I’ve been a PC user and software developer for 20 years, first on DOS and then Windows. I’ve used UNIX and Linux a little bit and Mac OS even less. I’ve always disliked laptops but never owned one of my own until now, when the need to purchase one arose. I never would’ve considered a Mac if not for several things that swayed me: 1) At multiple Microsoft developer conferences, I was surprised to see numerous attendees using Macs. 2) I spent about 30 hours playing around with a very similar 13″ unibody MacBook a few months ago and was very impressed with both the hardware and OS X. 3) Apple switched to Intel CPUs, making it much more viable to run Windows on a Mac – whether it’s in a virtual machine or natively through Boot Camp. 4) Apple lowered their prices on the kind of machine I’m looking for: small enough to be good for travel, not aimed as a desktop replacement, but not as weak and cheap as a netbook.
Enough about me, let’s talk about the hardware. So far it’s lived up to my high expectations. Physically it feels very solid, looks great, and is just the right size. The display is clear, 1280×800 resolution is sufficient, viewing angle is ok, and reflections haven’t been a problem at all so far. I love how the screen appears to float with no discernible transition between it and the black border. The touchpad is amazing and was one of my main attractions to the machine – it’s big, you get pixel-perfect precision when scrolling with it using two fingers (this is NICE!), tap to click/drag works well, and right-clicking is easy. The keyboard feels good, though it’s a bit cumbersome to not have dedicated Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDown keys (a common laptop problem). The magnetic power connector with charge status LED is a nice touch. Gigabit Ethernet lets me transfer large files as fast as the hard drives can handle, while the wireless is convenient and reliable. Speaker quality is surprisingly good and loud (on OS X), and the audio was fine with no noise when plugging in a good pair of headphones. The 5400RPM hard drive can be a bit slow but OS X and Windows 7 make the most of it. I’ll upgrade it to an SSD later. Upgrading the RAM to 4GB was a piece of cake once I got my hands on a #00 Phillips-head screwdriver. The optical drive is loud and scary on disc insert/eject, but works fine. I’ve used the machine on battery a few times and the battery life seems incredible (6+ hours while using XP in a VM on OS X?) but I need to test this more to know for sure. I usually keep it plugged in.
The fan is silent at its default speed of 2000RPM, and the case stays cool at idle and during light use. Under load the case can get quite hot, but only near the screen/power connector. The system doesn’t seem to mind running hot, as it never seemed to raise the fan speeds on its own in my testing. So, I use Temperature Monitor and smcFanControl (third party apps for OS X) to cool it down a bit. At higher speeds the fan is not silent but is still pretty quiet and cools much better. I’m used to having to do this with PCs and graphics cards anyway.
Everything seems to work nicely so far on OS X, but I’m still new to it. Visually it’s pretty and stuff “just works” for the most part. Being able to use Terminal for certain things is nice. Running XP in a virtual machine using VirtualBox was VERY easy to set up and works well – just like running it on Windows. I have noticed a few problems using OS X so far: Keyboard shortcuts seem kind of inconsistent between apps. It wouldn’t remember one wireless network after having connected to another. The list of Windows machines on the network shows up in the Finder sidebar sometimes, but not other times (apparently a machine running XP has to be on the network?). These problems weren’t hard to overcome, though. I paid the $10 to get Snow Leopard and am looking forward to trying that soon.
I installed Windows 7 64-bit RC1 using Boot Camp and that went fairly smoothly. I had to download the NVIDIA 9400M drivers separately from NVIDIA’s web site. The biggest problems running Windows natively seem to be no manual fan control (have to do that in OS X and then reboot) and bad sound drivers. While sound appears to work fine at first, once you use the machine a bit more you realize that the drivers are broken. Apple switched to a new audio chipset (Cirrus CS4206A) and it works fine in OS X, but the Windows drivers (XP and Vista/Windows 7) have serious problems. The built-in mic works in Control Panel and Sound Recorder but not in any normal applications like Skype, the left/right speakers are too quiet and the left speaker is louder than the right one, and there’s red light coming out of the headphone jack. There are huge forum threads about this, no good workarounds, and apparently Apple needs to get it fixed. There are a few other minor annoyances in Windows compared to OS X: the trackpad scrolling works but isn’t as precise/smooth, and I can’t seem to fully turn off the keyboard backlight. Other than these things though, Windows 7 runs beautifully. It’s very fast, looks great with Aero Glass, idle temp is ok, sleep works perfectly, function keys work, wireless is rock solid. I could easily use it as the main OS and probably have a better overall experience than most Windows-based laptops out there.
For now I’ll run OS X as my main OS on this machine as much as possible, to get to know it and to get the best use of the hardware. But it’s great that it runs Windows so well too. I bought this machine in order to get high quality hardware plus the ability to run both OS X and Windows, and Apple seems to have delivered.