First of all,
This kicks ass so good.
-This is the nicest keyboard to type on that I’ve ever used on a laptop. It really feels like my fingers are flying on it. The keyb on PowerBooks was really good but this rocks. Especially, you’ll notice a massive improvement compared to iBook’s flimsy keyboards. Also the two-finger scrolling up/down AND sideways is a really great feature. You don’t really miss using a mouse for your basic browsing.
- The screen is bright, as Apple says, as bright as the cinema displays. If compared to a 12″ iBook screen, you can turn this down to it’s second lowest level to match that on the brightest. It’s glossy but that’s ok. I was really worried about this, but it really isn’t a problem actually. In my office, I’ve got a window right in front of me and I never see/notice a reflection of myself.
-It’s smaller than 15″ PowerBook, obviously, but quite a bit bigger than the 12″ models. It could be smaller but I quess it’s hard to fit all this within the frame.
-Battery life is great. I’m traveling to Dublin this weekend and we’ll see if it survives the train and the flight. I watched an hour and a half long movie (Bruce Almighty, if you care) and still had more than half of the battery left. And this was on the brightest screen setting. Al thought the battery in my old PowerBook was in very good shape, i.e. you could do light work for atleast for 2:30 hours, but you couldn’t imagine watching two hour film, even if the film was on the hard disk and therefor not using dvd drive, and the screen on darkest setting.
-It’s really fast. I upgraded mine with 2Gb RAM from Crucial. If you don’t want to spend £220 on it then you should atleast spend some £80 and upgrade it to 1Gb directly from Apple. See the Photoshop benchmarks here, the last comment has results for this one (funnily enought, this kicked MacBook Pro’s ass [I know, it's just because of different settings and setting]). Anyhow, very very fast.
So, does anything suck?
Yes.
-Only two USB ports. Only one FireWire port. Backlit keyboard would be nice but I’ve never really missed it.
-Those are smaller things. One thing I’m a bit worried is how the integrated graphics card can handle Civ IV and other 3D intensive tasks. What made me even more worried, was when Aspyr said MacBook isn’t one of the officially supported machines. I’m sure it’ll still crack it, no problems, especially with 2Gb RAM. And if it doesn’t, I’ll just boot to Windows, get a Civ IV for Windows XP and wait to play the mac port on my next machine in two years time.
Conclution:
Darina wants one as well. It’s so good.
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Comments
2 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.it frustrates me when people complain that the apple laptops don’t have enough usb (or other ports).
how often do need to plug in more than 2 usb devices whilst mobile ?
if you do need to many usb devices, chances are it’ll be on your desk at home or at work where the devices don’t move, so there is no reason not to use a hub.
more ports != better
having said all that, having 2 powered firewire ports would be great, as all the fw hubs i’ve tried suck.
Indeed, havin’ only two usb ports isn’t that big of a problem but it’s not that rare to want to have another one. Like when using one of these stupid pocket harddrives that need one for data and one for power. Good thing about old powerbooks used to be was that you could use FW800 for external HD (Lacie d2) leaving one port free on the machine. Should maybe invest to a FW400/800 cable to still have free 400 port on the HD…
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