Black MacBook Review by Andri.dk

I bought my Macbook for school because I needed a more compact laptop than my old PC plus I was getting sick of Windows. So far it has been up to the task of serving me in school.

Specs: 2GB ram, 80GB hd. Software: amsn, firefox, parallels.

I like

Battery life: Somewhat better than on most other laptops around me.

Processor Power: Handles everything very smoothly, including multiple virtual machines in Parallels.

Screen: Bright and smooth.

Internal gadgets: Bluetooth, WLAN, iSight work well, no problems so far

Virtualization: Parallels performs very well for all my Windows specific needs. No need to multiboot.

I don't like

Grease-magnet: It's very annoying that I have to constantly wipe grease and smudges of the surface

Speakers: Really, people's cellphones have better sound quality than my Macbook. However I don't use it much for audio so it doesn't affect me much.

Screen: The glossy monitor is very hard to read if the sun is shining on your monitor. However I mostly use mine indoors.

Gaming: The internal graphics card really wasn't made for any games. Even Warcraft 3 is painfully slow. Don't buy this for games!

Video out: I _hate_ the fact that you need to buy Apple specific cables for every output. You need one for svhs/svideo, one for DVI and another one for VGA. The DVI plug is specificly designed so you can't use any DVI-to-VGA cables on it.

Upgrades

I upgraded the memory from 256MB to 2GB and boy, oh boy! The speed improvements in the operating systems are considerable. Money well spent.

Would I recommend it?

This machine is ideal for students or people who need a mobile office. It however is not suitable for gamers or people looking for 3d performance.

I'm a virgin!

I've been a Linux user for 9 years and a Windows user for 11 (i think). This was my fist Macintosh computer and the change in working environment wasn't that hard.

Problems?

The only problems I had was when the Apple store didn't stock enough memory for the laptops and I had to wait for 2 weeks to get it even if I did order it with the machine.

Conclusion

I'm happy with my Macbook and I would recommend others to get one, even if it's not perfect.

Go Back - or - Leave a Comment

It's true speakers sound is not the best in portable computers. And at firs I thought it was to low to my music, but I found about VLC that has a better way to pre amp the sound or whatever it does it works, and soon I found out that iTunes equalizer can also raise volume and the quality of sound is still good. I think there should be a sound hardware improvement though!

Posted by TVX45 on April 24th, 2007

great reveiw! seriously whats with apple using plastic that attracts so much grease, smudges and fingerprints? i have the same problem on my white iPod video and my friend has the same frustrations on his black iPod video. I recently put a down payment on a black macbook (blacbook?) and it looked to me it had different plastic. i maybe wrong though.

Posted by dillon on July 28th, 2007

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