Macbook Pro

Yeah, I've joined the Cult of Mac. Here are my impressions after using my 15-inch MBP for a week or so.

Hardware

The aluminum shell is nice. The whole thing feels very sturdy (way more so than my last laptop), without being overly heavy. I think I would have to really exert myself to put a crack in this thing. The display is good, even though I'm not really a fan of glossy displays. My favorite thing about it is that it dynamically adjusts its brightness based on the ambient light - it's a parlor trick, sure, but it's a damn useful one. I tried it outdoors the other day, and I'm happy to report that it's still readable in direct sunlight. I wouldn't recommend it, since the backlight can't quite keep up with a G-type star, but if you're desperate you won't kill your eyes trying to read it.

Input devices are a mixed bag. The keyboard is a little disappointing overall - I like the backlit keys a lot, but the keys aren't especially responsive, and worst of all, I can't rearrange them. Once you've gotten used to a non-qwerty layout, going back to qwerty is just obnoxious. The multi-touch trackpad is brilliant, on the other hand, and I predict that everybody will soon be copying multi-touch gestures for scrolling and navigation, assuming there aren't any patents in the way. I didn't think it was possible for something to be more convenient than a scroll wheel on a mouse, but Apple has done it somehow. I only have two small gripes about the touchpad. First, it's nice that you can click anywhere on it, but it takes a ton of pressure to click relative to what you use just moving the cursor. If they could dial the resistance back by like a factor of five, it'd be really convenient to use. Second, tap-to-click has a noticeable delay (maybe a quarter to a third of a second) compared to actually clicking. This is just long enough to be an annoyance, so it seems like Apple could clean this one up with a little tweaking.

As for the system specs, they're pretty satisfactory. So far everything is snappy enough, even with all the random visual effects, that I don't really feel like I need the system to be faster. It'd be nice to have a little extra RAM, I guess, since 2 GB isn't all that much these days, but Apple charges a lot for RAM. :( If it ends up bothering me more than it does now, I'll probably pick up some extra from Crucial or somebody else. The battery life is excellent - I haven't tried running it down yet, but based on some quick maths I think it'd go for about 3-4 hours on a charge.

Software

Mac OS X is really unexpectedly nice.

You know how people say that OS X "just works"? Yeah, it used to annoy me too, but now I kind of see what they meant by it. Apple has put some serious effort into smoothing over rough corner cases, and it shows. Boot Camp, for instance, is a shining example of this - you can repartition the drive that the OS is running on by dragging a slider and clicking a button. This is the sort of thing which normally requires serious voodoo. Then, because apparently that wasn't impressive enough, they provide a complete set of drivers for the Windows side, so that Windows can work properly on the hardware in the laptop. Or, to take another example, printer configuration. I decided I wanted to install a shared network printer, so I started clicking around in system preferences. Twenty seconds later, the printer was installed. It Just Worked(tm).

The eyecandy is nice, but could be better - probably, I'm just spoiled by Compiz. The implementation of multiple workspaces, for instance, feels a bit sluggish compared to the Compiz desktop plane plugin. Overall, though, this isn't exactly a huge issue.

I know a bit about operating systems, and I can usually find plenty to criticize, but in terms of system architecture OS X actually isn't that bad. Software installation, for instance, is normally a sore point for me, but OS X is about halfway to what I'd consider a good implementation. (Linux, by way of contrast, is also about halfway, though it gets different things wrong and varies by distro; Windows has literally the worst possible software installation system I can imagine.) Programs go in a single folder, and by and large they stay there. It's not perfect, since it still allows programs to do retarded things, but at least the retarded way isn't the standard, accepted way.

Having a BSD-flavored system underneath everything is really convenient. I don't know how I'd ever get anything done without being able to drop down to a command line every once in a while. Plus, since it's UNIX, it integrates relatively nicely with the rest of my systems. It also means that most UNIX software is available for installation, via MacPorts.

Still not touching iTunes with a 10-foot pole, though. I can manage my own music kthx.

Overall

When my mom first saw me using this laptop, she said, and I quote, "Wow, that's a badass-looking laptop!" What more needs to be said?