Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome, 21 April 2008
Very nice.
I only got it on friday but my god is OSX ever better than Windows.
The battery life runs about 3.5 to 4 hours, and when you close the lid it goes in and out of sleep mode quickly and without errors, very nice.
The keyboard put me off at first (tiny return key) but it only takes an hour to get used to it and then it comes into it's own, very good keyboard indeed, a breeze to use a great size, and the light sensitive backlighting is a stroke of classy genius.
One of the main reasons I went for a MAC is the last powerful laptop I got was a Rock Pegasus TI99 2.0 GHz, back in 2004 and the fan noise from it was unbearable. I want a machine I can take into an office, or work away on while my wife watches a bit of telly without having to leave the room, and with MAC having such tight control over their own hardware I figured this would be better built. Wasn't wrong, it's very, very quiet, and it runs very cool even if you're multitasking quite heavily. Interestingly, the only time it's gotten hot was last night, when I installed the Parallels VM and got Windows XP installed. OK, it's two OS's running simultaneously though I wonder how much of it was just XP's bloaty old fault? I'll do an Ubuntu VM as well and see!
MAC OS X is just fantastic, never used it before and it was a bit confusing at first, but after a couple of hours everything just falls under your fingertips exactly as you would want it to, and it is blindingly fast. It could be having two gigs of memory but there was virtually no paging happening, everything just blinks into view, and the eye candy is great, it just looks and feels super sweet to use. It doesn't get in your way in the slightest. The whole OS just seems to be designed to get you working quickly and efficiently while it retreats discreetly into the background like a good waiter!
Oh, and the multi-touch touchpad is a stroke of genius, not least because you can right click one handed (something which kept me away from MACs for years). You just tap two fingers together on the pad and a context sensitive menu pops up. It works beautifully.
And the wi-fi is very fast, it's twice as fast downloading as my other two laptops (The Rock, and a Thinkpad X31) I downloaded a 720MB image file for Kubuntu in under half an hour, no sweat, over my 8Mb connection.
I can't think of any cons, it's just a great machine, with a lot of thought and attention put into it. I know it's a few hundred quid more than an equivalent Windows specced machine, but it's the little things that just set it apart, and make for a really pleasant user experience, far better than any windows box I've ever had. It Just Works, is an apt motto.
As an aside, I got this because I didn't want to buy a new machine with a strong spec, and then have Vista smother it with it's enormous code base. I was going to get a 600 quid laptop and install Ubuntu, but I just didn't like the idea of kludging around getting the new hardware to work. I have an ultraportable that also needs replacing, and I'll get an Asus eee pc for that.
Oh, and the reason it gets four stars? It's not really the laptop, it's a swipe at Mac themselves, their product lines seem to have been designed by an evil scientist. I ended up spending far more than I really wanted to, because the normal Macbook and the Air both have little features missing that would otherwise have had me buying them instead, and saving myself about 300 quid. Bottom line, you want multi-touch, backlit keyboard (shallow of me I know, but before you cast stones tell me why you don't have a pink laptop boys.... uh huh, you see my point) good connectivity, a Matte screen that doesn't reflect everything behind you, and a deicated graphics chip, then you HAVE to get this, which is a shame as I was very close to getting the Air....
Still, you pays your money, I've paid mine, and I am in love with this damn thing more than any other system I've owned.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A beautiful machine, 31 Aug 2008
I've pondered over several laptops for a while, tried to wait for the redesigns etc and finally cracked. And I'm glad i did. This machine is beautiful both in appearence and running.
-Firstly, the build quality is incredible - no flimsy screen or creaky hinges and the finish is great.
-Secondly, it's very light and thin considering it's a 15.4 incher and its power.
-Thirdly i definitely prefer OSX to Vista, having plenty of experience with Vista. OSX trades on the minimalistic look, and it feels much more comfortable than the cluttered apprearence of Vista. Also everything feels snappy and runs really nicely. The only problems i have encountered with software is the sudden, unprompted closure of imovie twice (which may be to do with problems with my connected camcorder).
Other things: The multi touch (although gimicky) makes navigation great without a mouse, the speakers and display are incredible (although the blacks aren't incredible, though are good) , and the small touches, such as the throbbing light whilst it's sleeping just convince you of the laptop's top quality.
Negatives - Not many mac-games, software compatibility issues... erm that's it!
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great machine, with reservations!, 11 April 2008
Firstly, where I'm coming from: I'm an IT administrator, looking after a heap of Windows servers, LINUX boxes & 40-50 'personal' machines, all these Windows (XP & Vista) running on a pretty large range of hardware. I also do photography & graphic design so use a fair few 'design & editing' packages. The reason for the launch into Mac-land is I have become bored with Windows & intrigued by Mac since it finally came up with a functioning operating system (UNIX). There's also the chance that if these things are as pleasant & easy to use as Apple claim, I could then run them out company-wide & have happy users (always something to aim for for a stress-free life!). So I got one...
The hardware: Excellent - a masterpiece of ergonomics. Great screen, great battery life, quick enough for a 'heavy user', and given these features/performance, pretty light. Very pleasant keyboard, excellent touchpad. Haven't found a single thing I'd change!
The software: Hmm. Very nice to use, which it would be, being (like) Gnome running on X11. But there are a couple of critical problems: one is that the system isn't particularly stable, at least not compared to the more recent versions of Windows. I'm pretty sure it's a program I'm using that's causing it rather than a hardware failure (wrong type of crash!), but it's taking out the OS too: this should never happen. The other was (!) a wireless problem, but - as far as I can tell - this has now been fixed due to a spate of firmware updates as I haven't had a problem in a couple of months.
So - aside from Leopard seeming to be not quite ready yet (I still get ocassional lock-ups which require an 'archive and reinstall' - incredible that this is needed really, but Apple have the system down to an art so it's quite painless), it's a good machine to use. My office machine (Mac Pro) has no stability problems, so I'm going to assume the laptop's upsets are 'user error', or rather 'user expecting more oomph than is available' problems so probably not applicable to other users...
I'd buy another, so overall things must be good!
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