Tuesday, March 28, 2006

My Cup Runneth Over



I've had the MacBook Pro for about a month now, and it was worth every day of the wait. For most things, the perceived performance is on a par with my dual 2GHz G5, and there's no perceived difference when I run PowerPC binaries under Rosetta. (It should be noted that none of my performance-intensive work is done under Rosetta.)

In my spare time, I'm trying to get the MacBook set up to work with my HDTV:

- I've got the video connected with a DVI cable. The MacBook is capable of driving the built-in display and the HDTV separately, but FrontRow seems to require configuring the Mac to mirror the displays. Makes sense, assuming the long-term goal is to sell the Mini or something like it as a set-top box where the TV is the only display.

(By the way, what's with the price of DVI cables? Radio Shack had them listed online for about $12, and there was even an empty hook at the store so marked, but all I could find in stock at RS, Circuit City, etc. was $100+ DVI cables. Methinks someone is artificially jacking up the price as an "anti-piracy" initiative...)

- I still don't have sound figured out. The MacBook and the TV both purportedly support digital audio, but the only input jacks available on the set are what look like a normal pair of RCA jacks for analog audio. I used a cheap analog mini-plug-to-RCA-pair cable, but the sound quality is terrible, as expected.

This could become a dream setup: set-top box via Front Row, or settle in to the leather recliner with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and a 50" display for "work"...