Videos from [my] MacBook Pro sessions

Here are real-world examples of how the new MBPs perform. The purpose of the videos isn’t so much as to show how much faster (or slower) it may be compared to other systems – but to ease Apple users’ minds should they be considering an upgrade.

First I’d like to apologize for the horrible video quality. I was using an external iSight which had a hard time focusing (it would switch focus every few seconds, so I had to kill the auto-focus) The movie was captured using a small resolution setting so YouTube then blew it up… and ergo the blurriness.

Below, you will find a blow-by-blow recap of what I was doing in each video.Basically, I start off with an exposed desktop showing applications I have running concurrently. I then “scroll” through them one by one:

1. Apple QuickTime – which is incidentally recording the whole session via external iSight as well.
2. Adium (online)
3. iTunes – which is playing the podcast Security Now! (from an external hard drive) most of the time.
4. Parallels – which hasn’t launched any virtual environment… yet.
5. Apple Mail
6. Apple Finder – though you can’t see the contents, there are 3 volumes mounted: iPod, 120GB (iTunes library), and a my Athlon’s Desktop folder.
7. NetNewsWire
8. Firefox
9. xTorrent – which was downloading something the whole time.

I go back to QuickTime to move it out of the way, and launch a WinXP virtual environment via Parallels. It was on /sos (verbose) mode that’s why you could see commandline stuff on startup.

While it was starting up, I reduce the volume on iTunes… and I resize/minimize the other active applications (never shutting any down) and go back to the now loaded WinXP session.

I then load VideoLAN VLC Media Player, and access my Athlon64 to play/stream a high-res movie from the network (the lucky movie was the new Ghost in the Shell (Solid State Society) movie.

I start loading every other app and start to hide/minimize them before returning to Parallels – where I toggle the movie on full screen mode.

I now do a keyboard seek to different parts of the movie, then expose it showing Parallels and QuickTime (and fine, iTunes as well) – to prove that Parallels wasn’t skipping a beat. I upped the ante by maximizing all the other apps that have been minimized/hidden and expose everything – proving once gain that everything is [still] running smoothly.

I then go back to Parallels and set the movie (VLC) to windowed mode, then proceed to go to iTunes, killing the podcast audio, and going back to XP, increasing the volume.

After which, I closed VLC, shut down the virtual session, and start closing everything else.

THE END

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Now you may want to split hairs about hard numbers representing the exact performance hit each application may run. You might say that most applications probably don’t use that much resources. I really don’t care.

The point of this video is to show how even a virtual environment can run pretty darn quick while you do your daily stuff. ¹ Where in the video did any of the applications skip a beat? Both audio AND video were continuos throughout and never got choppy. The applications I had online are probably normal (or even more) for an average user to have running.

You have two important points to consider/remember:

1. iTunes ran most of the time Parallels was running.
2. VLC was playing a movie from the network, and all of this was within a virtual environment.
3. The entire video session was being recorded by the machine itself as well.

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For the second video, I now prepped the assets to reduce load times, but the important thing was the running of them:

I concurrently ran Parallels with instances of Windows Media Player with visual effects AND VLC playing the same movie from the first video. Then I doubled up the processing power needed by running another instance of VLC on OS X playing another movie.

What you get is this:

Notice that it does “chop” a bit at some point, but the performance is still pretty impressive nonetheless. Oh and as you saw in the beginning, the laptop was running low on power, so I guess it was on a “reduced performance” mode.