chris dalrymple - blog

Little chance for blogging at the moment due to a dizzyingly busy couple of weeks at work, however just enough time to say, this is almost stupidly pretty, however it is also stupidly expensive, and this place makes rather nice wine.

Labels: macbook, wine

It's been a few weeks now since I switched from my PC to a MacBook, and here's what I've found so far.

1. It's a thing of beauty. Sure, the Sony Vaios are nice (and I was tempted by one), but the simplicity of the design is great, and everyone I've shown it to covets it just a little bit. Sure, looks aren't everything but it's great to be carrying around something that feels so well designed.

2. I thought I would feel severly hampered by OS X being so different to Windows, but it only took me an afternoon to get used to it - I now happily use OS X at home and XP at work (although I do sometimes double click the status bar in XP to minimise the window and drag my mouse to the bottom right to get the desktop..).

3. For £1000 for the black MacBook, I'd really like a decent office-type package thrown in. There's a free trial for Office for Mac, and iWork, but they both expire within the next couple of days. Overall I'm potentially shelling out for Office (£306) iWork (I much prefer KeyNote to PowerPoint - £55), Dreamweaver (£370), PhotoShop (£520). It all adds up, so the more they can throw in for free, the better.

4. It's a bastard to keep clean. No matter how clean I think my hands are I still leave marks over the surface. And it's such a lovely surface!

5. It just works. Bluetooth, Wireless, webcam, Networking, Front row, remote control (why don't all computers have remote controls??!) - all working straight out of the box.

6. I sometimes get lost in the folder heirachy. Weird one this - I often find it difficult to know where I am in the folder directory because there's no address bar in the file explorer as there is in windows. Sometimes makes it difficult to see where I'm saving files to.

7. Right mouse button! A constant annoyance of switchers this one - please put a right mouse button on the track pad! Doesn't bother me so much as the first thing I did was plug in an external mouse, but annoying when I'm out and about and leave the mouse at home.

8. No delete key. There's a backspace, but no delete, which is annoying - I suspect on the seperate keyboard there is one, but why have two 'enter' keys and no delete??

9. It's the little things. The fantastic sleep state which never seems to drain battery but always saves work when you close the lid. The readout on the battery showing how charged it is. The fact that I can install Skype and videocall without any additional hardware. The Magnetic power cable that stops you from triiping over the cable and knocking the laptop onto the floor.

Overall then, it's fair to say I'm impressed. I've been an avid Windows user for as long as I've been using computers, and since I've had the MacBook I've turned on the PC twice - once to get all my files off there, the other to read a Microsoft Publisher document.

If you're thinking about switching I'd recommend borrowing a friend's Mac and using it for a weekend to make sure you're compatible - I quickly got over the little differences, but you mileage may vary.

Personally, I'm very happy. And looking forward to Leopard..

Labels: mac, macbook, switch, windows, xp