I ended up signing out a Mac from work last week. It’s an older Core Duo era MacBook Pro. It’s quite slick, and since I’m used to working in Linux, it took me no time at all to feel right at home. (Except that there’s no /proc partition… When Linux is all you use, you forget that it’s specific to Linux.)

It’s exactly what a computer should be: my first laptop was a huge clunker, so I thought my Thinkpad was amazingly sleek when I got that. But this has outdone that, and is still quite slick. The video card isn’t total junk (I’m driving a second monitor at 1920×1080, with all the fancy graphic effects), the speakers are actually pretty good, the keyboard is really comfortable and backlit (!), the screen is bright, and so on. The MagSafe power cord is slick, too: I’ve rolled over it twice in my chair already, and it simply pops out, rather than pulling the laptop onto the floor. Plus it makes it really easy to plug in: as long as you get the cord pretty close, it’ll pop right in.

But despite all this, I was actually being more literal in the subject of my post. On the left hand side of hte laptop, over the speaker, I find that I rest my hand when I’m not typing. And it’s very warm. Not quite uncomfortably hot, but remarkably warm. I also wouldn’t want to use this laptop on my lap, because the bottom gets pretty warm. But then I discovered that the thin strip of metal right above the function keys (F1-F12) gets insanely hot.

I installed iStat Menus, a slick plugin showing stats on all the hardware sensors. My CPU is running at 65 degrees Celsius, and I’ve seen it north of 70. The GPU is at 59, the GPU heatsink is at 64, and the memory controller is at 57. (The heatsink is warmer than the GPU itself?) After some poking around online, I think I figured out the problem: the fans in the case vent right by the metal strip above the function keys. iStat Menus shows the fans are running at 1000 RPM, though they’re inaudible. I’d really prefer they sped up a bit… Now I’m up to 72 Celsius.

My other major pet peeve is that the battery life is abysmal. Something like 45 minutes. I’ve “calibrated” the battery, too, though it seems as if that simply helps it more accurately predict runtime. It’s at something like 400 charge cycles, which isn’t that much for a machine that’s a couple years old. My old Thinkpad still runs for several hours.

Still, though, I’m pretty impressed. If this were mine to keep I’d probably buy a new battery, but as it is, I tend to work plugged in anyway.