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• Two months ago, I never thought I would become a Mac fan. I had toyed with the idea, but if my Vista PC wasn’t compromised, I’m sure I’d still be a PC guy. But my time with the MacBook changed things. When it comes to my core computing applications: Internet, office productivity, and digital imaging and content creation, the MacBook works beautifully. It’s incredibly stable, extremely responsive, and a pure joy to use. Small touches like Cover Flow for the normal Finder and integrated Canon RAW support bring the extra level of polish that’s lacking from Windows Vista. With the unibody MacBooks adding a final tactile complement to software, it’s hard for me to imagine ever going back to Windows after making the switch on my primary PC. The MacBook itself is a stunning piece of hardware. Starting with the aluminum exterior and wonderfully intuitive multitouch trackpad to digging internally to the Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset and careful motherboard design, the MacBook is one of the best notebooks I have used at any price.  Sure, as a techie I’d love to have a higher-quality screen from the MacBook Air, and the backlit keyboard of the 2.4 GHz model, and yes, the addition of FireWire or at the very least an eSATA port would have been welcome. But, the notebook does everything else so well, so efficiently that I still get a smile every time I use my MacBook. I’m not the first PC guy to be impressed by the latest Macs. Our colleagues at Anandtech were pleasantly surprised to see the superior battery life of Mac OS X over Vista and our colleagues at Wired aren’t the only ones to comment on the speed of Mac OS X over even Windows XP. We’re just the first to look into the possibility of performance penalties in running hacked Mac operating systems. Windows Vista is still my platform of choice for home theater PCs and gaming. Windows Media Center still offers a better living room interface than Apple Front Row, and its support for ATSC HDTV makes it must-have in a digital living room. More importantly, I can build Windows Media Center PC of my choice, combining a silent CPU and power supply with a ton of hard drives and multiple ATSC tuners. The Mac doesn’t have anything like Media Center. Plex, the Mac OS X fork of XBMC and Boxee both show a lot of promise, but without the ATSC integration that Windows Media Center offers, it’ll be a while before I even think about leaving Windows Vista behind. The Mac also can’t compete with the PC when it comes to games. While StarCraft 2 will likely be the Mac Game of the Year in 2009, the PC version of Mirror’s Edge already has me itching to rebuild a gaming PC. But I’m waiting to rebuild. In January, Apple is expected to launch a new set of desktops. If these systems offer Core i7 quad-core CPUs, a modern GPU, and arrive at a reasonable price, I’ll be the first to get one to dual boot Vista for games and OS X for everything else. If Apple comes through with a netbook, I’m not sure if I’ll pick one up or not. The MacBook already does what I need in a notebook and the iPhone does everything else I need for extreme portability. An Apple netbook would need eight-hour battery life and full Office 2008 document support for me to make the switch.  Who knows, maybe iWork ’09 will run on ARM?

• Networking The MacBook ships with Gigabit Ethernet support, a feature Apple was quick to adopt, even with its earlier generation MacBooks. Historically, Apple used Atheros 802.11n chipsets. These designs, with 3x3 radios, offered theoretically better performance at long distances than similar 2x2 modules. Real-world performance with the Atheros implementation has been benchmarked at somewhere between 10 to 15% faster than the Broadcom solution depending on the access point. The current AirPort Extreme with Gigabit uses an Atheros module as well. With that said, the Broadcom design is the first 65nm single-chip 802.11n solution and has as much as 50% lower power consumption than other designs. In theory, Apple may see additional performance savings by going to a single-chip integrated Bluetooth/WiFi solution. We did not have any trouble running an 802.11n network on both 2.4 and 5 GHz frequencies or run into issues with dropped connections.  The MacBook was able to see 9 access points in my apartment complex whereas an Intel 3945abg was able to see 11. The two additional access points that were seen by the Intel 3945abg were labeled as “0 bars” of wireless signal, making the omission less important. Chassis and Keyboard The aluminum unibody design of the MacBook is superb. Not only does the laptop carry an impressive sturdiness to it, it makes the machine easier to clean. Some of the early MacBooks were affected by crooked keys, and our original unit had a sticky left shift key. Apple gave us no trouble when we asked to switch our MacBook for a new one. Our second MacBook had none of these problems. Keyboards have gotten considerably better over the last few years. Good keyboards were once the restricted realm of the ThinkPad and MacBook Pro. The unusual appearance of the MacBook keyboard is actually very comfortable to write with once you get the hang of it. Keys have a firm, tactile response that allows for easy touch typing. Although my first keyboard was a bit mushy (especially the Left Shift button), I had trouble noticing a difference between the MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards once I got my replacement unit. The original MacBook Pro allowed me to hit 140+ wpm at times. Using a more challenging typing test requiring more ring and small finger use of my non-dominant hand, I’ve clocked around 120 wpm for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro. Certainly for typing this entire document, the keyboard was never a problem. Multi-Touch Trackpad The iPhone introduced multitouch to the masses. The current MacBook and MacBook Pro’s have taken things to the next logical step. The MacBook trackpad is unquestionably the best trackpad I’ve used to date. Besides the giant surface area, the glass surface is noticeably smoother than any trackpad I’ve used. More importantly, the surface retains its slickness after extended use. Multitouch is hardly a gimmick. Besides the “use two fingers” to right click or “two fingers” to scroll, the four fingers to enable Expose and present all open windows is my most commonly used gesture. The tap-to-click function works well in the Mac, but the integrated button is also useful if I’m doing anything complex. For example, it’s possible to swipe four fingers up to see the desktop, use the physical button to grab something from the desktop, then swipe four fingers down twice to get to Expose, pick a Finder window and then move the file into the new directory. That is, the sensor is capable of detecting all 5 fingers being used at once.