Because you read every AppleSwitcher blog, you already know what I like about my new MacBook. How about the bad stuff?
- Going from keyboard to the trackpad means the cursor is hidden, and it takes a little bit of trackpad input to get it back.*
- Photoshop is kinda slow because it’s not a Universal Binary. I know, this is Adobe’s problem, and it will be fixed sometime in the next quarter or two.
- It gets hot. When the cores are pegged for more than 10 seconds, you’ll get some heat. Surfing and email won’t peg them.
- 2 GB ram limit. With Aperture 1.5 and Photoshop open, you need every electron of that 2 GB ram maximum. I know this is a built-in limitation to bump people up to the pro machines, and when I say 2 isn’t enough, I’m asking for something Apple will never give me. I know all this. Still, I’m sayin’ it.
Other than that it’s a great machine. Battery life, screen, keyboard… all good.
* It’s just an instant of unresponsiveness, but it bugs. Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Trackpad -> unchecking Ignore accidental trackpad input seems to have fixed this, but now my input suffers from accidental trackpad input :-). It’s a better trade for me; I just have to watch that my thumbs don’t brush the trackpad while I’m typing. I think the cause of all this is the MacBooks’s extra-wide trackpad, a shape that mimics the screen’s aspect ratio.
October 27th, 2006 at 12:06 am
If it’s any consolation Matt, I have a semi recent anecdotal account of artificially low Macintosh RAM limits. When I bought my 466 MHz iBook SE in early 2000, I was annoyed by the 320MB limit, yet by the time I sold the iBook in 2004 I had the toilet seat shaped beauty purring with 640 MB installed. Wow, 640 whole MB. Remember when that used to be a respectable amount.
Who knows, maybe a firmware upgrade will come along and allow the MacBooks to bump up to 3 GB. 4 GB would be better, but I’v read their is some limitation about these processors only being able to address 4 GB total memory from the system. Hence only 3 GB of RAM support. Sorry.
I’m just impressed your MacBook is doing such a good job it is replacing your desktop Mac.
Nathan
October 28th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Thanks for that reminder about the RAM limit bump in the clamshells, Nathan. It is consolation to me.
Also — and I should make this statement a proper blog — now that I’ve loaded my Aperture library up with ~30 GB worth of images, the app is slowing considerably. So much so that the comparison with my G5 in this respect should be considered void. Ack.