MacBook 2008

So I recently purchased one of the new MacBooks released just last week.  I’ve now had about 5 days to play with it, so thought I’d give my initial thoughts.

First, the hardware.  Here is what I have:

• 2.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4 GB 1066 Mhz DDR3 SDRAM
• 250 GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 RPM

It feels a lot beefier then my previous MacBook (first gen, black model upgraded to 2GB RAM).  I’ve been using my previous MacBook for both work and personal usage for the past several months (primarily personal usage before that).  Lately I was feeling it strain at times.  I’m a web developer, so that in general means my normal suite of development tools running (Apache, MySQL, Navicat, TextMate) and also having to run Windows XP in Parallels and, at least at times, Photoshop.  Then of course there’s the other average stuff like IM, Email, etc that the average person runs.  All of that together is a workout for most computers, so I didn’t really fault my MacBook for straining under the load at times.

The new MacBook however, seems to carry the load with ease.  Today for example I had probably about 10-12 app’s running, plus Parallels/XP with 1GB of RAM dedicated to itself, and Photoshop, even with all of that running, it was still extremely responsive.  Definite thumbs up.

Some of the other items I’ll comment on because they seem to be getting coverage:

• High Gloss Screen: This really doesn’t bother me.  I don’t really understand why some people have such negative reactions to it, but they’re entitled to their opinions.  I will say that I tend to work in low-light environments, and working from home a lot, I have a great deal of control over my work environment (thanks Business Bullpen!).  So I never notice a reflection.
• Aluminum Body: It does feel sturdy.  I wouldn’t say it feels significanly more sturdy then my old MacBook, but it is very handsome and doesn’t pick up the oil smears like the previous black model can tend to do.
• No-Button Trackpad: It works.  Nicely.  This was by far the feature I was most apprehensive about when I purchased.  My initial reaction when I read about it was, “Oh man!  They ruined a great laptop.”  I currently use it with the functionality to mimic two buttons.  I notice that I have to be careful to click distinctly to the left or right to make sure it does the correct click.  It seems to have a little bit of gray-area where it decides which to give you on its own, but now that my fingers are getting trained, I’ve noticed it becoming a non-issue.  I’m very happy that they still gave it the feel of a button clicking, which is part of what I initially thought they’d taken away.

Now, let’s cover some of the software I first installed, just for the geeks of you that might be interested, in absolutely no particular order:

• MAMP – Great “get up and running fast” dev environment.  I highly recommend it unless you have a real need for a pretty strong custom configuration in your dev environment.  If you’re building things that will end up in shared hosting environments though, MAMP likely has you covered.
• Navicat – My GUI of choice for interfacing with a MySQL server.  I’ve tried CocoaMySQL, and I know it’s free (Navicat is not), but Navicat just gets it done better for me.
• TextMate – This is definitely my editor of choice for web development now.  In previous positions I’ve used BBEdit, and even DreamWeaver, but TextMate seems like the right balance between features, speed, and ease of use.
• NeoOffice – Google Docs doesn’t quite take care of all my office needs, at least not well enough.  NeoOffice is an off-shoot of OpenOffice, but made specifically for the Mac.
• iTerm – Improved and tabbed Terminal, ’nuff said.
• Transmit – Great FTP client for the Mac.
• Parallels – Sadly I can’t give up on Windows all together, I still need to test my code in IE 6/7.
• FireFox – Duh …
• Fluid – Easily create app’s out of your web-apps (single-site browser).  Whenever I tell people about this app, they almost always get envious when I start mentioning the websites we all use that I’ve virtually made into desktop app’s.
• Adium – Best multi-service chat application there is.
• Dropbox – 2GB for free?  How can you pass it up.  It’s installed on all my computers.
• JungleDisk – Mount a Amazon S3 bucket as a drive on your computer.  This is another one installed on all of my machines.  I use it for both off-site personal storage as well as off-site backups.

I would say that covers most of the essentials.  I’m sure there are other applications that I’m using, but the list is probably already stretching to the realm of non-noteworthy.

One other thing I will mention is that this is the first time I’ve started messing with Time Machine.  It really is quite nice.  I use an external USB hard drive to let it keep my backups.  Basically it keeps hourly backups of my files for 24 hours, daily backups for a month, and weekly backups until it runs out of space on your backup drive.  That’s pretty good peace of mind, and nice if you happened to delete a file and realize tomorrow that you want it back or need to roll back some changes.  As I mentioned, I’m pursuing other backup means as well (such as S3), so I don’t feel it’s the only answer, but it is a good answer.