My MacBook Initial Review

Well I'm a linux user, and for some time I had my wife use that OS as well - in fact, she used our nice Acer laptop with Ubuntu on it, whereas I used an old Gateway Solo PII laptop running Xubuntu. However, recently I bought her an Apple Macbook instead, as she was having stability & performance problems in linux, as well as the linux peripheral support shortcomings. She is not very computer literate, & mainly wants to surf the web, watch videos, use the spreadsheet, and print & scan things like labels, forms, etc.

We bought the lowest spec MacBook - it came with an HP 3-in-1 scanner/printer/copier, which is free after $100 rebate. We also bought iWork to install on the machine.

Random observations:

- Setting it up was pretty easy, though the HP driver/software installation continually locked up, & had to be force-quitted multiple times. I did a search, and found advice to go to the HP website to download the latest software. I did, and installation went fine. The printer works great.

- Not crazy about the screen - it's small & grainy looking, & has one of those anti-glare surfaces that's hard to see from an angle. Definitely a step down from the big, glossy screen of the Acer Aspire.

- Things do crash occasionally.

- The HP photo/printer management app is a major resource hog. It effectively locked up the machine at one point.

- The Mac scheme is funny & weird - buttons are in the wrong place & do strange things, the menubar at the top "becomes" the menubar for the application with focus, the system chooses which app icons to display on the bottom (I guess based on recent use), and the minimized applications are crammed in the lower right corner.

- Very slick & compact looking, feels solid. All the usb ports are on the left side, though, which is a bit inconvenient. Neat how there's no extending CDROM tray, you just stick it in the side, & it spits out when ejected.

- I really like the cool power adapter & extender scheme, & how the cord-to-laptop jack is magnetized.

- It has a BASH terminal, if you can find it (it's buried somewhere within Finder). Once there, it's your basic *nix interface. It did everything I tried, including ssh, ifconfig, etc. However, it failed to mount a remote NFS partition, which I later found out that it uses AFS (I think), so no surprise that didn't work.

- Numbers (the iWork spreadsheet) does not recognize the OO calc .sxc (?) format. I had to convert our existing OO spreadsheets to .xls. However, if you simply try to open those, it funnels you into the installed trial version of MS Office, and gives you instructions on how to buy. You have to explicitly open the document in Numbers. Numbers does however have some handy built-in templates, such as the party planner template (not sure exactly what it's called) - my wife loves it & is using it to plan our son's next B'day party.

- We also bought an external Kensington mouse which was recognized & worked fine, except that we found it interfered with my own external Kensington mouse, so I ditched mine.

- The Addresses(?) app is very handy, & makes it easy to print out envelopes, labels, etc (that is, it was easy once you figured out that the funny-looking "down" button expanded the options window to expose printing format options...).


Well that's all I can think of now. Not the perfect experience I was hoping for (& payed for), but all-in-all a pretty slick machine, hopefully it'll work out for the wife in the long run.