William Hook’s Blog

On Saturday the 25th of October, I took a train ride down to Birmingham New Street to pick up the new Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook, from the Apple Store in the Bullring. As always, upon going into the Apple store I was greeted by one of Apple’s staff, and asked if I needed any assistance, so I said yes, and asked for the new MacBook. 10 minutes later, I walked out the store with a rather heavy box containing the MacBook, and a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adaptor (which was £20 - ouch!).

Itching to open it, I arrived home, took it out the box, took a few photos, and turned it on. Instantly, I was greeted by the Apple setup wizard on the lovely bright display. I must say, after using this for a week, I’m very happy with it. It’s a much better display then any other laptop I’ve had, however, it does still fail to display blacks as vividly as the iMac did, or my Dell 2407WFP-HC does. In fact, overall, it seems a little off on several colours, but it’s not that bad - I’ve gotten used to it so far. If you’re seriously into graphic design, get the Pro. But if you just use it as a general day-to-day machine, it’s fine.

The design of the notebook itself is fantastic. The curvy edges when it’s closed make it feel thinner then it is, and the whole notebook feels very strong - much stronger then the old Vaio laptop that I’ve had (but not used for the past two years+). Whereas the Vaio felt like the screen was going to snap at any moment, the MacBook feels nice and strong. The overall design is nice too, I like having all the ports on the one side (and it’s the left, too - I hate it when the ports are on the right side, where I usually put a mouse and mousepad). However, I do have one complaint so far. When I’m typing, if I put my wrists on the edge of the laptop, the edge is actually pretty sharp - you don’t notice it if you have a jumper on or anything but if you’re just wearing a T-Shirt or something, and your wrists / arm are rubbing against the edge, I can imagine it would get irrating after a while. However, it hasn’t annoyed me that much yet.

In terms of the software, well, it’s OS X. Same as using my iMac. No real difference there, apart from the speed. Dropping down from my iMac’s 2.8GHz to the MacBook’s 2.4GHz isn’t that noticable - Photoshop and H264 HD video playback seems slightly slower, but not that much - both are still perfectly usable. Again, I think Photoshop would be much better with 4GB of RAM, versus 2GB. However, that’s another topic for another day.

Another thing that I love about the hardware itself, which is a very small feature, but it’s great nonetheless - if you plug the iPhone earphones into the audio out jack, you can use them for audio, but, and here’s the good part - you can use the microphone, too! I’ve been using it for the past week with Skype (calling my dad, in the Netherlands), and it’s pretty much perfect to replace my large and bulky headphones - the audio quality, according to him, is very good. As for the built in speakers, they’re very very good for a laptop, some of the best I’ve heard, but, of course, I’ll stick to using my speakers for music. They sound a hell of a lot better.

I’ve not yet installed XP on here to play any games yet, but I plan on doing so in the next week or so.

Now - the bad points. So far, I have a few issues.

Firstly, the trackpad is great, it’s huge, it feels good to use, however, it’s loud if you click. Seriously, if you’re in a quite place, like a library, and you click, I’m guessing everyone would look up and stare at you. The trackpad is just loud.

Secondly, and this seems to have been reported by other people - the function keys seem to all be slightly tilted to one side - the left is lower, and the right is raised.

Finally - and this one annoys me a lot - well, take a read for yourself: Apple Support - Discussions (I know it says MBP and the Cinema Display, but it’s happening to me too, on my 2407WFP-HC).

Other then those few issues, I think it’s been well worth switching from the iMac, and I’m very happy with my purchase. I just hope Apple can fix the issue I’ve been having with the external monitor issue, and soon, because it’s annoying.

I think that covers everything.