Well, I’ve already posted about niggling annoyances with my new MacBook. So, to balance things up a bit, here’s part 3 of my series of posts on whether I’m falling in with the crowd of Apple Faithful – or not – and it at least includes a few things that I like about the MacBook.
Very nice body and build quality.
Design is a mixed bag. The single pane glass LCD is both gorgeous and smart: it’s hard for dust and little particles to sneak in between the bezel and screen, which was a persistent problem with a lot of the other notebooks I’ve owned.
I like the backlight keyboard too. A lot of times I’ve struggled to see what’s on my notebook keyboard when the lights are dimmed. My Thinkpad use a soft light source mounted near the web cam, but the Apple MacBook’s idea is even better.
However: the MacBook design also has numerous fails for me. The number of USB ports at just two is miserly. Even smaller netbooks have 3 USB ports these days. More seriously though… the two ports are placed too closely. A lot of devices I use have USB stubs that are wide, e.g. the Starhub Maxmobile dongle – which means that effectively, I can’t use another USB device when I’m on Maxmobile unless I get a USB extender. !@#!@$%$#@$
The combo audio/microphone jack is a bad idea. The auto-toggling works in OS X, but not in Windows. I’m guessing it’s sloppy drivers on the part of Boot Camp, and I’m not the only person who had difficulty. Hunted around for a solution and found it though – fortunately.
The OS X’s version of Live Messenger has no nag adverts. Nice! No need to use third party software to kill those adverts.
Very nice User Interface in and out. Even the normally drab and all workman like Firefox looks gorgeous in Snow Leopard.
Pretty good battery life. Not quite to the ungodly endurance of some of those Windows 7 / Intel CULV notebooks that are clocking in 9 hours, and a few even 10 hours. But the 6 hours normal use this MacBook offers isn’t too bad. It’s long enough for the Kyushu flight, and longer flights than that I don’t typically stay awake throughout the flight anyway.
But at the end of it, I’m still not a MacBook convert: I’m still solidly a Windows geek. Apart from nifty UIs and that the Keynote software on iWorks churns out nicer presentations than PowerPoint, there’s little else I’ve found that the MacBook can functionally do that I haven’t been able to already do in Windows, and without all the annoyances.
Maybe more time with the new toy will change. Who knows LOL.
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