I have had my new macbook pro for about a week now and I thought I would give my general impressions so far. It is a much faster machine than I thought it would be initially.

I used macs all the time in college as a part of the communications department and the one thing that I always remembered was how slow they were compared to windows machines. The new intel chipsets are amazingly fast. The macbook pro boots very fast and isn't sluggish at all.

The battery life is also very good. This is especially true with the addition of the led backlight to the lcd screen. This little feature buys you another 45 minutes of battery time.

There are other features like the Sudden Motion Sensor and some of the functions on the keyboard that are just icing on the cake. The first app I tried out my mac was the macsaber app that uses the Sudden Motion Sensor and turns your macbook into a lightsaber.

Now given all that praise, here are my negative points. The single button trackpad is horrible. It really takes a lot of getting used to. Luckily for all of us windows users there are bluetooth mice we can get that have the 2 buttons. I think it is way past time for apple to wake up and smell what they are smoking and put a 2 button trackpad in. The second annoyance is with the magsafe power adapter. While it is a great concept and it works great, there are no 3rd party adapters available. This keeps the price on the adapters higher than they should be and the only place to buy them is at an Apple approved store or vendor.

This all being said I am very happy with my purchase. I just need to get a new copy of windows to install on here with bootcamp and I will be set. Given the performance of windows using parallels and with bootcamp, the macbook pro is a very versatile platform. Without the bootcamp option I wouldn't have even considered a mac.