Scaling down, moving up
31/03/08 21:44 Filed in: Hardware
Why a smaller, cheaper laptop made
sense...
Photo courtesy Apple.
It's no surprise to me that Apple's MacBook portable computer is its biggest selling technology product after the iPod.
For me, it's come close to being the perfect laptop, and here's why.
I need three things in a portable computer, upgradeability, power and ports.
The Macbook manages to deliver on all three key points, not as fully as its "Pro" counterpart does, but the compromises are quite acceptable.
It would be nice to have two FireWire ports, but I've matched one up with a powered hub. The shared video graphics might be snappier if Apple had chosen to use a dedicated chip from NVidia or ATI, but I can drive an external 23" monitor in spanned desktop mode without any issues.
If there is one thing that irritates me about the MacBook, it's the faked "millions of colours" mode on an LCD screen than only really displays thousands. For most folks, this is likely to be a non-issue, but the difference in screen quality between the MacBook Pro and its cheaper sibling is visible when you look at high resolution images side by side on their screens.
The one thing I've given up that I don't regret is two pounds of weight, the difference between my old PowerBook G4 and the new MacBook.
Over the years, I've owned the original PowerBook 100, the 145, 150, 540 and at a critical juncture, the first PowerBook G3, also known as the 3500.
This was the first laptop computer I owned that moved from being a satellite computer to being my main Mac. From that time on, my desktop computers devolved from being workstations to being scan stations and servers. Now I own no desktop systems and my old PB G4 runs as the office server.
After the 3500, with its whopping 256MB of RAM and 5GB hard drive, I was a portable computer user for good. The 3500 was replaced by the PowerBook G4 Pismo, formally titled by Apple "Bronze Keyboard," which I must have cracked open to change RAM and hard drives at least a half-dozen times.
Next up was the Mac my wife dubbed Gwyneth, the first of the TiBooks, a 667mhz, slab of thin metal, which evolved over time (through sale and upgrade cycles) to its 1ghz kin and finally the PB G4 that I still own, fastened with velcro to an articulating arm just over my left shoulder.
That Mac is probably the laptop that I've owned the longest and it's due for an upgrade to Leopard soon.
I've never bought at the top of the line and until Gwyneth, I never bought new, the build quality of the older laptops was solid enough that a two-year old computer was less than halfway through its lifecycle.
But I never bought down at the bottom of the sales listings either. The MacBooks have changed that equation for me, and I suspect for many other Mac owners as well.
I can honestly say that if the cheapest MacBook was available in black, that's the one I would be using now. After using a white MacBook for just three months, I can safely say that I will never buy anything made of white plastic ever again.
It was, shall we say, a mismatch for my lifestyle.
Apple's decision to work closely with Intel and to embrace their chip designs with remarkable speed has made even the lowly MacBook a vibrant piece of equipment. In less than two years, the MacBook has been revised four times, and each upgrade has added incremental value to the agreeably small slabs of plastic and silicon.
I'm not an undemanding user. I routinely run 20 or more processes, at least five of which really should be running on their own, and while the fans on the MacBook hum into action every now and then, the portable copes with what I throw at it with digital élan.
Of course, the first day I got it, I booted it once the way it shipped to make sure everything was working and then tore out the stock RAM and hard drive, replacing them with 4GB and a 250GN disk.
Not everybody will need to dose their MacBook with hardware steroids, in fact, most MacBook users won't ever tax their systems in their stock configuration, but isn't it wonderful that after years of the artificially stunted iBooks, there is a truly affordable portable Mac that you can turn into a powerhouse?
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Apple MacBook US$1,099 - 1,499