MacBook to join the robertmoir.com team!
Things were a little quiet today so I took a drive down to Brent Cross and picked up a
MacBook from the Apple retail store there. I already had one on mail order but Apple seemed to want to take about a month to ship it to me and Brent Cross is about an hour and a half's drive away so...
What can I say about it that others haven't already? Here are my first impressions. I plan to do more work on virtualization and other clever tricks with it once a memory upgrade arrives, but here is what I think so far.
- 512MB is in no way enough memory (2GB kit on its way from Crucial)
Apple ship their machines with the minimum needed to get the basic work done. You could make do with their shipping memory levels if you want to do the basics, but for "serious professional work" you'll want an upgrade.
Even with 512MB, it's faster than my old Mac. Mind you, I'm comparing it to a G4 800Mhz.
Basic hardware is as you expect from the other reviews on the net. 2.0 Ghz Intel Core Duo, DVD Writer, etc. Very well put together.
- It looks fantastic. No, really.
The black vs. white style is down to personal preference. Having tried both in the Apple store you can see which one I picked, but really they are both very nice looking.
- The default install image appears to be ~ 15GB of hard disk space which is way too much.
DeLocalizer and a bit of judicious pruning of stuff I just wouldn't be using managed to clear at least 4GB off the hard disk. I don't mind spending a lot of disk space but I don't like wasting it. Still, the stuff I trashed may well be the only reason someone else purchased a Mac so who am I to judge.
- For all the comments about the video, it handles the OS X desktop effects nice and quickly.
Not sure I've got much to say about this. First of all - it isn't like the crippled display in the G4 Mini; the MacBook handles core image and Quartz Extreme just fine.
It even looks good playing a few simple games - though I admit I wouldn't rush to install F.E.A.R. on any Windows install using that graphics chip.
- The keyboard might look odd but seems to type very well (as ever, YMMV).
Not much to say here. It feels fine to me, and with the speed I type, feel is important to me. If you worry about it, or if indeed you have nothing better to do, you should try it for yourself.
One minor thing that I'm sure we'll all enjoy: It's nice not to have Eject and F12 sharing any more as they did on the iBook.
[edit after another day of use] I'm normally quite fussy about keyboards but so far I think this keyboard is great - I've been using it for most of the day to do various bits and pieces and I find it an improvement on the iBook keyboard. I also use a Samsung laptop at work, and again the MB is better than that keyboard.
I think the keyboard may be a lilttle more roomy than most notebook keyboards, and the keys certainly don't feel anything like as odd as one would imagine they do from looking at pictures; I've seen people compare it to the keyboard on the Sinclair QL by appearance but I've used a QL (now I'm dating myself!) and it doesn't feel like one at all.
- What about the heat? Can you really fry an egg on your trackpad?
CoreDuoTemp reports an idle temp hovering between 48C and 52C, and the system seems pretty damn quiet. Running an 'average app' such as Garageband raises the temperature to the mid 60s, again with no noise problem.
Running a couple of 'yes > /dev/null' commands in the terminal ramped things up to a max of 88C and made things much warmer. Round about that point, the fans kicked in and made things noiser as well, quickly driving the temperature back down to 72C. Killing the terminal processes that were pushing the proessor made the temperature and noise drop very quickly.
The hot spots were at the back of the case and on the underside; not an issue if you're using it on a table but maybe a little too hot if you want it sitting in your lap.
More to come, I'm sure.