CES 2012 - Day 3: Macbook Pro - the laptop of choice

I'm covering CES 2012 using a Macbook Pro. The idea was to carry a portable but powerful laptop with good battery life that could handle the basic day to day rigours of covering a trade show.

From the off the Mac was impressive and looking around the press room it would appear a number of people agree.

Certainly, the Mac is the device of choice amongst tech journalists here in Las Vegas. And it does a number of things well. It boots quickly, finds and manages Wifi networks easily and importantly it can handle fairly regular use throughout the day without the battery flaking out. 

But I wanted a bit more from it. I came to CES with the intention of filming some video - easier said than done on the often treacherously busy corridors of the Las Vegas Convention Centre. Video filmed, I plugged the camera into the Mac and booted up the excellent Final Cut Pro X to capture and edit it.

Unfortunately, the Mac wasn't so well behaved. It refused to recognise the footage was on the camera and while it noticed the camera was attached, it couldn't find anything I had filmed. There was no way to get the raw footage off the camera as Mac's don't understand the .MTS format used by Sony on its video cameras.

So I was stuck. There are workarounds and other ways of getting the footage off, but that somewhat misses the point. I maintain that the Macbook Pro is superb laptop, but as with a lot of Mac products it has its shortcomings in terms of compatibility and what you can plug into it and use easily.

Still, as tool for writing up news stories and sorting through reams of photographs, the Mac has been a pleasure to use.