I love Baby
Written: Jan 20 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: ease of use, speedy, widescreen is awesome and sexy look
Cons: none
The Bottom Line: Macs are quality machines, There is good reason many are making the switch. Stable system, good looks, great details.
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| Mynameismir's Full Review: Apple MacBook 13.3 in. (MA700LL/A) Mac Notebook |
I have been a Mac fan for, well, pretty much all my life – so certainly that should give me some bias but honestly, the MacBook I purchased a month ago (and have affectionately named Baby) is by far my favorite. Yes, this is my first laptop and I was a little concerned about the quality of the screen and durability. Now I see I have no worries at all for my little Intel Core2 Mac.
I primarily use this MacBook to surf the net and to work on my hobby – photography. I run Adobe CS2 – this can be a real RAM pig but with photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator open along with safari and itunes I cannot notice a slip in speed. Yes, I did upgrade to the 2G of RAM and I would encourage you to do that as well – it is only a little more but in the end you will be glad you did as software packages are requiring more and more RAM as they get more sophisticated.
The screen is great. I love the glossy look and I am very pleased with how my photos look on it when I am working on them. The widescreen is also excellent for viewing movies. The remote really comes in handy for this. Honestly I prefer this style screen to the 24inch iMac that I use at work.
The design is flawless. I love the way they are making the keyboards now. I have a friend who has an ibook (G4) and I never liked how his keyboard felt and a few times keys popped off it. Sure, you could go to the Apple store and they would pop a new one in for you gratis (isn’t their service wonderful) but really, that is annoying. This keyboard is much improved on that. Plus as someone who is used to using an extended keyboard from desktop units I used to balk and complain about the keyboards on my friends ibook. Everything felt so, well squished. The MacBook keyboard was such an easy transition and I have no complaints. Plus the area between the keys is super easy to tidy up!
The processor is blazing and I have been told that you are able to upgrade the Intel chips as new ones come out. I have not really noticed many issues but I have noticed some buggy messages pop up when I am using MS Office products. None of these messages have restricted how I am able to work with the software. I suspect that it is really about it not being a Universal Binary version (which I am sure will be out soon). In fact, the other software that is not Universal has presented any issues on the MacBook nor the iMac at work, but I will upgrade to CS3 as well as next version of Macromedia Studio once it is released.
The other cool features that I am sure you already know are wonderful is the built in camera. I have used this with several of my friends thru iChat (AIM) and have even been in a chat with 3 other users. Now, after you get the 3rd person in the video quality breaks down and even more for the 4th but I suspect that has more to do with the broadband connection than the machine. When Leopard comes out there are going to be some cool new features for the camera as well.
All in all I am really happy with my purchase. I really agonized over what I wanted to get and looked for the best deal (which I found thru MacMall – they were giving rebates at the time of purchase). It was a hit for me (I am a single income woman who is renovating a house – I am not a rich lady folks). But the $1600 was well spent and I really do not regret a penny of it. If I were to make any change it would be that I would have gone with a larger hard drive. My images files are huge and I take a ton of photos plus I have about 15G of music and software that likes to take up room. But an external hard drive will get me thru and I also deleted GarageBand (I am no musician) so that freed up 2G of space. But I was on a budget and felt the RAM was more important at the time. I wish I had spend the extra money to get the larger drive but I would never have picked the drive over the RAM.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1600
Operating System: Macintosh
Processor: Other
Screen Size: 13 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
Mynameismir
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Member: Mireille
Location: Baltimore, MD
Reviews written: 66
Trusted by: 31 members
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