My MacBook Pro showed up today. I have the 2.0ghz model, and I am overwhelmed by the speed difference over my 17" Powerbook G4. I haven’t run any benchmarks, but for everyday use, the speed difference is astounding. The key, of course, is to use Universal applications. Applications that run through Rosetta work, but they’re slow. I’d say that they’re somewhat slower than they were on the old Powerbook G4, but they are absurdly slow when compared to their Universal equivalents on the MacBook. The biggest difference is between Firefox (not Universal) and Camino (Universal). As some others have noted, when you’re using Camino, Gmail feels like a desktop application. The applications built into the OS open almost instantly, iTunes opens in a blink.
Other than the raw speed, I don’t have much else to say. Everything seems to just work, except for Eclipse, which has some native bindings that are broken on the MacBook. Oh, I should also note that the MagSafe connector is incredibly cool.
I also have to say a word about the migration utility built into Mac OS X. If you have never moved from one Mac to another, you don’t know the joy of booting up your old computer in Firewire hard drive mode and just letting the new one copy everything over. I honestly can’t imagine a more painless process.