[Nobody]

RE BATTERY LIFE
Great review. Too bad some of your readers don't read it before they open their mouths.
Perhaps a review of laptop computers and battery life are in order before your readers make judgement. You want to play a movie on a laptop, here is a nice explanation and trust me there are hundreds like it, why you may not want to. (http://www.5starsupport.com/tutorial/battery-life.htm)
As for the queries re running Windows, where do these people come from?

[Jason Snell]

That's what processor cache is for....
I'm sure Rosetta is taking advantage of caching wherever possible, but we aren't seeing notable speed boosts in the few repeat tests we done. YMMV, and some apps may be better at it than others.
All that said, Rosetta stuff is eminently usable.

[Jason Snell]

AirPort reception is indeed better on the MBP than the PB G4.

[melgross]

Fair enough.
But, just remember that the guy (don't temember his name) who runs Transitive, said, in a recent interview, that in order to get much speed benefit out of the program, you need at LEAST 50% more memory than you would ordinarily use. So, if you find that you generally need 1GB to run well, you would need at least 1.5GB to have Rosetta run well.
Remember that Rosetta needs a lot of memory to do its thing, as it does it in RAMlive!

[Jason Snell]

We've tested a bunch of stuff in Rosetta with 512MB and 1GB of RAM and seen very little speed difference, to be honest.
I understand all the theories about this stuff, but we just aren't seeing it in the tests we're doing.

[melgross]

The point is that 1GB might not be enough to tell. I'm sure Macworld can afford to jump to 2GB's for the purposes of running the tests. At the very least, knowing one way or the other could save readers from spending money they didn't need.

[Jason Snell]

Trust me, there was plenty of free RAM space -- it just wasn't being used.

[melgross]

I trust you. If you were monitoring that, then you should have been able to see what was happening.
There are a lot of questions about this, and we haven't been getting answers. That's why I've been bugging you here.
These findings should be put into the article. Far more people wonder about these things, than post on the forums.
An article explaining how Rosetta handles programs, uses memory, etc. would be helpful. Most of what has been published has been far too superficial.

[Jason Snell]

The big problem is, I don't want the review of the MacBook Pro to turn into a big article about how Rosetta works. They're two separate issues. I've already written a few thousand words on the Intel-related issues, which is a start.

[HiRez]

Regardless of the reasons (battery life relative to performance, etc.), it's still two hours of battery, which is not great. One thing I don't hear people talking about is how much Rosetta is contributing to battery consumption. I'm assuming it takes a lot of processing to translate all those instructions, therefore I would theorize that running apps under Rosetta emulation has an adverse effect on battery life.

[jdb8167]

In reply to:

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it's still two hours of battery

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Read the article again. This was not a test to see how long the battery would last in an ideal situation. It was meant to drain the battery nearly as quickly as possible. They turned off Energy Saver! No one who is using a notebook on the road will do that. That would be counter productive. There are several people who have done some early battery tests and are getting anywhere from 3 hours to 4.

[Nobody]

The battery test was simply timing the duration playing a DVD movie. Which based on all evidence and as outlined below simply that the new MacBook with its more powerful processor and significantly brighter screen is if anything less power hungry than its predecessor.
Here is a short presentation from labtopbattery.net which hopefully gets the bunny out of your butt.
"Every laptop battery carries a certain "reservoir," or capacity of charge per cycle. Much like your car's gas tank, you fill it up every so often and then use the gas bit by bit. In the case of a laptop battery, the tank usually holds 2,500 to 4000 milliAmp hours. (For an explanation of Amp hours, see our article on Volts and Amps.)
Just like your car, your laptop computer battery lasts longer depending on how you "drive" your laptop. Many laptop users are familiar with the Power Management settings icon in the Control Panel, which allows the user to control use of the laptop battery. This control forces your laptop to conserve its fuel by limiting the operation of the highest energy-consuming functions. Unfortunately, there is a trade-off between computer performance and energy conservation.
The key "consumers" of the laptop battery are the processor, the screen, wireless networking cards, drives such as the hard drive, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, and other peripherals. The more these functions are used, the faster your laptop battery will run out of juice. (Note that you "use" your screen more when its brightness is set to high; to conserve laptop battery power, dim the screen.) DVD movies are a major culprit when it comes to laptop computer battery drain because both the drive and the screen must be run at full power for as long as two hours.
With the "pedal to the metal," your laptop computer battery uses as much as 2500 milliAmps per hour, meaning that a 3000 mAh laptop battery would last for just over an hour. You can reduce the laptop batteries use by up to 75% with intelligent use of your laptop.
This connection between laptop computer battery life and laptop usage patterns explains why we cannot answer the often-asked question: How long will my laptop run with your new laptop battery? Unfortunately, all we can say is: "it depends". Just as with a car, your mileage will vary."
By the way, there are a number of consumer reports that have shown that some of the current DVD player have a problem keeping awake for two hours and their screens are much smaller than 15", let alone many laptops which do equally as well or poorly.
Bottom line, it appears from this initial review, with all the MacBook Pro new bells and whistles, battery life may be a bit better, all things equal.

[TheBoyKen]

I don't own a Core Duo mac, so can't comment for sure on what you want.
Nonetheless I believe there is a team of people who have written a 'hack' doing what you need... they're called Apple's Performance team... on a dual processor PowerPC mac, you can shut off one of the processors (I believe the Quad can do any combination on / off) using the CHUD tools, which are part of Apple's free Developer Tools (but I think you need to do a custom install to select the CHUD tools, else you just get Xcode etc.). Then go into Sys Prefs -> Processor (which isn't there until you've installed CHUD). Developers use this tool (or at least those who aren't should!) to optimise their app.
Hope this helps,
Ken
p.s. CHUD = Computer Hardware Understanding Diagnostics (could be wrong about diagnostics)... it's the same set of tools Apple uses to determine the best speed of the fans etc.

[antistereo]

watsup?
i want one i want one i want one...but i just cant bring myself to spend that much money NOW.
thats because i think [hope] that apple is going to update the macbook pro, answering to many of the problems mentioned in the thread...
what do you think? go and grab one now and ride the wave - or see what beautiful revelations apple can conjure to up the ante for the MBP?
cheers

constantin