I've been using my new PB 15" for about a month now (1.67G, 128MB video), and I must say that I'm very impressed w/ it. However, one thing that I've been reading on the posts have really struck home this weekend. I hurt my back yesterday, and was basically lying down all day w/ nothing to do, so I plugged the PB to an outlet and began playing WoW while lying down, w/ the notebook on my lap.
Man, after only a little bit, it was running so hot that I had to put a pillow under it so that I wouldn't get burned. Granted, WoW is a pretty hardware intensive game, so the PB runs hotter than usual, but I think the heat generated by this notebook almost reaches the level of manufacturing defect. This is the first PB I've owned, the third mac in our household (I have a first generation G5 tower and the lampshade iMac for the kids); I've used Windows laptops before, both the compact (Sony) and the large (Toshiba, which is basically the same size as the 15" PB), but neither of them come close in terms of heat generation. I know that there are third party solutions for the problem, but it seems to me that this is something that should have been addressed at the design level, as in "How much heat would it be appropriate for our laptops to generate before they can't be used as laptops?"
I'm not a disgruntled switcher - I've been using apple products since the 80's (apple II, +, c, plain vanilla macintosh, etc.), although I haven't really bought apple computers until my G5 tower. I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to computers (my first PC was an Atari 400), I'm more interested in what the machine can do for me. I must say that when it comes to design, the current crop of macs beat the pants off the competition, but as others have noted in different posts, the design seems to have overshadowed the engineering side of things, where certain aspects of the product are compromised by the design (i.e. aluminum bodies look cool, but are susceptible to pitting because of sweat and drastically reduce wifi range - I haven't experienced the pitting, but I can personally atest to the reduced wifi abilities - my Toshiba laptop must have about 20% better range than the PB). I figure that heat generation, size and performance must have been some of the driving factors behind the switch to Pentium chips, which I applaud, so hopefully this will be corrected in future generations of apple notebooks, whatever they'll be called.
In any event, I'm not posting this to flame apple or to generate controvercy. I'm just hoping that w/ input from dedicated users like us, apple will shift some of the focus to areas that also matter. Design is very important, specially to apple users, but so is good engineering and customer relations. I think apple needs to shift its thinking from "secrecy and deniability" to actually taking other consumer needs into account. For example, I was hesitant to purchase the PB because I had been reading about the trackpad issue. Sure enough, I went to the local apple store, and after talking to a salesperson about the notebook, when I brought up the issue of the trackpad, she changed from a friendly demeanor to one of suspicion and said that she never heard anything about it. I think she might have been telling the truth, but if the number of posts on the issue has been any indication, it seems fair to assume that at least some people must have come to that very same store and inquired about the problem. And don't even talk about the 14 day return policy w/ restocking fee - I mean, even Fry's electronics, that unfriendly, horrible service electronics warehouse has a no questions asked, 30 days full money back guarantee on hardware.
Anyway, now I'm clearly rambling...apologies to all. One final note - is there some software available that monitors the internal heat of the PB? I like using laptops as lap tops, so if anyone has found a way to control fans, etc., in order to have the PB run cooler, I would appreciate it (I do know that there are third party products out there that can help, but I was wondering if there is anything that can be tweaked in the PB itself - for example, my Toshiba laptop did run hot, albeit not as hot as the PB, but I found a little shareware program that could force the fans to run all the time, and that reduced heat considerably, although at a loss of battery life, but which is not really a problem when one has the laptop connected to an outlet).
Top
