Hello all,
After months of bugging everyone on these boards about the performance of the Macbook, with the release of the SR Macbooks (and 4GB ram capacity) I was sold. I'm reporting with feedback and some questions after two days of macbook usage that resulted in some mad looks from the girlfriend.
First, it looks great from the outside, though I like the inside a little less (looks cheap), still tons better then any pc laptop out there. Overall, I love it. It's so flat, I can't believe it.
One of my concerns was the Ram, I got a relatively good deal on my ram (though it's not matched, 2*2Gb was just too much for me here in Belgium) and have to say the computer is blazing trough the apps it has to blaze trough (audio).
Another MAJOR concern I had was about the heat, I've nearly burned my cojones off with previous laptops, and had heard some horror stories on these forums, mine is SUPER cool? I read about a program called 'iStat' on these forums, and will certainly check it out because I'm really curious. I mean, it doesn't get hot, it gets slightly warm to the touch after half a day of constant use. (They changed the airholes on the SR macbooks)
About my mac says it's 7 weeks old, I find that a little scary as that would make it one of the first versions, hopefuly everything'll be ok
Got a great care protection plan (specific to the chain of stores, covers even accidental coffee pooring over your laptop!) for a lousy 150Euro, so I should be ok anyway.
I do mind the usb and firewire cables making a HUGE mess on the left side, so I will get a USB hub so I can hide all the cables at the back or something, it's really bugging me to see that mess there.
Then on to the software. Well, leopard is beautiful, really really nice. Going back to WinXP on the other computers feels like going back to the stone age, and that's not coming from a fan boy or anything related, this is the plain truth.
The dock is still confusing me, I'm used to the relative painless way of working with the windows start button and bar at the bottom of the page.
I don't like the transparant menu bar, I'd rather have it look the same as the dock, not transparant but 'lickable' anyway.
I love exposé, I still miss my rotating cube from Linux, but damn, exposé is really nice. Is there however any way to open ALL apps that have a BLUE ball under them in the dock? I find they should make a blue ball for the apps 'preloaded' and ready for quick loading, and a red ball for the apps 'open' that will show in exposé, and a green ball for the app currently being used. Or maybe I'll get usd to it.
Don't quite get Safari, I can't pull down a simple 'previously visited websites' like in Firefox (clicking the arrow down next to the url)? I don't know, it doesn't seem to like me very much so I'm using Firefox all the time here, or shouldn't I?
Mail & iCal seem nice, but I prefer my Gmail and Calendar as I can access it on any computer, anywhere, everywhere. Should I make a switch? Why?
iPhoto seems nice, but I don't get it yet, will look into it as I have tons of movies. But will it reorganize my folders of pictures also, or will I still have my 'messy folders' but that look 'organized' in iphoto? You see I imported a ton of pics from my winxp desktop, and they're not organized, loads are duplicates etc... any way to make iphoto organize all that, remove the old folders, create a new organized structure and remove duplicates etc...?
I have office for mac, seems quite alright.
Now, the general working of the OS however, is freaking superb. Took me a while to figure out the drag and drop install method but what the heck, that's just crazy! Uninstalling is a bit fishy, should I just drag the icons out of the applications folder, same way as I installed them?
Finder, spotlight, quicklook, all superb. Quicklook is probably my favourite thing, just browsing in finder, pressing spacebar, damn, nice!! This is the one feature that just blows me away, it's so fast to load that stuff and give you a preview! Only with divx movies it seems to take a while.
Coverflow is nice, but, not nearly as nice as at apple's Keynote presentations. I mean, I too have many pictures, but they are not all loaded quickly by coverflow, like when I flip fast to the end of let's say even 50 pics only, it only preloads the first 15-20, and the rest are question marks, so I have to wait a second or two to load the ones I flipped to. This means I'm not using coverflow anymore, and just column view with spacebar to quickly preview stuff.
As a conclusion, I love it, and will never (unless if they mess up real bad in the future), switch back to a PC or Dell etc... This is just too nice for words. I do feel I'm a little bit too much using the same apps as I was on Windows. I looked to the favourite apps on mac threads etc... but those are mainly the ones I used on my pc too, so the apps department (as I don't use iWorks (yet), nor Mail and iCal) is a bit windowslike at the moment (I don't mean the OS!).
Anyway, thanks all for the great feedback all this time before my purchase. It turned out to be an even better product then you were telling me it was, because it doesn't become hot as fire.
One last thing though: The apple ont he command key is not there? Awww!!!?!
After months of bugging everyone on these boards about the performance of the Macbook, with the release of the SR Macbooks (and 4GB ram capacity) I was sold. I'm reporting with feedback and some questions after two days of macbook usage that resulted in some mad looks from the girlfriend.
First, it looks great from the outside, though I like the inside a little less (looks cheap), still tons better then any pc laptop out there. Overall, I love it. It's so flat, I can't believe it.
One of my concerns was the Ram, I got a relatively good deal on my ram (though it's not matched, 2*2Gb was just too much for me here in Belgium) and have to say the computer is blazing trough the apps it has to blaze trough (audio).
Another MAJOR concern I had was about the heat, I've nearly burned my cojones off with previous laptops, and had heard some horror stories on these forums, mine is SUPER cool? I read about a program called 'iStat' on these forums, and will certainly check it out because I'm really curious. I mean, it doesn't get hot, it gets slightly warm to the touch after half a day of constant use. (They changed the airholes on the SR macbooks)
About my mac says it's 7 weeks old, I find that a little scary as that would make it one of the first versions, hopefuly everything'll be ok
Got a great care protection plan (specific to the chain of stores, covers even accidental coffee pooring over your laptop!) for a lousy 150Euro, so I should be ok anyway.I do mind the usb and firewire cables making a HUGE mess on the left side, so I will get a USB hub so I can hide all the cables at the back or something, it's really bugging me to see that mess there.
Then on to the software. Well, leopard is beautiful, really really nice. Going back to WinXP on the other computers feels like going back to the stone age, and that's not coming from a fan boy or anything related, this is the plain truth.
The dock is still confusing me, I'm used to the relative painless way of working with the windows start button and bar at the bottom of the page.
I don't like the transparant menu bar, I'd rather have it look the same as the dock, not transparant but 'lickable' anyway.
I love exposé, I still miss my rotating cube from Linux, but damn, exposé is really nice. Is there however any way to open ALL apps that have a BLUE ball under them in the dock? I find they should make a blue ball for the apps 'preloaded' and ready for quick loading, and a red ball for the apps 'open' that will show in exposé, and a green ball for the app currently being used. Or maybe I'll get usd to it.
Don't quite get Safari, I can't pull down a simple 'previously visited websites' like in Firefox (clicking the arrow down next to the url)? I don't know, it doesn't seem to like me very much so I'm using Firefox all the time here, or shouldn't I?
Mail & iCal seem nice, but I prefer my Gmail and Calendar as I can access it on any computer, anywhere, everywhere. Should I make a switch? Why?
iPhoto seems nice, but I don't get it yet, will look into it as I have tons of movies. But will it reorganize my folders of pictures also, or will I still have my 'messy folders' but that look 'organized' in iphoto? You see I imported a ton of pics from my winxp desktop, and they're not organized, loads are duplicates etc... any way to make iphoto organize all that, remove the old folders, create a new organized structure and remove duplicates etc...?
I have office for mac, seems quite alright.
Now, the general working of the OS however, is freaking superb. Took me a while to figure out the drag and drop install method but what the heck, that's just crazy!
Uninstalling is a bit fishy, should I just drag the icons out of the applications folder, same way as I installed them?Finder, spotlight, quicklook, all superb. Quicklook is probably my favourite thing, just browsing in finder, pressing spacebar, damn, nice!! This is the one feature that just blows me away, it's so fast to load that stuff and give you a preview! Only with divx movies it seems to take a while.
Coverflow is nice, but, not nearly as nice as at apple's Keynote presentations. I mean, I too have many pictures, but they are not all loaded quickly by coverflow, like when I flip fast to the end of let's say even 50 pics only, it only preloads the first 15-20, and the rest are question marks, so I have to wait a second or two to load the ones I flipped to. This means I'm not using coverflow anymore, and just column view with spacebar to quickly preview stuff.
As a conclusion, I love it, and will never (unless if they mess up real bad in the future), switch back to a PC or Dell etc... This is just too nice for words. I do feel I'm a little bit too much using the same apps as I was on Windows. I looked to the favourite apps on mac threads etc... but those are mainly the ones I used on my pc too, so the apps department (as I don't use iWorks (yet), nor Mail and iCal) is a bit windowslike at the moment (I don't mean the OS!).
Anyway, thanks all for the great feedback all this time before my purchase. It turned out to be an even better product then you were telling me it was, because it doesn't become hot as fire.
One last thing though: The apple ont he command key is not there? Awww!!!?!