As of the update today the MBP is more desirable: significantly better better life, twice the RAM, slightly faster CPU and that slick unibody case which is thinner and lighter.
Before the refresh the MB was the best bang for buck.
The macbook pro 13" is worth the money for the unibody alone. I own a 13MB and the white plastic case is cracking in more places then I care to mention. I got them to fix it once, and only because it was their fault. They just don't hold up build quality wise. The only negative part about the unibody is my wife doesn't like the feel of the metal, it gives her the willies, but I can't fault Apple for that one.
Really? I have a black MB that just passed the 2 year mark and it looks pristine. I carry it in my backpack every day, I took it with me on a three month trip through South America, and yet it has no scratches, cracks, or other signs of damage.
Nothing too much performance-wise. The new plastic one is even, at least in name, unibody. But it has a glossy keyboard area which you can scratch up pretty easily with a watch strap (I tried this at the store).
Looks like they put in a new battery in the Pro, and it has a fancier graphics card, SD card reader, and Firewire.
To me, the Al casing is worth a bit more money and wouldn't mind an SD reader, so I'd watch the Apple refurb store for last-gen Pros (which is what I did in January).
Unfortunately while there are strategies to mitigate the problem in hardware, proper TRIM support is still best. You might be getting confused by the TRIM enabled firmware that was released in December '09 for that SSD? It just means that the Intel drive will obey TRIM commands from the OS. But if the OS doesn't send any commands, which OS X won't, then you're not taking advantage of TRIM. For what it's worth, if you were going to choose a drive that would degrade the least in performance without the use of TRIM, you probably chose best with the Intel X-25M. But it would still perform better over time in Linux or Windows 7.
The drive does not know when data stored on the drive is “deleted”. This is what TRIM is for, i.e. when you delete a file you just unlink the inode. You need to tell the drive that the blocks that the file occupied are no longer needed, so the disk can ignore that data when reorganizing or later rewriting part of the block.
In fact, there are only two Core i* processors that don't have HyperThreading support, and they're both variants of the same quad-core Core i5 desktop processor (Core i5 750 and Core i5 750S):
I am a Software Engineer. I love Mac OS X, but I cannot afford to even buy a $999 MB. Even if I buy a $499 iPad, I would still need a device for my programming needs.
I have a Dell Mini 10v running 10.6.2 currently and everything works out of the box, but the screen is NOT 1366x800 and does NOT have an integrated GPU (like IoN)
