Review by Jackie Dove, Macworld.com – You get better colors compared to the older, March 2009 model: “… viewing them together, the heightened intensity of the red and green spectrums made the difference obvious. Mere eyeball observations were born out by Apple’s Color Sync utility. In comparing the last generation MacBook Pros with the new models, the range of visible color was specifically expanded in the red and green areas. The blues stayed about the same.”

Check out the latest prices and availability on MacBook Pro 15-Inch models.

Heavy or light loads, it didn’t seem to matter … the new MacBook Pro gives “The Best Battery Life I’ve Ever Seen“:

Eight, freakin, hours. I couldn’t believe it. In my lightest test, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro lasted eight hours and eight minutes. That’s with the screen at half brightness (completely usable) and no funny optimizations. The notebook is just playing music and surfing through a lot of my old reviews. There’s no way this could be right. Maybe my test was too light?

This works for MacBook and MacBook Pro computers.

Rather than clicking on the Apple menu item and then selecting Sleep, Restart or Shut Down with your mouse, all you need to do is the following.

Step 1

Press the Power Button briefly, and then let go. (The photo was shot with a Canon XSi / 450D at ISO 1600 and edited using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and spotlight effect with Skitch).

Step 2

Select the desired option: Restart, Sleep, Cancel, Shut Down.

Not for the faint hearted way

And finally, there is a combination that will shut down your Mac without any prompting whatsoever.

Do this only if you’re sure you want to shut down your computer as fast as possible, or you’re in a real hurry to do so.

Any unsaved changes in open applications or running programs will not be saved.

The combination is: control + option (alt) + command + eject (if you’re using a MacBook, pressing the power button instead of eject also works).

Ben Lam of Installingcats enjoyed a longer battery life on his MBP after he installed a replacement lithium-polymer unit made by SMP in exchange for the one made by Sony.

If you’re interested in what battery runs your Mac, simply call up the System Profiler utility.

A quick way of doing this is to press command-spacebar to call up Spotlight, and enter “profiler” (not the entire string needs to be typed in – System Profiler should be listed under Top Hit) in the search box.

Click on Power under Hardware, and have a look at the manufacturer:

I’m glad the battery in my MacBook Pro is made by SMP, although I’m still not exactly certain how one would ensure that their MacBook Pro battery is SMP-made.

To understand what the rest of the Power information in the System Profiler is all about, read this forum discussion.

A forum post on discussions.apple.com by neuroanatomist has a little more information about the issues with Sony-made batteries for the MacBook Pro, and points to this MacBook and MacBook Pro Battery Update 1.2 bulletin.

One of the things I miss about moving from the iMac to the MacBook Pro is the forward delete key.

The Delete key on the MacBook functions just like the on any other Mac, and that is to delete the character to the left of where your current cursor is.

Sometimes I want to delete what’s on the right of my cursor, and I had been using fn-delete, which is not something I like doing because it involves using both hands.

Good thing I came across Mac Guides – Keyboard shortcuts today, it turns out that I can also use control-d (with my left hand) to accomplish the same thing.

Still not as handy as having separate Backspace and Delete keys like what PC / Windows computers come with, but sure beats having to use both hands to do a simple forward delete.