Now that I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a little over a month, I have some additional observations on its merits and demerits. Overall, I’m still extremely happy with the product and consider it to be the best laptop I’ve owned to-date.

I still do quite a bit of work in Windows (both development and work with MS Office). I purchased a copy of VMWare Fusion to virtualize my Windows Bootcamp partition. Fusion makes it easy to operate concurrently on both Windows and OSX without any noticeable performance hit. I can drag files or copy and paste text back and forth from one environment to the other. Unlike Parallels, it provides a performant virtualized environment that I would actually do development in. That said, I have noticed some strangeness when trying to access a DVD drive or USB devices while running Fusion. I haven’t investigated enough to figure out what the issue is, but these problems seemed to disappear after shutting down the virtualized environment.

Another thing about the MacBook that is quite nice is the little remote that it comes with. It works well for driving presentations, pausing movies and shuffling songs. I’ve previously owned a USB-enabled remote for presentations, which I’ve now happily passed on to my wife.

Speaking of movies, I’ve been quite impressed with the quality of the MacBook Superdrive. I have a few DVD movies that I picked up in China that I haven’t been able to play on a PC. But the Superdrive can read them.

My one big annoyance is the lack of support for a direct VGA connection. I hate having to carry around the DVI-VGA dongle. It’s easy to forget or leave behind attached to the projector. I understand why Apple would provide support for the higher-quality, more future-proof DVI, but the majority of projectors and external monitors out there still require a VGA connection. Would providing VGA support really been such a big effort?