My New Laptop

"New" should really be in inverted commas--it's from 2008.

I'm truly amazed with this thing, though. It's around five years old, and still feels solidly constructed, runs well, and feels modern. I have long suspected that Apple has the best build quality around, but as this is the first Mac I've owned since a 90's PowerPC (technically my parents') I haven't been able to verify that claim with my own experience--until now. It's one of those "Unibody" Macbooks, that are very similar to the Macbook Pros of the same period.

I'm still having trouble getting over how well it works after all this time. My brother's Toshiba laptop went after less than two years, and my mother's Dell after three or four. This Macbook is still going strong after five.

I probably can't write shock and awe to really convey how amazed I am.

Of course, it has issues. The charging slot is broken to some extent--the MagSafe charger has to be held in the right place for the laptop to charge. There's some damage to the corner where it was dropped. The DVD drive whines and scrapes on accepting disks. The battery charge drops quickly when streaming video. Yet, hardly any of these are noticeable; simple workarounds (like hooking the charge cable under the wireless mouse dongle) make them almost disappear. The latest version of OSX runs as if it was native to the laptop (unlike XP SP2...) and I'm still admiring some of the choices made in regards to fullscreen windows and workspaces, which makes up for some of the lackluster experience of using the window manager. The multi-fingered gestures are nice, when you're willing and able to use a trackpad, but otherwise they can be annoying. Finder's limited abilities are only partially made up by having a somewhat watered down bash shell available. But all in all, I'm quibbling over almost insignificant details: even a flawed laptop is better than no laptop.

Want to hear a funny story? OSX thought it could hide things from a system administrator. I broke out sudo and chown. I wonder if Finder feels violated now.

Want to hear another funny story? For the same model of mouse in Office Depot, the colorful ones are cheaper than the plain ones. I may never understand.

Anyway, these are my first thoughts on having a laptop, and using a Macintosh. I've bought 8gb of RAM and a new hard drive to upgrade it, which will hopefully prolong its life beyond the expected time, but it's doing pretty well as it is.