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Despite all the articles of defective Mac Book Pros, we decided to order one. We were disappointed when we saw how many problems the unit had. The first problem encountered was the loud hissing sound, which occurs when the LCD‘s brightness was turned up all the way and the CPU wasn’t being put to work. The sounds didn’t seem too bothersome at first, but became extremely irritating after working with it for about 30 minutes. The biggest problem we ran into was with the touchpad. The touchpad on the unit we received was smashed in the top and was pushed off to the right. It wasn’t noticeable at first glance, but after working with it awkwardly for a few minutes we could tell that something was wrong.
With all the reports on its awesome performance, it was hard to believe how slow our 2.0GHz Dual Core Processor with 1GB of ram was running. For some reason it took us over 10 seconds just to launch iTunes with no other programs running. Apple’s new Front Row application was also quite slow and buggy. After pressing the “menu” button on the remote a few times, nothing happened. But after about five minutes it suddenly started to take in all the previous actions we had given it, making it go crazy. The computer also kept saying the DVDs we put in were corrupt until the 3rd time we restarted the machine. Apple has a lot of work to do with this.
With so many issues, I suggest that to anyone who plans to purchase a MacBook to wait until a “rev. b” is released. A new version soon should be expected soon if too many units are running into these problems. Note: Apple may have some big announcements on April 1, 2006, which is their 30th anniversary.
Links: MacBook Pro | TUAW Report
Recent: A Faster MacBook Pro
Has anyone had problems with the new magnetic power cord on the powerbook, mine worked fine for the first 2 weeks , now it won’t charge without lots of pressure being put on the connection point?
I am a Graphic Designer and needed a new computer as we were hiring someone else for our department and gave her my tower. I did some research and everyone told me not to buy the macbook pro. Well, I bought it anyways, and I LOVE IT! I am having an issue with it right now but I need the disks which I left at work and then it will be fine. I do not have any hissing problems. Only thing I noticed is that it does get hot, but not too hot, at least not yet :) Everyone I talked to told me that I would not be able to run the adobe products on it. I have had absolutely no problems with this machine as far as that goes either. Only issues I have are with airport and trying to get onto my servers from work, I need to download an smtp (or something like that) and we’re going to do that tomorrow and that should fix that one. I absolutely love my macbook pro. I wish I would have waited two weeks and I could have got the 17″, but other than that its faster than my tower was, and I can take it with me anywhere. Its an awesome computer. As with anything new, and old, there are always a few that have problems, and it seems to me that those problems are posted more than the praises. So this is a macbook pro praise report. I got the 2.16GH and 2GB hard drive, its very fast and reliable. My power cord has not caught on fire on me, I don’t have hissing problems, i love the LCD screen, its very bright and crystal clear. I highly recommend this machine!
I have a new MBP and when I try to hook it to my projector and show Powepoint slides it will not show the slides correctly then turn off. I have sent it to Apple and they have replaced the motherboard and the video card, but it still occurs. Does anyone know if this is a software or a hardware problem?
Hi, experienced a very weird event to my MBP, the screen went fade out on the right side! .. i took it to customer service, they said it was the lamp! and they imediatly order a display 4 replacement.. after a while, curiously after i upgrade firmware, the screen became brighter on the faulty side! and all looks okay now!…this is really weird! i hate to go here and there and see this thing happening!.. Its really sad because i did not experienced much of the hissing and noise, etc… only the heat thought! .. about the Apple remote, that happened to me also! the problem is the remote! they changed imediatly 2 a new one, works fine now.. the menu takes no more than 2 seconds to respond now… I also tried to install windows on the MBP, and it works great, but i had some issues afterwards regarding data that was beeing influenced or somewhat corrupted, maybe by beeing in the same disk.. maybe was the formating mode “i used FAT” like: a stickie note that i wrote before installing windows.. after install Win and go to osx, Stickies.app took around 4 min to load and accessing disk!!! impressive huh?…weridly after i deleted the note and run stickies, it was fast again “3seconds loading!. i deleted windows now.. i guess i will wait 4 the new OSX for that.. not reliable still “i think!”… Hey! thats what you get when you are the Lab Rat!
Have a MacBook pro and installed Adobe Acrobat 7.0 standard…, it work fine for 2 weeks but when I tried using it last week, just after I made the last apple recomanded update, my computer frooze I did a hard boot,… and it did not want to restart without freezing up instanly…, called Apple and they told me to reload os X, which I did, that seamed to fix the problem, but then when I tried to used my acrobat, the compuer frooze again.. remove the sofware so that I would crash my computer again, but just notice today that after my reload, the last security up date had to be redone, therefore making me doubt that the update was responsible for my problem…
My Question is, is this a Mac Book Pro problem or a Acrobad problem ??
I’m a Graphic Designer using a MBP, yes I have the hissing and the heating issues, but what REALLY p*sses me off is when using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS2. One will always crash! Any other designers having CS2 crashing issues on their MBP? Also, CS2 runs damn slow compared to my old G4 desktop. The MBP is suppossed to be 4x faster… but I’m not seeing it, all I see is the spinning colour wheel… a lot!
Sotiri, CS2 is slower on the MBP than the PowerBppk because the application does not support the Intel processor yet. It’s running through Rosetta which translates all the instructions back and forth; hence the coloured wheel you’re seeing quite often. Adobe’s next photoshop version should support the Intel processor.
Hi, I have the MBP and I am having a problem with Flash Professional 8. Flash on the MBP runs really slow. Can anyone help me? Besides that I like my MBP. I do have problems with the heat and sometimes it might lag in front row, but that’s it. Thanks if anyone can help.
Rj
After reading countless (ok, probably 30) different websites with reviews and general comments about the Macbook Pro/nonPro, it all comes to the same conclusion: this is the first release of a new technology, and as such, it has a lot of bugs that will be corrected over time.
Apple created an outstanding product which improved anything they had before (which does not mean it is revolutionary, as many other computers perform the same tasks since a while ago).
The fact that there are so many people complaining about the same issues is the biggest proof of this. There are (very luck) users who have not faced the heat/noise problems and try to invalidate whoever that does. These issues exist.
I was very close to purchase a Macbook Pro, and disregard the issues. I decided not to be a paying tester (we seem to be part of the Beta Generation, as much of the mainstream software and hardware on the Internet is either in Beta or Gamma phase).
Yes, Windows is buggy, but at least when you purchase it you know it before hand, so you go for a reduced price device and are prepared to work around it.
Apple is offering a fairly overpriced product with which you have to gamble whether the device you take out of the box will be the faulty one or not. I am certain this will change, as it did with their Powerbook (up to date a very good product).
I see the trolls have arrived in force. People, this is June now. It’s no longer, as Victor puts it, the “first release of a new technology”. My own MBP, obtained in April, was no longer a “first release”, and exhibited only the whine (a problem which isn’t limited to Apple’s products — my Palm Tungsten T3 had the same issue, and Palm had the same opinion as Apple on the matter. In any case, I can’t imagine the kind of brain damage I would have to incur in order to think buying any Windows-based solution was anything other than a really bad idea.
a “windows-based solution” is an oxymoron
As usual, the problem starts when you marry to a single type of technology. If I were to believe that either Windows or Mac OS X are the single most reliable option in the computing market, I’d show I have a serious brain damage and would demonstrate my lack of knowledge about computing.
Apple themselves are pretty aware of that, considering that they decided to allow Windows as part of their systems. That was definitely a good move.
Intel Core Duo is a recent technology that will take some time to be as stable as the Pentium M. When Apple did the move to Intel from PowerPC, part of the “justification” (as if they need to justify what they do to anyone) was the heating issues of the core. They mentioned themselves that PowerPC would never be able to manage the heat as good as Intel. That is what shows this is a first release, because Mac OS X still cannot handle properly that issue whereas Windows already has experience in this (a MacBook Pro running Windows does not suffer the same problems that Mac OS X).
If there is people who believe they should pay (a rather large amount of money by the way) to test Apple products in their first generation, good on them. Myself I prefer to wait for the next generation (when there will certainly be value for money, after all that people who went ahead and purchased the product already dealt with most of the issues) that will be fully compatible with Mac OS X and even with Windows (as by them Boot Camp won’t be in beta anymore) and other Operating Systems.
Aaaahahahahaha. Boot Camp a good idea? Don’t make me laugh. It’s a great idea, as long as you never want to get back into OSX ever again.
And you payed premium price for a product still in Beta and without most of its applications available for it to run on it natively, now that’s a smart move.
I don’t particularly care if 100% of the applications I never use aren’t able to be run natively.
It seems like theres a lot more problems with the macbook pros than with the macbooks. Am i right or am i right? i havent gotten my macbook yet but i ordered it two days ago. do you think that it wont have too many problems with it. I hope its ok.
Honestly, my experience with both the MacBook Pro and Macbook have been negative. We purchased both of them to review and both of them had issues. We surely can not say that these products are bad, because if they were Apple wouldn’t be in bussiness today. But both machines we got had overheating issues and the Macbook had tons of system failures, WiFi card malfunctioning, and the list goes on. However most of these issues are claimed to have been fixed. I suggest that if you get a Macbook, make sure you test everything out in the first few days and if you find any issues you’ll still have a chance to return it.
I got a MacBook Pro 1.8GHz several months ago. I’ve used PC’s most of my life, although my first computer was Macintosh Plus.
While I’ve had a couple problems people have described, none of them have bothered me very much _except_ the HEAT issue. It’s infruiating that my hands sweat if I use the computer for longer than 15-20 minutes. In fact, my entire body starts sweating and I feel like I need to turn down my A/C after a while! No joke. It’s obviously due to the heat transfer into the metal casing. While the debate over this being a defect or not can be argued for eternity, it is _highly_ annoying and inexcusible for a laptop which costs this much.
My only other complaint is the fact that Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc.) are not yet universal binaries. I use these products constantly for my job and their performance is absolutely horrid. While I was aware this would be an issue until Adobe releases the next version of these programs, it is very disappointing.
Otherwise.. I love it.
With sweaty palms,
Jesse
Won’t they let you exchange it? My MBP doesn’t have anywhere near that level of heat. The only thing it warms up is the underside.
Mine heated up so much it left burn marks on my hands… I took it back to Apple 4 days ago and still haven’t heard back from them. I’ll post their response when I get it.
I have a comment on all the complaints about the adobe products. I am using the macbook pro and I don’t have any problems with any of these things you guys are all talking about and I’ve had mine since it was only 15″ display. If you guys are using the adobe products and they are crashing when you open more than one of them, well thats because you have more than one open and rosetta doesn’t like that all too much. But I have the 2GB hard drive, and the only time my programs crash is when I run microsoft programs, if I have word or excel or powerpoint open, then everything else crashes, but if I don’t have those open…its smooth sailing. I work with photoshop, indesign and illlustrator open at the same, and acrobat all while listening to my itunes and messing around in iPhotos, no problems at all, until I open the microsoft software. Doesn’t seem to me that the problem is adobe and the intel chip, i think its adobe and microsoft b/c i had that problem with my tower also.
I highly recommend having the 2gb processor though, when I went to the mac store, there was a lady there that uses the adobe products as well and everywhere else I looked it up said the same thing, as long as there’s enough processor speed, it should run fine (and it does), the problem is when it runs through rosetta it bogs down the processor, so if you have enough ram and processor speed, its smooth sailing.
A follow-up to some of the comments left after mine:
First off, everything I’ve read is that the heat issue I’m referring to is fairly typical for the MBP. However, if what Trejkaz says is true (that some don’t heat up except on the bottom), I may consider bringing it to an Apple store to see what can be done.
Regarding the Adobe comment from Amy above, I think there is half misunderstanding in my complaint and half of what you say I totally disagree with. For the first part, the Adobe products never crash on me (I never said they did). I said the performance was horrid and this is due to them not being universal binaries. They literally aren’t made to run on the Intel processor. The difference in speed between the 1.83GHz MBP and 2GHz MBP is negligible at best. I have 2GB of ram. Perhaps if you’re doing basic home-photo altering type stuff it runs fine for you, but I’m a professional graphic/web designer and perhaps I demand more. I use the identical Adobe products on my 3-year-old PC and they easily run twice as fast, with half as much RAM and a comparatively slower processor. The fact that Adobe products run horribly (meaning running MUCH slower than they should) under Intel-based Mac’s is one of the biggest complaints out there and happens to be my #2 if not my #1 complaint. I choose to do design work on my (somewhat) ancient PC instead of my brand new expensive MBP because of the performance, which is ridiculous.
All other programs I’ve updated to universal binaries from their previous PPC-based incarnations run nearly 2x as fast.. I can’t wait.
I have had experience with 4 MBP’s now the newest ones only get half as hot as the first ones. (I can set the thing on my lap)
The battery died in my MBP within 4 months. the first signs extreme heat,
power failure,
airport cuts in and out,
noisy as hell,this started at 3 months
finally would not power on without being plugged-in.
I got a loner from the store while it was in for repair. It didn’t get too hot or have any of the original problems, but it scratched
1/2 the CD’s I put in to rip to iTunes.
When I got mine back (scratched up) it seemed fine for two weeks, now all the original problems are starting up again power failure airport loss heat, and they had replaced the battery.
It sickens me that I spent over $3000 on this computer including the warranty for a machine that has had more hardware problems than all the PCs’ I’ve owned combined.
The other two MBP’s I’ve used Where my Brothers. I talked him into a MBP before my problems aroused. He got a newer model and didn’t have the battery problems, but he got kernel errors. apple replaced it after 3 trips to the apple store. his newest one seems fine though he has not had it long enough to know for sure.
SO 1 in 4 problem free! NOT WORTH BUYING NOT YET!
PS: great OS. MY first apple leaps and bounds better than XP, the HARDWARE is CHEAP JUNK IN A PRETTY PACKAGE
I wasn’t necessarily commenting on your complaint [jesse] just in general. I am a professional graphic designer/marketing director and I have no problems what-so-ever with my MBP, just offering my advice for those who want to buy them now…..I am doing WAY more than just home photo retouching…anyhow, just trying to give the macbook pro some praise. Its getting slammed on here and I think its a great product. From what I hear CS3 is set to come out in the spring so the adobe problems should go away for those who have them, fairly soon.
I got my macbook pro in july and it works great, i use adobe cs2 all the time and it only quits itself very occasionally otherwise it is fast. My one gets really hot, leaves read marks on my legs for 30 mins afterwards, i dont hear the fans come on either unless they are reallly quiet and on all the time so i dont notice them. Wondering if i have faulty fans. i do ha e hissing noises etc but not so loud really. i love it though, it works great!