Mac Book Pro and 3ds max, Part 2; The honeymoon’s over.

Well its been a week. I have been using the MBP and 3ds Max and thus far I have a couple of things to report. The honeymoon is already over. I– already– would rather have a Dell Precision mobile workstation or something similar…

Here are some reasons why;

1. Its hot. And not like Paris Hilton hot… its hot like Arizona hot… you could (insert your heat metaphor here). But its only during certain operations so you can really tell when the CPU is cooking.
2. Its doesn’t have all the Windows keyboard keys. On the MBP, the “Backspace” key is called “Delete”. But it is not the Windows Delete. In 3ds Max, if you create an object then try to delete it using the “Delete” key it doesn’t do anything. (Just like if you use backspace on the Windows keyboard– you have to use the actual “Delete” key in windows.) So you can’t delete and object in Max, on a Mac, without choosing Edit>Delete from the drop down menu. PITA! BTW… this also means CRTL+ALT+DEL doesn’t work. Yes you read me correctly. The only solution is to remap F12 (or some other key) to Del. Also missing is “Insert”… though not necessariliy relevant to 3ds max… some of my other tools do use it quite a bit…
3. Regular graphics performance seems OK… but not stellar. I can definitely tell its not a workstation but its also probably not fair to compare it to such. In the next post I will be putting up my 3DMark results.
4. When doing heavy video batch conversion (from one codec to another) it hangs– frequently…. Believe it or not its converting to Quick-time… (from AVI using the Camtasia Codec)
5. The Battery life is, eh, so-so. I had actually expected at least 120 minutes of full out working on battery…. so far its 73 minutes… but in fairness, the machine is not new and I don’t know how old the battery is. But is the same lackluster performance on all 3 of my MBP’s.

Whats good…

…Playing with the Apple goodies in OSX. I like the fun little apps–yeay!

So far its working just like a windows Laptop… just seemingly more expensive…

Like any relationship, there are ups and downs. Hopefully it will get better as I learn little tricks and quirks…

Editor’s note: Here are the links to the 1st three parts of the MBP + 3dsMax experience.

Part 1, Part 3

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~ by learn3dsmax on July 26, 2006.