Toy Time: Apple MacBook

No, we didn't buy it in Singapore! (Although if we'd had the luggage space...)

We bought this about a week before we set off. Why? Because Bec has caught the movie bug, and as the Apple ads so stylishly put it, PC movies just don't quite cut it. We discovered this after creating a movie of our Thailand holiday in Windows Movie Maker, and then discovering the complete lack of a "make DVD" option. WMM is fine if you want to make little postage-stamp size movies to email to people, but it just doesn't support the quality levels and file formats you need if you want to make a smooth, good-looking DVD.

So Little Miss Spielberg "needed" a Mac - and I must say I didn't need a great deal of persuading, having admired Macs since OS X came out in 2000, and desired a Mac since they switched to Intel processors, giving them a very healthy speed boost and genuine (as opposed to icky-slow virtual) Windows compatibility.

So the white 13" MacBook was purchased. It's a 2GHz Core Duo (not Core2 Duo sadly) with a 60Gb drive, SuperDrive DVD burner and the RAM boosted to a healthy 1.25Gb.
It's a terrific machine, incredibly light and compact, yet the screen never really feels small cos the resolution is fantastic. It's just beautiful to look at, even the retail box is a work of art.

It boots in less than half the time of our similarly-specced PC laptop, has no annoying "trial versions" of antivirus/DVD/utility software clogging it up out of the box and nagging you to spend more money(shame, Dell, shame), and detected and hooked up to our wi-fi in about 10 seconds. Speed-wise, Firefox loads in about the same amount of time as the Dell (a 1.83GHz Pentium-M with WinXP), and feels faster when rendering web pages, although that might just be the smaller screen. I don't really use any other cross-platform software so can't compare the speed for any other tasks.

The real killer feature of the Mac is of course the "creative" software that is "free", installed and ready to go from the moment you first turn the thing on. They all work a little different to the PC - iPhoto and it's concept of albums vs. libraries vs. folders, iMovie's editing behaviour being destructive (i.e. if you trim the ends of a clip, it'll actually delete the unseen bits), but they work so well together that you feel you can try just about anything and, sure enough, it just works.

We're still learning all the tricks with the Mac, but we're definitely BIG fans. It's fast, small, silent, intuitive, and the hardware is simply outstanding design. Did I mention it will comfortably go for 4.5 hours on one battery charge? Or the MagSafe power connector which not only can show you at a glance whether the battery is fully charged yet, but holds onto the Mac magnetically so you can't kick it off a table when you stumble through the power lead? How about the way the lid is held shut magnetically so there's no clasp to break?

OK, nerd-rant over. Normal blogging will resume shortly...