Unibody Macbook

Unibody Macbook – ⓒ Diego Park Creative Commons

At least two months have passed since the hard drive of my old work laptop died. The result was that my old 15” Macbook Pro was replaced by a 13” Unibody Macbook. The fact that it took me nearly two months to write this blog entries shows two things:

  • I’m quite busy
  • The transition was quite un-eventful

I was a little bit worried of going to a smaller screen size, but when using the laptop as a laptop, this is a minor issue, which is compensated by the smaller size of the computer. When I’m using it at work, I’m using the same setting as with the Macbook Pro: a 30” screen with an external Microsoft Natural Keyboard, so the difference in size does not really matter. So in the end the difference amounts to small things.
Things I love with the new machine:

  • The multi-touch pad.
  • The strong feeling of the Unibody structure.
  • The new keyboard’s touch.
  • The smaller form factor.
  • The larger hard-drive.

The things I miss from the previous machine:

  • Being able to drive the 30” monitor without an external dongle, this is mostly an issue because said dongle is buggy and needs to be reset a few times a day.
  • The backlit keyboard.
  • Having a firewire port, this made moving the data from one machine to the other way more complicated.

I’m still ambivalent about the matte glossy screen. My feeling is that it is way better when working inside, but slightly less confortable outside. As the fraction of the time I work outside is relatively small, I can’t say this is major issue. Performance-wise, I have not really noticed a real difference. The two machines feel different, and the newer machine generally feel snappier, but sometime I have a feeling its slower. As I have never run any benchmark, and quite a few applications got replaced, this might just be a feeling.

The interesting thing, is that the newer machine is in my opinion a better laptop, Apple started back-porting software and ideas developed for the iPhone and I really hope the trend continues with Snow Leopard.

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