I’ve got a baby due in September and before that I’m encouraged to buy a mac cos “after it’s born you can forget it”.
I’m not a big laptop fan, being an IT guy I can’t stand the things, but since its probably going to be my only new computer and Mac for around 5 years I thought I might get a Macbook. I know these things have an artificial restriction of 64MB shared video memory but has anyone actually used one in seriousness for blender and general graphics work. I do mild blender modelling and scenes, gimp work and would like to probably get Final Cut Express and do some movie stuff.
Applications like Photoshop, Shake, Final Cut run about the same (sometimes faster if it’s a faster hard drive) as they would on the higher end Macbook Pros because the CPUs are the same. The only programs that would have problems is the likes of Motion which uses a hardware accelerated rendering engine.
In terms of Blender performance, it will handle about 25,000 polys per object and 250,000-500,000 polys per scene and still be usable. Experience will vary but that’s the limit of what I find acceptable. It’s not very good and the Macbook Pro is about 10 times faster.
I would hold off a purchase until the new machines come out which should be later in May. There is a new Santa Rosa chipset coming from Intel that improves the system bus, power consumption and graphics capability (Hardware T&L, higher pixel shader support etc - it should be around 3 times faster than the GMA).
Thanks osxrules, I’ll be holding off to see what comes of WWDC and hopefully it’ll bring new Macbooks. The current GMA chipset really puts me off and the MBPro’s are shockingly more expensive in Australia. Hopefully something will come out before the sprog appears.