MacBook, review part 1

The MacBook arrived on Wednesday, 9th January. Delivery took three working days, five days including the weekend - longer than I was expecting, but an inspection of the delivery notes on the box reveal that it was sent to me in the UK, by Apple, from Shanghai. Not bad really for such a distance to travel, especially with free shipping. The courier turned out to be TNT - but I'd tried the Apple courier tracking number with TNT and they found nothing.

The packaging is up to usual Apple standards. The box is a fraction of the size of that in which my Powerbook G4 12" came, which is a good thing.

First impressions of the machine (13", 2GHz, white MacBook with 1GB RAM and 80GB disk - the cheapest currently available):

It is fast. It is close enough to my Athlon 5600X2 running Linux as to make little difference. My simple test case is a huge OpenOffice spreadsheet - a manual recalculation takes something like 5 seconds on the Athlon, perhaps 7 or 8 seconds on the MacBook. Impressive enough for me.

It is very plastic. My aluminium Powerbook makes it look very cheap. There is constant attraction of dust as the outer plastic is prone to generating static charges. The outer plastic is also shiny and smooth and as such attracts greasy finger prints and constantly looks dirty - Apple know this, as the machine comes with a cleaning cloth. Good grief. The front edge of the machine (where your wrists rest) is very sharp. The magnetic latching of the screen when closing the case seems like a good idea a first, but feels cheap in action. All this basically means that if you can afford a MacBook Pro, go for it - I really want a small laptop, and a MacBook Pro 12" or 13" would seriously tempt me.

The glossy screen is actually very good. I was terrified that it would reflect badly, but I've never seen one reflection from it yet while powered on. When off it's like a mirror, but this changes completely when in use. I also got a VGA adaptor so I can plug into my large monitor next to the DVI Linux box; I've just been watching a documentary on the large monitor while 'working' on the laptop itself and had no complaints at all (except for Quicktime not wanting to play full screen while I'm working on the other screen). VGA is a little blurry at 1680x1050 but that's expected. I do wish more monitors came with two DVI inputs.

It's a fair bit wider than my 12" Powerbook - probably an inch so despite the screen being in a widescreen aspect. There seems to be a fair bit of border around the screen and keyboard compared with the G4. On the other hand, it's significantly thinner which makes up for that when packing my laptop carry case.

The keyboard - firstly, the layout. Some keys have moved around and it has a tall, rather than wide enter key. Option has disappeared, I think this is now labelled 'alt'. My Mac inexperience is probably showing there. Worst, the function keys have useless play, pause, rewind where the keys for the expose functions should be. I can't show the desktop with one key press any more (Fn-F11 is now the shortcut)! This is a major problem and I'll have to find a workaround.

Secondly, the feel: at first, it looks depressingly like something off an 8bit computer. Thankfully the keys are quite light, direct and well spaced. Time is really the method of test here - this review is the first large text I've written on it. It's going well so far.

The start up bong can't be muted. On the Powerbook, holding mute when switching on would silence it. Otherwise, you'd hear it - which can be very useful if you're somewhere noisy already as it tells you that the blank screen is the machine booting, not a call to press power again. Well, I've had to install "Psst" and kill it off completely.

Migration - I don't understand why the migration tool requires a firewire cable. I don't have one. One doesn't appear to be provided in the box. I do happen to have a large, fast and expensive ethernet network. Never mind though; it turns out that migrating is actually quite easy on a Mac. Mount the remote drive using AppleTalk / File Sharing, and simply drag over whatever you want. Beautifully simple. My home directory and all the applications I wanted just came straight off the PPC based machine onto the x86 and worked well first time. Some clean up of the home directory was required (such as login startup items) but otherwise I'm happy with it.

The trackpad is great - the two finger scrolling is simply wonderful. It works naturally and is immediately understood and made full use of.
PowerPC applications run on the 2GHz Core 2 Duo at about the same speed as on the 867MHz G4, which is absolutely fine. There is little now that isn't universal.

Leopard I will gloss over as I want to concentrate on the hardware - let's just say that I don't buy a Mac to run anything other than Mac OS.

That will do for part 1. I'll give it a week of good use and think of something to write for part 2.

This, by the way, is the model I've bought: