Filed under: Portables, Macbook Pro
MacBook Pro vs. Acer TravelMate 8200
Cnet has pitted the very hot MacBook Pro vs the slightly ugly Acer TravelMate 8200 in a deathmatch. May the best portable win.And which portable do you think won? It was close, but the Acer edged the MacBook Pro out by one. The MacBook Pro won on design, display, and software while the Acer took features, performance, battery life and price.
It should be noted that the Acer doesn't run OS X and Windows out of the box, but if you're looking for a PC laptop it looks like the Acer is a good one.
How many people out there are being to trade in their MacBooks for one?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Lee said 9:40PM on 5-04-2006
I've noticed that CNET's ratings seem to be somewhat biased. They never give Mac's a chance.
What they neglect to factor in the price is that the Mac comes with hundreds of dollars worth of software, whereas the Acer comes with........Windows. Exciting.
Long live MPB!
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Eric said 9:43PM on 5-04-2006
just being curious, can we use the ugly acer on our laps?
if we can, wooo that's gaint advantage since all macbook pro users cannot use their laptop anywhere else than on their desk, not even their laps.
(... potential a burn ... potential a burn .. )
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RP said 9:45PM on 5-04-2006
And calculator!
Don't forget clock!
"Sounds like hours of fun."
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wastern said 9:56PM on 5-04-2006
I really wasn't expecting this to get posted here, it least not as a serious story. their bench marks were all based on Rosetta and then at the end they ranked the Acer #1, but then said the MBP was basically a better deal when all was said and done
the areas the the Acer won on were very subjective. it was a very bias and inaccurate measure
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b said 10:02PM on 5-04-2006
why is bundled software even a catergory for two computers that cost over $2k
most people spending this much on hardware use it for more professional purposes...hence the name 'macbook PRO'
they should have swapped out the 'bundled software' catergory with 'upgradeability/expandablility' (which the Acer would win since it still has a pcmcia slot rather than the note widely yet-supported express card slot)
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icruise said 10:50PM on 5-04-2006
That's a pretty good rating for a Mac, considering it's CNET and all.
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Mark D. said 11:11PM on 5-04-2006
Funny, I almost bought an 8100, then when the Yonah launched I was highly tempted by the 8200, in the end going for the MBP for the size/better OS options (you know, runs all major OS is a nice feature, after all), well the MBP also fullfilled my Mac lust... erm... anyways... moving on...
I would imagine the 8200 is, like it's 8100 older brother, also not 1" thick (or the Apple '1" thin') and would have much more room for fans and cooling (from what I could find, about .5" more), also not being made out of aluminum could possibly effect heat dispersal (though my experiences are rather limited with the 8100 I observed, so I can't vouch for this in any way.) Of coruse the supposed carbon fiber lid ('cool 3d pattern' according to CNet) is an interesting choice, maybe those supposed/rumored MacBooks that come in other colors could use this to their advantage...
Also, they say the 8200 wins with audio out options, but doesn't the MBP have optical audio out? Isn't that the odd red light coming out of the jack in Windows XP (the current Apple windows drivers enable ALL audio-out options concurrently, of course, so this is easy to observe.) I did find the speakers only 'good' on the MBp, my old laptop actually had some pretty nice ones, though they were int he front bezel and projected well.
I'll be honest and say that the 8200 would be my next choice after the MBP, the 8100 was a solid system when I researched it and the 8200 appears to be the same thing with a Duo and better video.
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carl said 12:13AM on 5-05-2006
ur also forgetting...
games of course run better in windows, no contest there
and they did rosetta apps like photoshop and expected the mac to do as well as photoshop running native? compltly biased
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carl said 12:17AM on 5-05-2006
EDIT: i skipped over how they mentioned rosetta sry but still games and battery life,,are those settings equal? now sure way to tell
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Nate MC said 2:34AM on 5-05-2006
Lets see, article mentioning laptop that beats an apple yet the link to the article gets somehow mangled... interesting. ;)
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10442_7-6511774-1.html?tag=lnav
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Reg said 5:17AM on 5-05-2006
Fair review I think, though it really examined them as if they were both PCs, which they're not (the MacBook Pro can pretend to be a PC via Boot Camp, but it's real value comes in being a Mac, which the Acer can never be).
A few errors though: the MacBook Pro has 6-pin FireWire, not 4, meaning it can supply power to devices, and I believe it is possible to get S-Video out of the MacBook Pro.
Also: "Text... We examined a text document (WordPad on the PC, TextEdit on the Mac) ... Text on the TravelMate 8200's screen was crisper and easier to read than on the MacBook Pro's, and we found that most letters on the MacBook Pro looked blurry, especially at lower font sizes. Advantage: Acer."
Sounds like someone doesn't like anti-aliased text.
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Matt Stocum said 8:58AM on 5-05-2006
This review is pure crap. Most of it is based on areas that are highly subjective. They benched marked Photoshop running under emulation on the Mac vs. native on the Acer. In the areas where the Acer won it was by minimal amounts (excluding video which is due to Apple's descision to underclock the video card). In the areas where the Mac won it did so by a decent amount. The features section was plain wrong, the Mac does have digital out, just optical not S/PDIF, s-video is available (for extra money sadly). Most of the "objective" tests were so close as to mean nothing.
I'd say CNET is just trolling for page hits, and it looks like we all gave them just what they wanted.
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Jordan said 9:31AM on 5-05-2006
Even after reading this review I still want to switch.
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Eric said 9:51AM on 5-05-2006
Matt. just look at what you've said:
ya mac is slow becoz its under eumlation!
hey as a customer, all they need to know is how fast the software actually runs, they dont need to know why why why. Mac runs damn slow it is a fact. and it wont be change until at least next year
s-video is available , but for extra money
you know what, the acer can actually support 4 external display at the same time? how ? for "extra money" you can get USB-VGA adapter and plug 4 in, done.
mbp video is bad, becoz apple decided to underclock it
so why acer don't need to underclock it and still hav better cooling and longer battery life?
whos biased.
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Elias said 10:19AM on 5-05-2006
Wouldn't it have made more sense to run Bootcamp for this review?
Boot the MacBook Pro into XP and compare it the right way?
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Chris Watson said 10:32AM on 5-05-2006
I hope they do a follow up to this when (if) the iBook replacement/Macbook is releassed. Surely it would be quite a bit cheaper and not terribly far behind the Pro's performance aside from memory, video and storage. Regardless though, the review is pretty biased which is made very clear in the end when they mention "You COULD factor in the big software difference into the price...", well of course you could and you SHOULD.
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James M said 10:48AM on 5-05-2006
Just had an opportunity to read through the article and I'd say it was a good article.
My takeaway is that both laptops are quite even ... the turning point was the battery life with a difference of 8 mins.
Personally, it was a draw ... design and software features vs. gaming and cost. You'll have to be the final judge.
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Silver said 10:50AM on 5-05-2006
Anyone notice that the PC laptop makers are also starting to integrate web cams into their laptops? And anyone notice how the integrated web cams look like some kind of horrible tumor or something?
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Daniel Koeppel said 11:45AM on 5-05-2006
The big issue that everyone misses is that the story compared mechanical/electronic performance - which can be argued both ways and is roughly equal, since the computers (as everyone has pointed out) roughly equal; the Acer wins in some areas, the MBP wins in others.
The difference is the Mac OS, as usual - which is barely mentioned and definitely not given a value. And I'm not talking about ease of use. Let me put it this way: the speed of photoshop, the length of battery life, and every other performance metric all are far less important than how much time I waste in Windows dealing with viruses and spyware, with running Norton and MS Defender and every other program that has to preload to keep my system safe, with the maintenance I have to perform in order to do all that, and in the numerous reboots I have to do DESPITE all this.
Even if the Acer were a Ferrari, and the Mac was something less - which it isn't - it would be the equivalent of a Ferrari with a one gallon gas tank and an engine that needed tuning up every afternoon. That's why the Mac wins (except, of course, when you're running it in Boot Camp - at which point it becomes a very gorgeous...Acer. I mean Ferrari.)
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James MacAulay said 12:46PM on 5-05-2006
They didn't just use Rosetta in the comparisons. They also ran the software in Windows XP on the MBP to make the most direct comparison possible, and in those cases the Acer was still almost always *slightly* faster than the MBP. Maybe photoshop and/or some other apps will be faster on the MBP when we get universal binaries for them, but for now there's no way to say that the MBP is a faster machine.
The main problem I had with the review was just that each category was weighted evenly. The Acer beat the MBP by a very small margin in performance and battery life, for instance, and for a lot of people this is vastly outweighed by the fact that only the MBP can run OS X. Even considering just the time I used to spend defending against spyware and viruses on a Windows box, it wouldn't be worth it to me to buy another one for anything other than a *massive* performance increase.
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