Already back from Singapore, with a brand spanking new MacBook. I’ve migrated over most of the stuff from my old iBook (thank you Firewire Target Disk mode!) and played around a little. It’s amazing how transparent the x86 transition is - I’m not even aware of which apps I run are native x86 and which are emulated PowerPC. But this thing is fast:)

Some initial observations:

• Size

  At 13.3″, the screen is huge. I’d be happy with a quarter size. It’s about an inch wider than the old iBook and quite a bit thinner, and about the same weight.

• Glossy screen

  The new MacBooks have a glossy screen (as do all new laptops). This can be quite annoying; e.g. you see the ceiling lights in the screen, but it’s not as bad as I thought.

• Superbright screen

  I’m not kidding, this screen will make you a nice tan. I’m using the absolutely lowest brightness setting, and it’s too bright for my eyes. I have to muck with the gamma settings to lower the brightness to a usable level. It’s stupid, really really stupid.

• Screaming fast

  I have the Dual 2GHz model, since the slightly cheaper one was out of stock everywhere. Compared to the old 600MHz iBook G3, it screams. It plays HD without batting an eye. I’d say for video, this thing is 10x faster than the iBook. Coool.

• Heat

  There’s been lots of heat issues with the MacBooks, and I would have held out buying a MacBook for this reason if my iBook hadn’t died. I’m happy to say it seems my new ‘book doesn’t have any such issues.

• Fans

  There are fans? No really, they are either broken or so silent I can’t hear them (it?). Big plus. Huge.

• x86

  Allegedly, this thing runs Windows XP. I haven’t had a chance to try this, but I’ve heard people buy MacBooks to exclusively to run XP on. The new CoreDual CPU also sports Intel’s VT instructions, so running several OS (eg Mac OS X and XP at the same time) is easy and runs at native speed. You only need something like Parallels Desktop to manage it.

• OpenGL sucks

  The MacBook has an onboard Intel graphics chip. It only does a “sort of” emulated OpenGL , and it really sucks bigtime. Most OpenGL apps like Blender has issues. There are also other occasional video display errors. Apple really needs to update the drivers.

• Mac OS X 10.4

  I’ve only used 10.3 so far, and 10.4 feels like a slight upgrade to 10.3. Except for stupid Spotlight, the “automatic index” feature. It doesn’t turn off. I’ve really really tried. The stupid thing spent an hour wearing down my old iBook’s poor harddisk for absolutely no reason. I hate it already.

All in all, I’m very happy with the MacBook. I hope this keeps up, because I’m likely to still use this computer several years from now.

My beloved ‘book just died <sob>. Her trackpad’s been wonky for several months now, and today the screen went. Very sudden, but still expected. When I bought her I expected a lifetime of three years. She’s pulled four and some. I’ve revived her from various ailments before, but I’ll let her sleep this time.

So tomorrow I’m going to S’pore and buy a MacBook (with intel. yech). Yes, it was actually planned.