What I like about my new MacBook…

1. The screen is very good. At first I thought it was natively magenta. But now I’m convinced it’s balanced (but not calibrated), and my 17″ Apple Studio LCD is simply old and dim, and doesn’t make a good reference. The more I look at the Macbook’s LCD, the more I like it. Buttery, yet crisp.
2. The MacBook pulls in Wifi stations from neighboring countries, and joins WiFi nodes very quickly.
3. Ram is easy to install. Not a “snap” easy, but not hard.
4. It’s fast! Hooray for the switch to Intel chips.
5. Monitor spanning! Spanning, not mirroring! It spans to an external display up to 1900×1080px, a very generous feature.
6. It’s cheap! $950 for the MacBook refurb I’m typing on. And it came with an 80 GB drive instead of the 60 GB, natch.

I’m taking advantage of Apple’s feature generosity with this machine and bought it instead of a MacBook Pro, saving myself millions. I’m bumping up against the 2 GB ram limit, so we’ll see if that becomes a big thorn in my productivity’s side or not.

[Of course a blog entry titled like this one is begs the question what don’t I like? Check back tomorrow for the Evil Downsides. Read more: MacBook reviews by Nos, Java, Fred, Carl and others.]

Google issued a formal-sounding commitment to the Mac today.

It extends the very good fortune of getting Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Apple’s Board of Directors a few months ago. He’s said he hopes that two companies will work more closely together with further partnerships.

Of course that’s good news, but of course Google was already pretty serious about the Mac, despite Google’s admitted lack of rich text editing for Safari users of their Gmail product.

Does this statement mean we’ll see a Google component to Apple’s living room invasion plans?

Let’s hope for all that and then some. Google is good for Apple.

Any screenshot that gets saved to the Clipboard will go straight to Preview application, no pasting necessary. Just shoot a screenshot to the Clipboard (typically any of the normal screenshot key combos, but with CTRL), then in Preview rock an Applekey-N. Voila, your screenshot is now a Preview document.

I suspect this works with any image on the Clipboard, but I haven’t tested it outside of copying to Clipboard an image opened in Preview, so that’s kinda cheating.

Full disclosure: the only real shortcut here is that Preview saves you from the trouble of a Paste, but it’s an interesting nugget nevertheless. To me.

I’m slowly moving my workflow over to my new MacBook refurb, and let me tell you, Aperture 1.5 is SIGNIFICANTLY faster on the MacBook than on the G5.

No spinning beachballs. Some waiting, and some fan noise because both cores get pegged, but nothing like the ass dragging I saw with Aperture 1.5 on the PowerMac G5.

Since I updated to version 1.5, Aperture no longer complains about the small screen resolution of the MacBook. And I’ve got 2 GB ram now, so it no longer complains about that.

I’m going to span my MacBook’s display to my Apple 17″ display (ADC), and I’ll be unstoppable.

Plug: Support AppleSwitcher — buy a MacBook through the AS-Amazon link: Apple MacBook MA254LL/A 13.3\” Notebook PC (1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD-ROM/CD-RW Drive)- White

I’d like to let out a big sigh, followed by a big thanks to my beloved PowerMac G5 dual 2.0 machine. I bought it almost 3 years ago to the day.

Aperture 1.5 brings it to its knees.

It’s not a matter of memory — I have 2.5 GB, which I monitor closely via Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor’s dock icon. It can show 25% free memory while I wait for Aperture to complete simple tasks (although under very heavy load Aperture can grab all of that reserve). Aperture’s slugishness is entirely CPU-bound.

Aperture 1.1 wasn’t a fast application on my PowerMac, but it was faster than 1.5, and the difference is just enough to really bug me. I see spinning beachballs all the time now.

I’ve restarted, updated to OS X 10.4.8 (required to install the Aperture 1.5 update), and offered 128 MB ram chips to the gods in smelly burning sacrifice ceremonies, to no avail.

Unless a CPU upgrade comes along for the G5 PowerMac line, I think this signals the beginning of the end of my G5 as my front-line machine. I was hoping I’d see 5 years out of it.

I was planning to replicate my image-processing environment onto my new refurb MacBook anyway, so I’ll soon have a handy comparison when the move is complete. Perhaps Aperture 1.5’s Intel-nativeness will make it fast enough on the MacBook to lure me away from the G5 and its two 1280×768 monitors.