MacBook, 1 month on.

Its been a month since I bought my MacBook so I thought I’d air my views (its unlike me to have an opinion, eh!).

• Its thin. I had a G3/800Mhz iBook before (and have a G4/1.33GHz iBook for work) and it feels noticeably thinner but that makes me worry about snapping it.
• Its wide and shiney. The width of the screen is okay, TBH I don’t see much reason for this swing to wider aspect ratio monitors generally, but the glossy coating, whilst indeed making colours more vibrant does mean using a MacBook outside is nearly impossible. I don’t do that much, so…
• It gets warm. Especially by the power conector. However, its not a great deal warmer than either iBook ever got and I don’t feel overly worried.
• Its insensitive. The touchpad particularly at times seems not to work. I end up licking my finger a touch and pressing harder to make the mouse move. The wider button is also not great and rather vague, especially at the ends.
• Its sluggish. I do find that quite often it takes a second or two to figure out I clicked on a tab in Safari or on a different Terminal window. This makes the beach ball pop up for a moment whilst it pauses then doe things very quickly. Odd. This has gotten better over night though, with UB of Flash installed.
• It takes ages to charge. I don’t know why but it takes a bloomin’ age to charge the battery. The iBook would race up to 95% in an hour or so, then trickle the last 5% in another hour. The MacBook doesn’t race, it just takes about 5 hours to charge from 20% empty to full.
• Its an Intel.Yes, you knew that I know, but it means CodeTek’s Virtual Desktop Pro (for which I have paid!) doesn’t work.
• Its clicky. The keyboard is really nice. Its clicky yet it doesn’t feel to hard. Its just lovely 🙂

Stuff like the magnetic power cord and screen latch, well, they work but I don’t see much real in-use difference. I never had trouble with the old systems, new stuff works, so did old. I have not made any use of the remote control or iSight (anyone use iChat?).

I think I need to increase the RAM (its on stock 512MB), I’m pretty sure this will help the little freezes between apps (I guess I’m swapping?). I will also at some point put in a larger hard disk and probably make sure its a faster one.

So, would I buy another? Well, if my iBook had not died and I know now what I do about the MacBook I wouldn’t be rushing to buy one (esp if they are bringing out Memron ones next month, bastards) but overall I’m happy enough. Its a laptop (notebook, sorry) which runs Mac OS X at the end of the day and thats what I really want.