Introduction

When Steve Jobs announced the new Intel Core Duo powered MacBook Pro notebooks, he didn’t say much about its performance in comparison to the PC competition. There were plenty of graphs talking about the improvements of the Intel-based notebooks over the older G4 systems, but it almost felt like Apple wasn’t ready to put its hardware up to a head-to-head challenge against a PC. Thankfully, the FiringSquad team was largely incognito – we had a standard exhibit hall pass rather than a media pass (which are colored differently). Like everyone, we were curious to compare the notebook against a paragon of the PC notebook industry such as an IBM Thinkpad. So, when Steve Jobs wasn’t around, we simply waltzed up to one of the many MacBook Pros and ran our tests to see how the MacBook Pro compared to our Thinkpad.

But first, a look at the systems.