Hi, I’m Dave, the new Web Developer Extraordinaire at Geezeo.

I get many questions about Apple laptops so I decided to do a little research so I can be better informed. There is some question as to the real difference between just a plain “MacBook” and a “MacBook Pro.”

What is this “Pro” distinction you ask? I wasn’t sure until sometime this afternoon. So please, grab a coffee (or beer) and let me enlighten you, dear Reader while I simulate an educated Englishman (puts pipe in mouth). If this prose bores you, there are cliff-notes at the bottom. You’ll recognize them when you see them.

Upon trivial inspection, one might surmise the only change the addition of the word “Pro” to the fine market-ese that is the word “MacBook” (bless you), is a change of material (MacBook == plastic, MacBook Pro == metal) and a slightly larger screen. However the differences are far greater once a person decides to look under the hood, kick the tires, and other automotive metaphors.

The MacBook Pro has 100% more L2 Cache on faster processors from the base MacBook. Although the clock-speed of these processors may only be a little higher (2.33Ghz over the base MacBook at 1.83Ghz), the addition of that extra L2 Cache magnifies the increase. The MacBook Pros also come with double the amount of RAM standard over the MacBooks, even triple the amount in the 17″ MacBook Pro.

This serves as a nice segue to screen sizes. The MacBooks come with a measly 13″ screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. While this resolution may work fine while editing one Word document at a time for your school book report due on Friday, it provides for a very cramped working environment when one is required to have multiple Browser windows, TextMate (the de-facto text editing program on the Mac for programming), Finder, and Terminal all open at the same time. It is also pretty cramped when working on a spreadsheet of any sort of complexity. Death to scrollbars!

So maybe you are thinking right now, “Well Gee(zeo!), Dave, why not hook up an external monitor?” My response would be, “Great question Reader! Lets talk about external monitors a bit!”

Now I will not presume to know how you use your computer, but allow me to enlighten you on my own personal usage. My current laptop; which some of you may know is an old-and-creaky 3 years and 4 months old; is a PowerBook G4. It has a screen size of 15″ and has 1280 x 960 pixels (which you may note is bigger that the newest MacBook! How astute!) and also supports a handy feature called “screen spanning.” This allows me to hook an external monitor to my laptop and have my Desktop stretch across both monitors! I love it and have done it for years and find that it greatly enhances my productivity. Note that I use *both* the laptop’s screen and the external monitor for double the Ruby power!

So lets examine the largest external monitors we can hook up to this “MacBook” and this “MacBook Pro.” The MacBook only supports an external resolution of 1900 x 1200 pixels. This is good for a 24″ flat panel monitor. However the MacBook Pro supports a maximum external resolution of a whopping 2560 x 1600! That is enough pixels for a 30″ Apple Cinema Display! That means you could work on a monitor that is bigger than the television set in my living room! If you had the 17″ MacBook Pro and hooked up a 30″ Flat Panel, that would be 6,370,000 pixels! I bet that even NASA doesn’t have that kind of pixelicious love!

It is at this point in this wonderful conversation that I would like to point to a study done by Pfeiffer Consulting in 2005 (PDF, 6 pages).

Did you read? That’s OK because I’m going to summarize it for you. “Screen Real Estate” increases productivity for even the most menial of computer tasks. Even moving files around the file system is faster. Can you imaging seeing hundreds of rows of an Excel spreadsheet, and still have room for a browser window to go Google-ing for statistics? The chart on page 5 of that study easily shows that a 30″ display increases the speed of almost every task by 50% over a 17″ monitor. Their ROI calculations for a revenue of $100/hr. is almost $6000 per year! So clearly having a larger monitor will make anybody using the computer more productive.

And the bigger the better! There isn’t any clear evidence of diminishing returns on this decision. So here we are at the end of this short story of pixels, lust, and intrigue. And the conclusion? A MacBook Pro with a 17″ screen all the way. It has the fastest processor, the most amount of RAM standard, and the largest screen which, by itself, will generate a higher ROI than a smaller screen. I would only recommend a MacBook if you are incredibly infatuated with plastic computers, or you absolutely have to, without a doubt in the world, HAVE to own a black Apple laptop.

Thanks for sticking with me fair Reader, and if you’ve made it this far, thank you. Your attention is greatly appreciated and may you have a fine rest-of-the-evening (or morning!).

And now for something completely different…

Two laptops meet in a field. One is small and plastic, and he says, “Hi, I’m a MacBook.” One is big and aluminum and says, “Hi, I’m a MacBook Pro” and proceeds to kick the MacBook’s ass until his perfect plastic case starts to split along the glue-line. There was once a study done on how monitor size affects productivity and ROI. The conclusion was bigger is better, no matter what the task. The MacBook Pros have better processors, bigger screens, larger hard-drives, more RAM and can also drive much larger external monitors. When those forces combine, they form… SUPER MACBOOK PRO HAPPY AWESOME COMPUTER! Now just imagine having more than one of those suckers in the office! You’d be unstoppable!

By the way, here is a link to that study.

-Dave

Start Us Up HQ - Inside

Originally uploaded by Start Us Up!.

Our new office/art studio. Isn’t it fantastic! We move in on July 1st.