MacBook
Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
Look at it. Its beautiful. What is it? I’ll tell you what. Its mine.
This stunning laptop is does everything I’ve asked of it without fail since I’ve had it, I don’t have a bad word to say about it. Not only does it look the business, its very quick and very quiet. And yes, its a Mac.
Once you get over the initial period of not knowing any keyboard shortcuts anymore, Mac OSX is such a breeze to use. Everything is supersimple, and normally found in a place you would expect to find it.
The apps that come with it (most staring with the letter ‘i’) cover most things you would ever want to do, and once you’ve installed Office 2004 for Mac you have Word and Excel at your disposal too. Also you get Entourage, which is like Outlook- but better.
It has built in wifi and bluetooth, the bluetooth is especially noteworthy. As the tagline states: it just works. I asked it to pair to my mobile, a couple of clicks later it sent some software to my phone, a moment after that all my calender events and contacts had been synced with the MacBook. Sadly the same isn’t true of my PDA. It won’t sync with a PocketPC out of the box, but some clever soul has written a program that will sort all that out for you.
The touchpad is huge, in size and power. There is only one button, which has lead to a lot of Mac bashing to the tune of ‘name one thing you can do on a PC you can’t do on a Mac? Right Click!’. Well thats tosh, because if you tap the pad with [i]two fingers[/i] it alt clicks. Scrolling is also a dream, you just drag two fingers over the pad and it drags the document around both horizontally and vertically. What could be simpler?
It isn’t a cool beast, currenly running at 75% of its top CPU speed and cruising at 59 degrees. I’ve heard at full whack it can easily reach 80.
Powerwise though it seems to last forever. It gives you a little countdown for how long you have till the battery runs out, which is nothing new and nothing Mac specific. However what I do like, is when I plug the magnetic power cord in, it tells me how long until its charged UP. Ooh, wait, thats right. The power cord is held in magnetically. So if some oik trips over your power lead, it doesnt send your notebook tumbling to the floor. It simply detaches from the laptop, just in time for you to use it to throttle the eegit that nearly ruined your life.
The powerbrick I was differnt to what I expected too, its not a conventional brick at all. Its like an iPod charger block. Just a rounded square box which you can either plug a long AC lead into, or just plug pins straight into to make a short power lead. It has two little flip out lugs which you can wrap the cable round too, then it all clips into a nice bag friendly tangle free bundle.
The big thing everyone talks about is the glossy monitor. I greatly prefer the clearity it offers, and when the screen is on you can’t see any reflection at all. Even from bright lights or direct sunshine, its actually BETTER outdoors than your typical notebook screen.
One gripe I might have found with it is it stands by when you close the lid and I haven’t found a way to stop it yet. Its not a huge deal, but if I say had it plugged up to a TV to watch DVD’s, i’d quite like to be able to close the lid down so it was nice and tidy until I was done. If anyone knows how to supress the standby, please let me know.
There is so much to say about it I didn’t know where to start, and I don’t know where to end, but something I should slip in before I do is it comes with something called Front Row. That basically means it comes with a remote control and a fancy interface which lets me control DVD’s, iTunes, photo slideshows and saved videos.
Its just amazing.