Okay, so I went against my 'not for another year' plan and purchased a new MacBook on Friday.
Honestly, I was really going to wait another year before buying a new laptop. I was going to wait til Apple "got all the bugs out" and I was going to get some more mileage out of my machine. After my experience putting in a new bottom case, I have become convinced that my PowerBook is out to get me and destroy my life. It's like the laptop just went and joined the Russian Mafia, and now I'm shopping for cement shoes. Anyhow, I just really got tired of dealing with replacing pieces of my primary machine, and would rather leave it to someone else at this point. I got the bottom case on, though. Needless to say, my PowerBook's working just fine, I just got a newer, sleeker, sexier version of it on my lap now.
Dirty.
I was expecting to come home, unpack it, get it all set up, and get ready to complain about things. I'm finding it difficult to do so. Apple's decision of a "glossy screen" irritated me a little, as I've seen dozens of laptops out there with these screens, along with the cheap flourescent lights in the standard computer retailer glaring off of them. It didn't make the best user experience, and my wife and I purchased her laptop completely blind because I was afraid of the same thing. Turns out that the glossy screen on this thing isn't so bad at all. Colors are wonderfully vibrant, glare is only an issue at certain angles at my employer's office. The built-in iSight camera is clean and crisp, but is pretty much the same as my standalone iSight -- just integrated. Front Row is a pleasant surprise, as I've never taken the time to really play with it. The additional remote and the simple functionality is really nice, and I'm tempted to get a TV adapter for it so I can see it on a bigger screen. The processor is really fast, but I expected that. Most of the things I was worried about was calmed slightly as I took part in the whole 'hackintosh' movement. I ran the less-than-legal copy of OS X on my Pentium 4 machine at home with great success, minus the unsupported video card. It really was a fantastic, seamless experience, and even Rosetta apps ran pretty well on the machine. Luckily, it's all even better now. These little machines are quite fantastic.
The only PowerPC apps I still use are Office, Photoshop, Microsoft RDC, and Apple Remote Desktop. I've found that Office performs pretty much on par with my old PowerBook. Photoshop is still occasionally painful, but that was expected. I use unix rdesktop now instead of RDC. Apple Remote Desktop still sucks. You have to hack around it to get it to run, and the whole system comes to a halt if you leave the agent running as a startup item. Naturally, this is all fixed with ARD 3, but that's another few hundred dollar upgrade that I'm not ready to do yet.
In true blog style, I took pictures of the whole unpacking process. I am not, however, going to tear it apart for you. Freaks.
