the next few months (putting this MacBook Pro on the same OS reinstallation schedule as my old T42p )

Yeah, that’s the other thing. For every Mac problem they’ve got some loser work-around. Greasy screen? Keep a dead animal tucked in your laptop. Right click? Hold your left arm in the air, pat your head, rub circles on your tummy and pull the fritzer key with your left foot.

How is it all these people so willing to bend over backwards to compensate for the flaws of Apple can’t do the same thing with a PC? I don’t care what anyone says, I’ve never had to reinstall XP every 3 months. You’ve got to be a computer idiot if you screw it up that bad. Besides, most people I know have had to wipe their OSX install just as much as I’ve ever done XP.

I think it’s a fatal case of Apple fanboyism.

The resize handle is only on the bottom right, if the window is too big, you can’t even resize it smaller at all. I don’t get that.

The maximize button doesn’t really maximize applications.

WAY TOO HOT! WAAAAAAAAAAAY TOO HOT! Even when it isn’t doing anything processor intensive, just sitting on a web browser, why does it have to be 400 degrees? I’ve never seen a PC do that.

Someone should be tortured for not having a second mouse button on the machines.

Am I supposed to have a flat slotted finger to open the latch on the screen? I’m sorry, I didn’t come with one. Maybe there is an iOpener attachment that you wear on the end of your finger to open the laptop. They could have used a spring to help open the thing.

The screen is getting greasy, I’m told “that’s how Macs are, you have to keep a leather protector between the keys and the screen when it’s closed.” You’ve GOT to be kidding. The genius hardware designers at the genius company can’t design another millimeter in there to keep the screen clean?

You can’t “go into bios” and turn off that stupid startup dong? Try turning your Mac on in the back of a church DDDDDDOOOOONNNNGGGG!!!! That’s just ridiculous.

Is World of Warcraft the first and only game on the Mac? That’s the only game everyone I know with a Mac plays. That game is like 5 years old and sucked when it was new!

There’s no treed menu for programs and organization. Mac users tell me I can drag icons to the dock, but I can drag icons to the bottom of my desktop on XP. They also say there are third party programs that youc an use but I thought the Mac was so much better out of the box?

It constantly reboots on its own. Whether running OSX or XP.

I’ve had a lot of “1.0 hardware” and I’ve never had problems like this. Not to mention most of the problems are in the DESIGN not the construction of the OS and hardware.

After a few months of being switched, I have to say that Apple has a great marketing company because they’ve got a (good) reputation that they sure don’t deserve.