MacBook 13" review
Approximately three weeks ago my grandfather came to our place with his old windows laptop and asked how he could connect to the internet here. Well, after fiddling around for one and a half hour to get him connected to our network, he decided his laptop wasn’t suitable for a human being any more. He asked us what to do and consequently ordered a white MacBook with 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo processor to replace his windows hard- and software.
Screen
The MacBook has a very bright glossy screen with a resolution of 1280 × 800 pixels, which I think is very good for the 13 inch wide screen display. Hey, did you say glossy? Yes, I did indeed. But it really isn’t a problem. The display isn’t a mirror, it’s bright enough. The only situation in which I see myself in place of the displayed content is when I’m a) wearing a white shirt (as I normally do) and b) sitting in direct, bright sunlight.
Keyboard & Trackpad
Great. This is all I can or rather should say about it. It looks a little odd, but it feels great. With the two-finger functionalities of the trackpad you have a really nice workflow, resulting in a pretty good working speed. I took this thingy with me to school and worked on the layout of our pupils magazine – after coming home and continuing work on a Power Mac G5 I was really disappointed of not having the possibility to click and scroll that fast I could do it with the MacBook’s trackpad.
Battery Life
Very nice – it works around 4 hours under normal working conditions – pretty good. When it goes into stand-by mode to prevent data loss, you simply plug the MagSafe-plug in, and it’s done – continue working.
iSight camera
Theres a tiny “headshot”-hole, the built-in iSight camera, sitting no the upper border of the screen. When I first booted up the machine (hell, it really loads fast!), the camera’s status LED (on the right) glew green and I couldn’t use the camera with PhotoBooth, Apple’s “Have fun with your iSight” tool. After calling the AppleCare service and rebooting with the pressed keys Command + Option + T + R to reset the PRAM it worked. It is okay for taking a quick shot of yourself and/or your surroundings, videoblogging or -conferencing works as well. All you need is to start either PhotoBooth, iChat AV or iMovie.
Apple Remote
Although I didn’t use it very much until now, I can say that it surely is a handy tool. FrontRow is a nice application and with the Apple Remote one can use it very easy and intuitive. I’m eager to getting to know how it works to present your slides while a speech.
Communications
The MacBook seamlessly connected to our Airport network without anything to do but to enter the password – this is how we like it! My mobile phone connects via Bluetooth, the digital camera via USB – there are two ports on the left side, and a FireWire 400 port as well. Ethernet is available as well as a mini DVI port, for which you’ll need an adapter to connect a beamer or second monitor.
Nine days ago it was delivered – customized with 1GB of RAM and the 100GB hard drive. I’m the lucky one to use it until the 15th August (until then I hope I’ll have my recently ordered MacBook Pro), and all in all I’m pretty satisfied with it for now.
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Great review! I just finished ordering my MacBook 2.0 GHz. I hope it gets here this week.
Congratulation to your MacBook and thank you for your comment!
Thank you for your comment… I too just ordered my mac book… I am a native Windows user.. so I am excited to see what I can do with a mac.
You can do everything while being more productive at it.
Macs are great I wish you to experience the “wow, I’m getting my things done without constantly fiddling around with the system” situation there’s no way to get back to windows after using Mac OS X for a certain time.
I hope i get my MacBook before Christmas. I love this little toy, I havent seen such a nice 13.1-inch glossy widescreen display before.
Toy? I’d consider it to be more than that.
But anyways, congrats to your Mac I assume you just ordered one.
Thanks for the review Mac Book will do for me then, thanks again for clearing my mind on what to choose.
Keep it up MAC!
I would have installed Xubuntu or soemthing like this on his notebook, if you do not need apple-aps like keynote or iPhoto, but just want to get and write some mails, the money you spend for a mac is just wasted. Nothing against Mac, but it’s a unix-system like xubuntu, but it’s much more expensive!!!
It’s much easier to help him if he’s running the same apps I am running.
And besides all that, there’s no system that’s better, speedier and as easy to use as Mac OS X
I just ordered my MacBook 2,0 ghz.
I’m a firttimer using Mac OS, I hope there wont be much hassle.
Thanks for a nice review.
Extremely useful review, Julian. Keep it up.
Very nice review. I have the BlackBook – this is my second BlackBook – because I love them soooo much! They are excellent machines and I’ve convinced four of my personal friends to move to OSX via the MacBook or the new iMacs. At first they are dubious and a little belwildered because they are hard-coded to Microsoft but once they get the hang of it, they go wild with excitement. It is sooo very easy and connecting via WiFi or cable is far easier than anything Microsoft has to offer.
Thanks again! I’ll point the newcomers to your site to read your review!
Tim…
@Dr. Tim Martin: I’ve made very similar experiences convincing friends to switch to the Mac. At first they doubt they made a good decision buying a Mac, but one week later they tell me they’ll never want to use Windows PCs again
@all: Thank you all for your nice comments!