Hello.

Around Monday last week I finally received my MacBook. Now, we all heard a lot of complaints from the Apple community in general, CPU whines, fan mooing, overheating, discoloration, display artifacts after sleeping, frequent crashes, random shutdowns, and the list goes on and on.

However I haven’t yet experienced any of those symptoms, I still haven’t had a single problem (apart from one that was already fixed anyway). Aestetically, the MacBook is a well designed machine featuring the standard new-world Apple design. The finish is glossy on the outside and matte on the inside (with the exception of the screen). The only two problems i found with it were the sharp edges which feel a bit strange, but can’t actually cut you, and the way it catches dust, dirt, and whatever else. It’s actually not that it catches more dirt, it’s more like that you can actually see all the dirt. It just made me terribly pedantic. Which in a way isn’t really a problem.
Oh, and yes, the Apple logo on the back of the screen is still lit.

On the left side of the machine, we see the different ports.

A Kensington security lock, headphone jack, line-in, two USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, a mini-DVI external display port, a gigabit ethernet port and of course, MagSafe.

The headphone jack knows when there’s a set of headphones connected and restore the volume settings you had on previously when you removed the headphones, so basically what it does is save the volume. Pretty useful. In 10.4.6 it used to actually cause a kernel panic whenever you unplugged your headphones and twisted the jack at the same time, however, it was fixed. (At least for me.)
The USB and FireWire ports work great, good speeds as usual.

As for ethernet, connecting and setting up - it’s all done automatically without you having to do anything thanks to Mac OS X. It also has a built in AirPort Extreme card. The range is very good, really good, I can see around 7 right now, where other portables see maybe 3.
MagSafe really is a treat. You don’t have to worry about directing the plug, you don’t have to worry about the orientation, etc. It even has a little LED that shines orange when the thing is charging and green when it’s done charging. Additionally, near the battery, there are five LEDs which are used to indicate how charged the battery is.

There also were a lot of complaints about the new shiny screen. Yes, it is mainly just a show-off thing, and at first I really didn’t like the idea of the MacBook having a shiny screen, in practice, I haven’t experienced any problems with the screen. I can work with it just about anywhere. However, the screen has other problems. The color consistancy isn’t very good, unless you find a very very specific angle, you get used to it after a while. Then there’s another problem which is mainly a problem with me actually, is that I feel as if i can sort of see the screen refreshing. It’s not a real problem, as I only notice it if I’m either just staring at the desktop aimlessly, or just actually looking for it. It’s also much harder to notice if you increase the brightness. I also found out that I’m the only one who notices this problem. So yeah, it’s probably my uber-vision or whatever.

The iSight takes some really good quality videos (and pictures), that is, for a so-called “webcam”.

The keyboard is realy strange. Reminds me a bit of a Spectrum ZX. It’s pretty good, and it’s about the size of a normal keyboard, very comfortable to type on. It may require some force for the keys to actually respond, but even that gets pretty trivial after you get used to it.

The MacBook is blazingly fast. Speed is not an issue. However, I urge you to get at least 1GB of memory. This new Intel code is really memory hungry, not to mention that PowerPC applications (like Photoshop for example) will also need Rosetta to be loaded in order for them to run, which reduces their performance a bit, and makes them take a lot more memory than usual. Under Rosetta they would still work, only slightly slower.

The heat issue isn’t really that bad. I just put a really heavy book on my lap, and place the laptop on top of the book, that pretty much solves it. I’d say that the cause for this heat is the fact that they kept the fan-speed low, which makes the MacBook run extremely quiet. The only time you are likely to hear something from it is when you run the CPU at %100 for a couple of minutes, and even then it’s pretty faint, almost inaudible. (Unlike my Pentium 4, which can be heard from miles away, probably)

Overall, it’s a good machine. The MacBook is all you need. It can run both Mac OS X alongside with Windows (using bootcamp). Go get one while it’s still early in the release cycle, not that much to fix for Rev B.