Clayton’s Weblog

So after a year or so of nagging on and off, work agreed to buy Macbooks for the people in our group that wanted one.  As a result, I’ve ended up with a 15″ Pro.  So far there are some things I like and don’t like.

• The screen is beautiful.  I wish it were a little higher DPI, but the resolution is better than I was expecting.  The LED backlighting should also mean that I won’t be horribly disappointed that the screen isn’t as bright as it was the first day in a few weeks.
• Magsafe is neat.  Magsafe plugs shouldn’t fit as well into usb ports as they do into the Magsafe plug.  No, this didn’t end badly, but on the 15″ MBP, they’re right next to each other and it’s easy to put the plug into the USB port if you’re not paying attention.
• The keyboard is ok.  I find it a bit awkward, but I suspect I’m just not used to it.  It seems really stupid that I have a dedicated eject key, but no home/pgup/pgdn/end keys, but with DoubleCommand, it’s livable.
• The trackpad and gestures work very well.  I’m generally fairly indifferent about input devices.  I’ve used mice, trackpads, trackpoints, trackballs, etc, and I find that I get used to all of them fairly quickly.  The right click with two finger tap works much better than I expected, but I’d still prefer to just have two mouse buttons.  Hint to Apple: Make it look like one mouse button, but make the mechanicals underneath be able to tell if you clicked on the left or right hand side.  Then make OSX consider the two sides to be one button by default.  That way you don’t confuse anyone, and people that want two mouse buttons have it out of the box.  Consider this my proof for prior art when you try to patent this idea.
• Sound is definitely better than any Thinkpad I’ve used.  It’s unrealistic to expect it to be fantastic, but it’s completely workable, compared to IBM who likes to put speakers on the bottom of the laptop…
• Power brick is kind of large, but no larger than average really.  Power cord is longer than average I’d say, which is nice.
• The thermal design, for lack of a better term, sucks.  The MBP is generally always a little warm, and if the CPU is maxed out then the fans kick up to really high RPMS and it becomes too hot to have in your lap.  None of the other laptops I’ve owned in the past 5 years (Including a CoreDuo and Core2Duo) had any thermal issues.

All and all, I’m pretty pleased with it so far.