MacBook: Impressions

On June 13th, two 1GB RAM chips arrived. I got my cart before the horse.

Two days later, my new white MacBook showed up. I bought the 512MB/80GB/SD configuration from Apple. The free iPod deal for students made it irresistable. I ordered the 2GB of RAM from NewEgg, for a $300 savings. Unfortunately, I did not have the screwdriver required to remove several screws from the RAM slot covers so I used the MacBook in its standard config for a couple days. While being fast at certain operations, it was no speed demon. It doesn’t take a computing genius to discover that at 512MB, it was starved for RAM.

The video card is integrated providing 64MB of VRAM by pilfering 86MB from the system RAM. Combine that loss with Rosetta and the RAM required for OS X itself and your system will enter the land of swap and sluggish performance in a hurry. If you love your MacBook, do not use it with only 512MB of RAM. Be kind to your hard drive (buy enough RAM that the system rarely swaps) and it will in turn be kind to your data. Apple’s upgrade to 1GB is reasonably priced and will suffice for most users. I regularly have Address Book, Mail.app, FireFox, Safari, iChat, iTunes, iCal, Terminal, and a random assortment of other apps all running so I can rapidly jump back and forth between them. This can be nicely accomplished with the PowerPC based Macs with 1.5GB of RAM, but on the Intel systems, I find 2GB is just right.

After Google maps helped me locate a Radio Shack, I bought yet another miniature tool set and installed my RAM. Since then, I have only one other complaint about the MacBook. While the display is nice and bright, the field of view is quite poor. When Jen and I watched a DVD in bed, we could not get it situated so that both of us could see it well. You could consider this a security feature, but I suspect that more often than not, it’ll be annoying when you want to share what is on your screen with someone else. Personally, I prefer my PowerBook screen where colors are what they are, even after shifting your head an inch in any direction.

Now that I’m done complaining, it’s time to extoll the virtues of this little beauty. For starters, there is no longer a “latch.” A magnet holds the iBook closed so it is very easy to open one handed. Once opened, the screen really is quite nice. Colors are rich and vibrant and text is nice and sharp, so long as you are directly in front of it, don’t move about much, and are not in the sun. My fingers love the keyboard. They have a longer throw than the PowerBook keyboard so I make fewer typing mistakes. I cannot imagine a touch typist who would not like it…but I do miss the backlighting.

After sticking in the extra RAM, the slowdowns all went away. Now everything runs really, really fast. I have been working on a few web development projects so I edit the pages locally (vi and TextMate), serve them via Apache, and view them in Firefox. On several occasions I synced the site from my iMac to the MacBook and continued to work while Jen drove us away. Did I mention that the MacBook is really fast? Speed has been my primary dissatisfaction with the aging PowerBook and I’m happy to report that the issue has been resolved completely. The Core Duo is a smokin’ fast chip.

The rest of its virtues are nearly identical to the features I enjoy on my Core Duo iMac: better quality iSight, built in speakers and mic, airport & bluetooth, slot loading SuperDrive, remote control for Front Row, etc. I won’t miss the modem as I rarely used it except when trying to send a fax. The battery life is much better than a PowerBook (or a MacBook Pro) for that matter. I really do prefer the larger screen but having the extra battery life from the MacBook could quickly endear me to it. The new larger trackpad is very nice and I like being able to right click and scroll with it.

Finally, a requisite application for any laptop of mine is GPS and mapping. Route 66 still works, but via Rosetta which is not terribly fast. I was able to pair my GPS receiver up with Mac OS X, and then share it to Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop. XP saw it as a serial device and MS Mappoint saw it and it immediately worked. Now that I can run Windows quickly and get XP to see my bluetooth GPS, I have a lot of choices for mapping software. Very, very, nice.

Speaking of Windows, XP installed just fine under Boot Camp. It runs just like Windows does on any good hardware. However, certain things are missing, such as the ability to right click. The driver for the trackpad is a generic Microsoft one, so it doesn’t support all the drag, scroll, and right click features, yet. The built-in iSight has no XP driver yet. I expect the final version of Boot Camp will address device issues like that.