[Mr Ten]

Clean, slim, gets really hot along the top (keyboard surface) close to the monitor, easy to type on although everything feels shifted-right a tad, mag-power is strong, not annoying, no noise, decently lit monitor, i'm still getting used to the speed (main desktop = dual core 2 w/4.5 gb ram), generally a pretty fluid machine. got it with apple care just in case, impressive package, bulky power adapter.

however, i think i went against my gut and made a bad decision for yesterday. i really depend on cs2. i could barely have photoshop and illustrator open at the same time, having two documents open was rough and sluggish, the app is slow and slow to open files, while making a very simple and low level edit with photoshop, illustrator closed / crashed, sometimes the apps would glitch and stall, provide reports to apple but not crash the app fully, not fun at all. we're talking art files <10MB!

generally, the machine is clean and solid, no complaints about it being a weak machine, however, if you depend on cs2 at all, really go in to the apple store and tinker with the machines with some of your own files before you buy, see what you can tolerate. i will certainly buy more ram, but i sure hope i can put with up with the annoying emulation lag until the native version comes out... then i should be happy again.

just an FYI. if you have tips for me on improving cs2 performance, i'd love to hear them, thanks.

[chucker]

I assume you have 512 MB of RAM. Double that. It's gonna help greatly.

[torifile]

Triple that and you'll be golden. Get a gig chip. If you can afford it, get 2 gig chips to get the dual channel stuff going.

[Kraetos]

Agreeing with the above posters. Stock RAM just isn't enough for what your doing. Pack that little MBP with as much RAM as you can get your hands on, especially if your doing big files in creative suite.

You might be able to eek a little bit of speed out by using a scratch disk. Plug in an external hard drive, go to preferences, and then set up the external as a scratch drive.

CS3 is slated for a holiday release and will in all likelyhood be a universal binary. If you can rough it out until then, you'll get the speed you need.

[Purgatory]

I have a MacBook Pro 1.83 w/ 1.5 GB RAM, and while PS CS2 runs decently, and I haven't tried Illustrator, the other CS2 apps run pretty horrendously. I grabbed the try-out versions of InDesign and InCopy, just to toy around with, and not only did both run really, really slowly, they took up a ton of RAM and virtual memory (a few hundred megabytes and one to two gigabytes, respectively), with only a newly-created file open.

[Mr Ten]

Originally Posted by Purgatory I have a MacBook Pro 1.83 w/ 1.5 GB RAM, and while PS CS2 runs decently, and I haven't tried Illustrator, the other CS2 apps run pretty horrendously. I grabbed the try-out versions of InDesign and InCopy, just to toy around with, and not only did both run really, really slowly, they took up a ton of RAM and virtual memory (a few hundred megabytes and one to two gigabytes, respectively), with only a newly-created file open.

i'm started to see weird things happen, like my menus will turn into an impact-style font, then run the mouse over them and they'll become the normal font again but constrained within that thin spot, so you'll see hist... instead of history, and the menu height on each line is like 2/3 so you can't see the whole word. apps crash, trippy stuff... this is the only time i went against my gut and i may regret it, plus 10% re-stock.

not sure if i want to spring $350 for ram just to see what happens, then again, i know when the native version of cs2 (or 3) comes out, it'll be heaven... then again, could i have saved hundreds of dollars (even though i got the student discount)? will there be enhancements and fixes? shit!

[rminkler]

I have a 17" iMac core duo, and with 512 megs of ram rosetta is almost unusable. It gets lots better with more memory (I have 1.5 gigs and rosetta is much better).

[Sargasm]

Out of curiousity, what is a scratch drive and what does it do?

[Brad]

That's simply the location where Adobe's apps store their "scratch" files. Intead of relying solely on the operating system to manage their memory, the Abode applications micromanage their memory. When working with moderately large files, one of these apps may consume vast amounts of memory when undos and history are included. So, Adobe dumps the content of unused memory to these scratch files.

Some people put their scratch files on separate disks that are faster or not otherwise in use by the system.

[Mr Ten]

so what do you guys think? am i just sketching out too much? just plop in 2 gb of ram and deal with the lag for now until the native version comes out? or suck up the 10% re-stock and get a g4 powerbook? i bought the laptop because i need one, i just need it to work well to make it usable.

thanks.

[alcimedes]

I was working on a machine the other day in office and it felt sluggish. Pretty sure I won't be jumping on the intel bandwagon for at least 6 months more.

[psmith2.0]

Do the restock, get a refurb 12" or 15" PowerBook to get you through 2006 (or early 2007 even?).

Revisit the Intel-based laptop when the Adobe stuff is native. Sounds like you're not putzing around and truly need reliability/stability, so - at this particular time - a proven G4-based PowerBook might make life easier.

And consider this: by the time the Adobe stuff IS native, there could be another 1-2 revisions of the MacBook Pro out (Merom-based, even? And all kinds of other enhancements and features).

If I were in your position and had your needs and concerns, I'd eat the 10% restock and get a refurb G4 (or hell...even an iBook, packed with RAM). View it as your "12-18 placeholder machine".



If there was ANY way you could get by on a 12" iBook or PowerBook (go as cheap as possible right now)? Then treat yourself to a Rev. B or C MacBook Pro AND Universal CS in a year or less?

[defaultmike]

is there any chance that Apple will improve rosetta even more on the next os upgrades? So far, from what I see online, the 2GHz MacBook Pro resembles a 1.1GHz G4 running Adobe CS2

perhaps if apple improved rosetta, they could get it closer to the point of a 1.5GHz Powerbook, which would be more acceptable

[dfiler]

Originally Posted by defaultmike is there any chance that Apple will improve rosetta even more on the next os upgrades? So far, from what I see online, the 2GHz MacBook Pro resembles a 1.1GHz G4 running Adobe CS2 perhaps if apple improved rosetta, they could get it closer to the point of a 1.5GHz Powerbook, which would be more acceptable

Doubtful. Rosetta is already quite impressive.

I don't think that instruction translation is much more optimizable than it already is, at least in the near term. But translation speed isn't that important anyway. Rosetta's performance is more tied to the efficient caching of translated instructions. This is why Rosetta consumes so much RAM. The more memory consumed, the more smoothly it runs; much more so than other software.

Unfortunately, or fortunately from another perspective, caching methodology is a relatively known science. For many decades now, computer scientists and mathematical theorists have pursued ever more efficient algorithms for different applications.

Moral of the story? If you want Rosetta to run quickly, add RAM. Repeat as neccessary.

[TonyMillion]

Originally Posted by dfiler Moral of the story? If you want Rosetta to run quickly, add RAM. Repeat as neccessary.

I absolutely agree, I stuck another gig in my macbook pro 2ghz (now @ 2gigs). and once a PPC app has been running for a while its really hard to notice any particular slowdown. That said I don't really multitask several large apps at once (i.e. photoshop + illustrator + etc.) So there's plenty of ram to cache the translated instructions.