March 18, 2007 at 2:55 pm
I think it's about time that I actually got this thing reviewed. My journey to this point has not been the shortest one ever. I first wrote about trying out the black MacBook about two weeks ago. I then ordered it and got it on the 14th. I've been using for the past half week for both fun and work, and now I would like to share my thoughts.
The black MacBook is beautiful. With the exception of the Apple logo and some text and symbols, it's pure black. It's evocative of NeXT hardware, or the PowerBook G3, except it looks better than either. If you hold the black MacBook up against, say, the Thinkpad, there's just no comparison when it comes to the look of the case. I can just imagine a design session for the Thinkpad. Some color-blind manager said, “Let's make the enter button blue!”
“Um ... why?” a designer asked.
“Now now, the real question is, ‘why not?’” was the reply. The designer cried himself to sleep that night.
Apple's attention to detail is stunning. I've already talked about the power adaptor, and now I would like to talk about the machine itself. Everything on the machine is incredibly clean. The bottom of the machine is a wonderful example. I've seen and used laptops that are absolute messes on the underside. They've had random arrangements of panels, screws, and vent slots. On the laptop I owned before the MacBook, you could actually clearly see a heat sink through a a vent on the bottom. Not so on the MacBook. Its underside has 3 screws, 4 feet, the battery, and the coin-lock for the battery. That's it. No random panels, no vents, nothing.
I have one complaint about the design of the machine, however, and that's with the edge. When the machine is open, the edge that your wrists will be in contact with while typing is rather sharp. Whether or not this is an issue depends on your posture. If your elbows will be lower than the keyboard, the edge may cut into your wrists (not literally, but it'll feel like it). If your elbows will be level (as they should be, ergonomically speaking) or higher than the keyboard, you should be fine.
I'm not a picky person when it comes to keyboards, so I'm not one to judge keyboards on things like travel, but I will say that the MacBook keyboard feels fine. One thing I would like to point out, however, is the num lock key. The MacBook has one on its F6 key, complete with a little light when it's on. When it's toggled on, the keyboard acts like you're holding down the fn key, allowing you to use the right part of the keyboard like a numeric keypad without needing to actually hold the fn key down.
The trackpad is probably the best I've ever used. It's very large, which is very helpful. The fact that it can detect when you have two fingers on the trackpad enables it to have much greater functionality than other trackpads. A one-fingered tap is a left click. A one-fingered slide moves the mouse. A two-fingered tap is a right click, and a two-fingered slide scrolls the current scrollbar view, both horizontally and vertically. Very simple, but very effective.
I must confess that I was worried about the glossy display before I actually bought the machine. I had heard horror stories about the display effectively being a mirror, or that it's totally unusable if you have any direct light shining on it. I'm very happy to be able to say that glare has virtually been a non-issue. If you have direct lighting shining on the display then yes, you will be able to see it, but as long as the light is not far brighter than anything else in the room you likely won't notice it unless you conciously look at it. I've used it in the office with fluorescent lights overhead, and the lights weren't a distraction.
I do think that the glossy displays have one major advantage over the matte displays, and that's in grain. Matte displays tend to have this annoying grain to them. If you look at a large square of a single color it'll look like there was a soft noise filter applied. Color on the glossy display, on the other hand, is perfectly smooth. It's beautiful.
I've been using my MacBook with an external 1280x1024 display, and the experience has been amazing. Apple nailed the way you configure it. When you have a second display hooked up and you go into System Preferences to adjust resolution and color profiles, you will actually get two windows, one on each display. They are mostly the same, but each window corresponds to the monitor it is displayed on. Compared to Windows, this seems more intuitive. Instead of having a single window and leaving you to figure out which square represents which monitor, you get a window for each monitor.
When it comes to arranging the displays, you are given a single window with squares representing each display, but it's incredibly easy to rearrange things. You just grab the square representing a display and drag it to its position relative to the other displays. Additionally, if you want the menu bar and dock to appear on a different display than the main one, instead of checking a ‘make this my primary display’ checkbox, you simply drag a menu bar graphic from one square to another.
The battery life on this thing rocks. I tend to get about four hours out of it when I'm browsing the web and writing code. This blows my previous laptop out of the water. It was lucky to pull two hours, usually getting only an hour and a half to an hour and fourty-five minutes. When I'm using it in less involved ways, such as when I'm in a meeting, I pull off even greater battery life since it drops into low power and sleep modes when inactive. From what I've read, a fully charged battery will last for a good number of days in sleep mode.
OS X's handling of battery life is awesome. In the PC world, Windows tends to get fussy when you dip below 25%, and then it'll go to hibernate mode when you hit about 5-10%. OS X gives you a warning when you have 10 minutes left, and then enters sleep mode when it reaches 0%. Now, this is somewhat of an illusion. OS X actually enters sleep mode before the battery is fully drained, but unlike Windows, it basically hides that extra bit of battery life from the user. If the battery tells you that you have thirty minutes left, you really can expect to be able to use the machine for about thirty more minutes. You're able to much more accurately guage your remaining time when you can't see this extra bit of battery life you'll never actually be able to use.
While I'm not one to take benchmarks, I would like to talk briefly about qualitative performance. It's fast. With a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, it screams when it comes to processor speed. Numerically, it's only slightly slower than my 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. As far as computation tasks are concerned, however, I haven't observed any difference (again, I haven't run any benchmarks). I haven't even noticed much difference in hard drive speed, which has a wider performance gap when comparing the 5400 RPM drive in the MacBook to the 7200 RPM drive in the iMac. They're both far faster than the 4200 RPM drive in my Mac mini.
The real difference that I've noticed has been with RAM. My iMac has 2 GB, the MacBook has 1 GB. I've been able to throw virtually anything I want at the iMac without issue, which includes running XP in Parallels and having my website open in Safari, Firefox, and IE all at the same time. The MacBook, however, didn't like that at first. I initially set it up so that both Mac OS X and XP would get half of the RAM. Now, XP is just tickled happy with 512 MB of RAM, OS X is not. When Parallels was running, switching between apps and other RAM-related tasks became dreadfully slow under OS X. Everything seemed to clear up when I dropped the RAM usage of Parallels by 128 MB. OS X was a lot happier, and XP was still chirpy. I would imagine that I'll be upgrading the RAM in the MacBook at some point in the future, however.
I love my MacBook. I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again. I absolutely love this machine. With little exception, it is a testament to the high quality I've come to expect from Apple. Bravo.
