I have now officially spent a month with my new Macbook, so I felt like it was time to  put together some thoughts on the purchase.

What I like

1. Industrial Design—There is little doubt that this machine is one of the best designed laptops on the market.  The little details, such as the breathing power light and the flexible power supply, are well thought out.  I do believe that when people say that Macbook’s are overpriced, they have not actually used one.  Yes, this is a $1300 laptop, but it looks and feels like it is worth the money.

2. Bootcamp—After recently installing a Window 7 partition on both my PC and my Mac, I can tell you that the Mac experience is much easier.  You can tell that this was a point of emphasis for the company.  It is really easy to run a dual boot on your Mac.

3. Smoothness of OSX—OSX is an extremely smooth operating system.  It is kind of difficult to explain this property.  You really need to spend a day on Windows XP and then spend the night on OSX.  It is quite relaxing to see applications seemlessly transition back and forth.  The smoothness really gives you a Wow! experience when using the machine.

4. Multi-touch Pad—After some growing pains, I have come to really like the multi-touch pad. Admittedly, I still sometimes zoom in the browser when I don’t really mean to, but overall it has been a good experience.  In my opinion, the two finger scroll is the best thing to happen to web browsing.

5. Safari 4—I really dig Safari 4.  It seems to be as fast as the beach ball (Google Chrome) is on Windows, while at the same time providing some nice eye candy.

6. Fonts—I am not sure what it is, but this machine makes text look great.  As a programmer, I spend a lot of time looking at text on the screen.  And, it just looks better on OSX.

7. Keyboard—To be honest, this is one of the reasons why I bought the machine.  Weird, huh?  When I was down at SXSW I got to use Nick’s Macbook, and I really dug the keyboard.  Given that I spend a lot of time banging on keys, to me this was extremely important to me.

What I dislike

1. OSX Dock—I have made the dock smaller.  I have moved it to the left.  I have minimized it when not using it.  But overall, I still really do not like the OSX Dock.  Yes, it is much, much better than the taskbar in XP and Vista.  But, after using the Windows 7 taskbar, I now expect more.

More to Come

Honestly, I have spent 90% of my time on my Mac surfing the web or doing development in Aptana.  So, I have not really spent a lot of time playing around with iPhoto, iTunes, iWork, or any of the other bundled applications.  I hear they are great, so I will have to give them a shot in the coming months.  Overall, my first month with my new Mac has been a pleasant experience.  For anyone seriously considering a premium priced laptop, I would definitely consider looking at a Macbook.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 7:17 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.