The Apple Macintosh MacBook

It seems funny to think that my first Apple Macintosh laptop (a PowerBook 100 if you are interested) had no CD drive, no wireless connectivity, no Bluetooth, no software, no colour screen and yet cost £300 more than the new base model MacBook on review here. And that was 15 years ago.

Wow how things have moved on. But the new MacBook has a lot in common with that original machine. It’s small, very light and very, very usable. In fact, it makes you wonder why anyone would want a desktop machine.

The all-white polycarbonate MacBook is only 12.78 inches (32.5 cm) wide by 8.92 inches (22.7 cm) deep, and is paperback thin at only 1.08 inches (2.75 cm). Weighing in at 5.2 pounds (2.36 kg) it really is a carry anywhere machine. Yes, I know that all laptops are meant to be, but my other Toshiba PC laptop feels positively lardy in comparison.

Don’t underestimate the benefits of a lightweight laptop. By the time you add a case, mouse, power adaptor, assorted CDs, diary and the other detritus we need for work a heavy laptop soon becomes a pain in the neck, and back, and shoulder.

But lightweight doesn’t mean lacking in functionality. Open up the magnetic latch on the lid and the MacBook shows you its 13.3-inch (diagonal) glossy widescreen TFT display. This supports a native resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels and millions of colours, giving you a widescreen cinema effect in a handy package.

If you want to use the Mac as a desktop you can also plug in an external keyboard, mouse and monitor, although you will need a Mini DVI to VGA adaptor (£15). Don’t let the London Apple Store palm you off with the wrong one like they did me - grrr!

Here is another revelation. Plug in a PC mouse and you instantly get right-hand button pop-ups and scrolling windows, just like a PC – nice one Apple.

A PC keyboard was also plugged in, recognised instantly and worked well – although you have to do some head scratching to find out how you access the Apple key. It is the Window's key by the way. The MacBook even has a tiny built-in iSight camera for video conferencing.

The Macbook’s Wi-Fi turned out to be very effective, allowing me to connect and download data from networks that my PC could barely detect. Back in my office and it refused to connect to my Belkin wireless router. Switch the encryption off and it was fine, put it back on and no go. After a lot of surfing to find a solution it seems that this is a known problem. All you have to do is add a “$” sign to the beginning of the WEP code – easy when you know how. From then on it worked fine.

The MacBook’s Bluetooth functionality was also very good, allowing me to set up a GPRS connection via my Nokia mobile phone in about two minutes. I don’t think a PC would have been that easy.

Battery life was excellent – the battery gauge suggested that you could get up to 4 hours on a full charge. I very much doubt that, but 2-3 should easily be possible.

Other excellent features include a Magsafe magnetic power supply plug. This pulls way if you accidentally yank the cable, so saving your laptop from instant death as it hits the floor. I have never actually found anyone who has destroyed his or her laptop in this way, but it is the thought that counts.

The keyboard, while looking like it has migrated from a child’s toy, is actually surprisingly good, even if the keys look like they belong on an office calculator.

There seems little point in singing the praises of Mac OSX and all its toys, other than to say that you get iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb and the others as standard. What was annoying was that the updater program advised me to download the latest versions as soon as I hooked up to the net – all 400Mb of them. Still, Windows XP is little better.

As for other programs that is entirely up to you, although the MacBook will happily run all Intel-native software. You can also run MS Windows using Bootcamp or Parallels although I haven’t felt the need so far.

A free 120Mb download of NeoOffice gave me all I needed to open a PC version of most of the documents I have, including those produced in MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint - this feature was written in NeoOffice and saved as MS Word.

In all then, if you are already a Mac fan you will love the MacBook. Even if you are a PC user there is a lot to be said for a machine that is this cute. I won’t be throwing my PC away yet, but I think this one could soon be accompanying me on any trip that involves lugging a computer around for any length of time.

The base model with a 1.83MHz Intel Core Duo processor and 512Mb of Ram will set you back £749. This gets you a CD rewriter/DVD player combo drive. Increase your budget and you can get a faster processor, DVD rewriter and more memory.

See www.apple.com/uk for more details.

posted by Steve Nichols @ 9:31 AM Comments: 0