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Life with eames
So it's been a few weeks now that eames, the new Macbook, has been in the house [1, 2], and I figured it was the right time for a short review of how it's fit into my life.
Usage
eames is being used far more often than I would have thought, and it's been long enough now that the novelty has worn off. I've been using eames for a variety of uses, including development, general browsing, email, games, and academic work. Part of the reason is that eames is more portable than my old desktop, but that's really not the only reason, since I have brought the Dell laptop from work home on a few occasions and not noticed the same level of use.
The Macbook is light enough to be extremely portable. I can comfortably use it on the couch, at a desk, or even outside (something that, due to the screen, is impossible on the Dell). I often take it up to the bedroom at night for some casual gaming or catching up on email/blogs before sleep; the other night when I suffered from some insomnia, I was able to get some work done on a presentation I'm giving later this summer.
The Dell has never felt all that 'portable'. In fact, it gets the majority of its use at work, plugged into dual monitors. I rarely take it off-site, though I'm glad to have that option. Conversely, eames is never in the same location for long; it's being taken downstairs, used in the living room, taken into the kitchen to refer to a recipe, etc.
It just works
I know it's a Mac cliché, but stuff on the Mac just works. Installing and uninstalling, for the most part, is just really damned easy. I find I'm much more open to installing and testing out applications on the Mac than I am on my Windows box because it's such a painless process most of the time. The first spot of trouble I ran into was today, when I decided I wanted to set up a web server on the laptop and had difficulties getting MySQL running. Of course, as you may have seen in the miniblog, I managed to find an application bundle with Apache, MySQL and PHP that installs as a normal Mac application so problem solved.
Physical comfort
I already talked about this a little before, but the MacBook is pretty comfortable to use. One of the things I really enjoy about it is the keyboard. Typing on the keyboard is extremely comfortable for me; I find I can get pretty good speed on the keys without too many errors (at least no more errors than usual). The screen size is just about right as well - I wouldn't want it any larger, since one of my key reasons for wanting a laptop in the first place is portability.
Games
This is where things fall apart a little, in that the games I generally like to play don't seem to be available or playable on the MacBook. It is possible to play Halflife/Team Fortress on the MacBook through virtualization, but apparently it's not the best experience given the relatively low-powered graphics card in the system. I can also see that it would be near-impossible to play FPS games without a mouse.
That being said, there are a few casual games available for the Mac, which I've taken a look at, though there isn't a very large amount of quality freeware games available (if anyone wants to suggest some, go right ahead).
I'm gaming less as I get older though, and I do still have the Windows box for the games I do play, so this isn't really the negative it might be.
Overall
Overall, I really like the MacBook and OS X. OS X offers a very unified user experience, even with third party applications, and just seems to have a much better finish on it than Windows. Going back is a bit of a shocking experience, actually; one that I experience every Monday when I get back to work. Windows just seems so ugly. I've had far, far fewer crashes with the applications I use on a regular basis in both platforms (e.g., Firefox), and it seems like a lot of small things such as networking are improved (call quality on Skype, which I use daily with K, is much better under OS X than it is under Windows).