With me being the nerd that I am I could not resist. I just had to see what the new Macbook/Macbook Pros were all about. We made the pilgrimage to MacArthur Center Mall to visit the Apple Store last night and look at them. They are cool, the all aluminum cases are super cool. Gone are the hard plastic edges of the old Macbooks, all that's left is a very sturdy feeling sweet looking machine.
The new keyboard and trackpad are great and the biggest reason we decided to make the buy. Well that and the fact that we wanted to relegate the old Macbook to Home Theater PC duties. The multi-touch gestures are nice, especially the ones for controlling Expose. A four fingered swipe straight up and all of your windows magically dissappear and you have a clear desk top. Four fingers down your are presented with small versions of all of your open windows. Very Cool! One big thing that I did miss is the capability of "mouse clicking" on the track pad with a light single or double tap. With the new track pads you have to actually press it as if were an actual mouse click. That aside the new track pad is a big improvement.
As for performance it's really hard to judge so far, but by looking at the specs I would say that we should see some pretty significant improvements over our old MacBook. I saw that the front side bus is spec'd at 1067 mhz vs the 667 in our old Mac. The RAM is now DDR3 instead of DDR2. Those specs along with the much improved video should mean a HUGE improvement when we are working with our video and photos. I cant wait to try it out!
While I was messing around with MacBooks and the mini-DVI to VGA adapter something jumped out to me. OSX is cool, it just works. The way it handles multiple monitors is a perfect example. I hooked up the HDTV and it automatically recognized it. I selected the option to mirror the displays and OSX took care of setting the resolution of the Macbook to match that of the TV. When I disconnected the mini-DVI from the MacBook it automatically went back to the proper resolution. This is an example as to why I am sold on the Apple/Mac line.... things just work.
The new keyboard and trackpad are great and the biggest reason we decided to make the buy. Well that and the fact that we wanted to relegate the old Macbook to Home Theater PC duties. The multi-touch gestures are nice, especially the ones for controlling Expose. A four fingered swipe straight up and all of your windows magically dissappear and you have a clear desk top. Four fingers down your are presented with small versions of all of your open windows. Very Cool! One big thing that I did miss is the capability of "mouse clicking" on the track pad with a light single or double tap. With the new track pads you have to actually press it as if were an actual mouse click. That aside the new track pad is a big improvement.
As for performance it's really hard to judge so far, but by looking at the specs I would say that we should see some pretty significant improvements over our old MacBook. I saw that the front side bus is spec'd at 1067 mhz vs the 667 in our old Mac. The RAM is now DDR3 instead of DDR2. Those specs along with the much improved video should mean a HUGE improvement when we are working with our video and photos. I cant wait to try it out!
While I was messing around with MacBooks and the mini-DVI to VGA adapter something jumped out to me. OSX is cool, it just works. The way it handles multiple monitors is a perfect example. I hooked up the HDTV and it automatically recognized it. I selected the option to mirror the displays and OSX took care of setting the resolution of the Macbook to match that of the TV. When I disconnected the mini-DVI from the MacBook it automatically went back to the proper resolution. This is an example as to why I am sold on the Apple/Mac line.... things just work.
Leave a comment