Thanks Riyad to another AWESOME mini!
Whew… I’ve been putting writing this off for a long time on purpose. A lot of you expected this mini days after I got the MBP, but I have to admit, having never used Mac before I had no goddamn clue what was going on so I didn’t WANT to write a mini. It would be things like “Where the sh*t is the Start menu LOLZ PONIES!!!111″
I will say the laptop has some quirks to work out. It gets f-ing hot, like “goddamn I’m going to put this on something other than my lap” hot. The batter life sucks, in Battery Saver mode, it’s barely 3hrs, more like 2hrs 45mins and in Performance mode is like 1hr 45mins which is useless in my opinion. The battery life is just short enough that I don’t really feel mobile, I always need to be near a plug. This isn’t the laptop’s fault and I’m hoping that fuel-cell batteries later this year correct this issue and get me atleast 6hrs, that would be awesome.
I would point out when you plug this thing in and it’s running in performance mode, it flies. The HD is pretty smoking fast. Also there are issues with sleep mode and shutting down that I can’t figure out. Sometimes opening the laptop doesn’t bring it out of sleep mode, and on a few occasions banging around on the laptop didn’t help either. Also shutting it down and closing the thing while it’s shutting down seems to halt it into sleep mode instead of finishing the shut down sequence… this is weird. Now the BIGGEST complaint is that f-ing open office runs under X11 on Mac and has no native port for Mactels (NeoOffice doesn’t run on Mactel). The sucky part about running in X11 is like that it looks like the old school retarded Open Office interface, running inside of a shell and shares no common clipboard (copy paste). It’s basically like running OpenOffice inside of a VMWare window if you want a comparison and I refuse to buy MS Office for this thing. I’ll just wait until Open Office or NeoOffice stop sucking on Mac. Hell, even Gimp looks native with GTK, just use the goddamn GTK version or something (I’m yelling that at the Open Office developers, not you guys)
Now all that aside, everything except the heat can probably be fixed by software upgrades so I’m just keeping my fingers crossed.
Ok so OS X is slick. Is it the greatest thing ever and I’m so productive now that I could kill a family of 3? No, it’s just another operating system to get work done on.
I will say this, I DO NOT use ANY of the super slick Mac software that makes the Macs so popular. iTunes, i(Whatever), Garage Band, etc. I do email, browse web and program on this thing so I’m missing out on like 80% of the Mac experience. I will say what little I have used of the Mac software (Front row, iDVD, etc.) it is truely f-ing sweet. Let’s put it this way, if I used ALL this software and was a big blogger, had tons of music and watched tons of movies, this review would look a lot like:
“OMFG SO F-ING NICE!”
but since I don’t, and I basically use this thing like a vanilla laptop, my review is more “This is a totally smooth/stable experience but nothing is leaping out at me”. SO try and figure out what kind of user you are.
I would say that now with bootcamp, there isn’t much incentive to NOT get one, except you might wait for next year when Apple does a refresh on the new Conroe (or Murano or whatever they are calling the laptop part) which will be probably like 33-40% faster than these Core Duos, although I’m quick happy with the speed of the laptop. I wouldn’t compare it to other laptops, but most likely to my desktop… that’s a good sign.
The monitor is great. I am not Robert Heron so I don’t know the details of it, but if you like your Dell 2405’s quality, it’s probably like that or any other nice LCD. It does 1440×960 or something like that.
I do have to say working with OS X and having everything set and updated real time (like video settings, net settings, etc.) is pretty tight. It really is a nice OS. Safari is missing some features that Firefox has that annoy me, but I don’t want to use Firefox and Thuderbird on Mac, I want the full Mac experience. At first Mail’s threading annoyed me (with the coloring) but then I loaded it up once and was able to immediately tell what threads were read and which were not… so I came around and liked it. This has been happening with other mac things as well.
This whole drag-and-drop install business is slick. Finding free software to do stuff with on Mac is hard. While you can run most linux stuff, I avoid it (after the Open Office fiasco). Really unless it’s written FOR mac, or is atleast Mac aware (like a Java app that has been tested on Mac), my guess is it sort of sucks. Matt sent me a huge list of tools to install for Mac, I barely understand what is there already so I didn’t install any of them yet but for you more experienced users out there, this might make the Mac boners for you.
Spotlight is slick. I sort of miss my Start > All Programs menu, but really if all I hit is Apple-Space, then type what I want and hit enter… I guess I don’t need a menu to navigate.
Two things that really annoy me because I suck is a) there is no easy shortcut to maximize a window and the green plus doesn’t fill the screen on all apps, like Safari. It’s smarter than me so it maximizes the screen based on the current page (just enough to show as much vert and not show a horz scroll bar), which is super not-helpful since I don’t stay on the same website the entire time I browse the web. Also Safari always opens it’s download window when it downloads anything and won’t close it after it’s done. Clutter rocks.
Mac automatically understood my USB key drive (FAT) and my new Windows partition I installed with bootcamp (NTFS), that’s cool.
Adium is a good browser, but something feels incomplete about it. I wanted to just use iChat and stay all “pure” but it only supports Google and Yahoo or AIM or something, and I read somewhere that each account creates a separate contact window which is not helpful. I really wish all these IM clients could converge.
Java runs great on it and looks good as well. Oh yea and for some reason Mac wireless is like super-charged, I really get awesome transfer speeds on the wireless connection anywhere in the house and pretty readily keep a strong connected signal with my router.
Oh wait, something I do need to give props to is installing anything or upgrading anything on the mac. It’s such a smooth process. Like installing bootcamp required a Firmware upgrade. That was totally easy. Same goes for Bootcamp. Good description of OS X: It does everything with class, from setting mouse tracking speed to updating the OS. It’s all automated and easy to do, no interference or fuck ups.
So I would give the MBP a 7.5/10. It would be an 8.2/10 if it didn’t get so hot and it would be a 9.2/10 if the battery lastest atleast 4-4.5 hours. It’s really hard to give this a score because really all it boils down to is that it’s a nice laptop. It’s made out of great hardware, looks good and has a nice feel… so what am I rating? OS X? I know nothing about it and barely use it. Should I rate Windows on it? That doesn’t make sense… so I guess this whole review is like a “Retarded man’s view of a Mac”. I really need to reiterate, If you are the type to make use of all the iApplications on the Mac, you should go buy one right goddamn now. They really are as slick as they sound and look in the keynote speeches. If you are like me and just use the laptop as a tool I really can’t say if this is better for you or maybe a Thinkpad with the extended 7-cell battery.
P.S.> In reference to my track-pad issue on Windows being “floaty”, it’s actually just floaty when going towards the edges of the pad, the cursor likes to float left to right, maybe it’s because it’s an extra-wide track pad? Dunno.
Ask any questions you have, I’ll try and be more detailed.
-Riyad