Before I get into actually discussing the hardware I just need to say that while I usually love buying things at the Apple store, with the free roaming sales people who can check you out right then and there, it doesn’t work that well for new product releases. A salesman was trying to make a list of people, but you could also try to corral anyone in a blue shirt and get them to help you. Getting on a list and then having to find a salesman anyway made the experience chaotic and frustrating.

Initial experience

Since I got to the Apple store before the new machines were on sale, there weren’t any out on the floor to look at so the first time I actually saw the computer was when I got it home and opened the box. The first impression was striking, the top looks sculpted. Apple has the knack of taking last years hot shit and making it look antiquated instantly. The new MacBook is no exception. I’m upgrading from the last model of the MacBook Pro, and even though the design was aging, it still looked modern in the context of other laptops. Not anymore. Even though the new design is evolutionary over the last one, it leaves it in the dust. The curves on the case are much more refined and the black keyboard and screen bezel just looks classy. The case itself is the most solid I’ve ever felt on a laptop. It’s completely rigid with no creakiness at the seams. There’s no flex whatsoever when picking up the laptop. The following image compares the two side-by-side while I was using the (excellent) Migration Assistant to move my data across.

Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to after working on the older MBP. The keys there are larger and right next to each other. The keys on the new one are smaller and your typing has to be a little more precise. It’s an easy adjustment that only takes a couple of hours to get used to. The overall tactile response is very good, not as clicky as I’d like but responsive enough. The backlighting on the new keyboard is very good. The black keys contrast really well and I’d almost describe the overall effect as “glowing.”

The new trackpad is really interesting. There have been some concerns about the fact that it doesn’t have a button, but the whole trackpad itself clicks. Really the best advice I can give is to just treat it like a regular trackpad with a button until you get used to it. I actually find it hilarious that, after the years of bitching about apple not providing a second mouse button, they’ve taken away the first one. And to good effect. You can get a right click effect by setting up the trackpad so that a click in the lower right corner brings up the context menu.

Gestures are something new for me. So far it’s working really well, but the four finger gestures seem almost kitchy and just using the corners of the screen to bring up expose works much better. I’d like to see what other applications can do with these though. Working with gestures on photos is really neat, you can pinch and zoom just like an iPhone.

Screen

The new black bezel around the screen makes everything look brighter. The screen itself is insanely bright. Seriously, I think it’s only a couple of lumens away from achieving that effect in crappy movies where text is projected on the hacker’s face. Colors are crisp with great contrast and the LED backlighting gives the screen a really cool temperature feel.

The new screen is glossy, which is unfortunate. You can make up for most glare by cranking the brightness all the way up, but you’ll still have to adjust your viewing angle. Fortunately the new case design fixes one of my main complaints with the old design in that the screen has a much greater range of motion. I could never seem to tip the old screen back far enough when it was balanced on my lap before. Now there’s plenty of motion. One minor complaint I have is that the glass front on the new screen makes it slightly heavier so that it’s more likely to bend on its own as you move the laptop around.

Conclusion

With the new MacBook, Apple has taken their old design and updated it. It’s not a revolutionary change, but it is significant and better in almost every way. I have some minor complaints about the screen moving on its own, the edge of the palmrest is slightly sharper and it digs into my forearms a little bit, but overall the improvements more than make up for any quibbles I have. I’m also amazed by how cool the new MacBook runs. I’ve been sitting with it on my lap for over an hour now and there’s virtually no temperature increase when my old one would have been cooking my lap by now. Overall, I’m really pleased with the upgrade.

The construction is amazingly sturdy, almost too sturdy. There were several points where I felt like I was forcing the chassis to do something it wasn’t meant to do, when it was just putting up resistance because of how well manufactured it was. Twisting the screen to put it into tablet mode took more force than I’m comfortable using on most electronic devices. It felt like I was going to break something just while opening the thing up.

It’s slow. Not painfully slow, but slow. If anyone remembers the icons bouncing in the dock on OSX.0, it’s about that bad, and the icons even bounce in the same manner. The browser takes 10-15 seconds to start, the whole machine takes a while to start up, longer than it should with the solid state disk in there. Once an application is actually up and running though, things are pretty quick.

The keyboard is impossible to touch type on but still awesome. Considering the keys are covered in a rubber sheet, I was scared that it’d feel like some kind of early 80s speak and spell with regard to the tactile feedback and force needed to type. Fortunately it responds to a normal amount of force so kids using these things aren’t going to end up with tendinitis. There’s also a very positive tactile response to keystrokes. The only thing making touch typing impossible for adults is the actual size of the keyboard.

The touchpad, while it functions, well is kind of odd to use. There is one continuous area on the bottom of the keyboard where the touchpad is, the problem is that it appears that only the middle 1/3 of the touchpad is actually usable. On normal laptops you’re used to a tactile feel when you come up against the edge of the touchpad and hit the case. That’s not the case here: hit the far left of the touchpad and your finger just keeps going while the cursor stays. It’s really hard to get used to. You almost have to actually look at the keyboard to see where your finger is. I didn’t play with all of the applications so I’m not sure if the contiguous touchpad area has a use in any of them.

The screen is amazingly clear for its size. Colors are crisp, and there’s no ghosting.

The user interface is interesting, but it takes a little getting used to. The way things are done in the UI makes a lot of sense but it’s not like using any other computer. I found myself with multiple application instances open fairly often until I got used to how it operated. Hovering over an icon on the “home” screen brings up a context menu for resume and close. The system icons, accessible my mousing to a corner of the screen, have labels when you hover over them, but the labels don’t appear to be clickable, which I found nonintuitive.

Overall it’s a pretty neat machine, definitely useful for its intended purpose and I wouldn’t mind having one for personal use. I can see it being useful in classrooms anywhere, not just in third world countries.