Tested 15" MBP (late 2008) today

How do you switch the graphics chip?

You change your settings then reboot your MBP. It's not that much of a pain - it takes one minute to reboot.

I believe you change a system pref then log out. No reboot needed.

lenn

True enough. It even tells you so when you make the change in Systems Prefs... I hope they can eliminate this step and handle it on-the-fly in Snow Leopard.

Hmm... Can't find it under sys pref. Which icon is it under?

Energy Saver

You can choose Graphic options between Better battery life or Higher performance.

Thanks guys, got it!

You'll need to logout and log back in to switch the video chips.

Hopefully they can do on the fly switch and SLI (utilize both video chips at the same time) in Snow Leopard.

new MBP is the best ever made...no question about it!

better performance by far...already tested

I wouldn't upgrade from an early 2008 MBP to the new one. However, I agree with one of the earlier posts that this late 2008 "unibody" MBP (I have the 2.4 ghz model) is the best MBP--well, for now anyway. I spent quite a bit of time earlier this year when Apple stores had MBs and MBPs with either glossy or matte screens available, and I preferred the glossy screen. Maybe the rich, saturated color will someday start to bother me, but for now I love it. Glare/reflections are easy to minimize or eliminate with a laptop, and the screen is so bright and gorgeous to look at. For me the pluses outweigh the minuses, but I know there are people (even MacWorld magazine was somewhat critical of the glossy screen) who do say "glossy is bad." To each his own. But other big pluses for this MBP are the unibody case, great keyboard, and the inclusion of two graphics chips. Apparently, with Snow Leopard, this MBP will be even faster because the next OS will be able to use graphics chips like the Nvidia 9600 as a kind of additional CPU core.

Watch out if you want to run 4GB on one of these...

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/macbook-apple-RAM-4GB-firmware,news-29829.html

That article is pretty short on details.

I have 4 GB in my MBP and it is very stable.

charlie

On the switching graphics card thing. I think that the smartest and easiest change would be to let the system default to the 256 while on battery and the 512 while on the plug. That's what I keep manually having to do...quite annoying when it could be changed with a simply plist entry.

AndySea wrote:
Watch out if you want to run 4GB on one of these...

The recent firmware update seems to have fixed most people. I'll find out tomorrow when my 4 gig kit arrives...