MacBook: First Reaction

I played with a MacBook over the weekend. I was prepared to be
skeptical of the glossy screen. I ended up liking it a lot.
The coating seems to direct more of the light perpendicular
to the screen, so the display seems brighter and more saturated.
I tested the MacBook at the Apple store in the Aspen Grove
shopping Center in Littleton, CO where it was right next to
the front windows filled with light. There was no
noticeable washout. Then I went over and looked at a 15-in
MacBook Pro without the coating, and it looked, well, washed out.

Then I tested the keyboard. I was also prepared to be skeptical
of the MacBook keyboard because it reminded me of the chicklet
keyboards of the past. Well, I’m here to tell you that this
is a very good keyboard. As a writer, I’m excessively picky
about my keyboards — so much so that that on the
basis of Charles Moore’s reviews over at Applelinks, I went
out and bought TWO Matias Tactile Pro keyboards. I was looking
for the holy grail of keyboards, which some define as the
IBM Selectric typewriter of long ago. Anyway, I typed
for some time on the Macbook’s keyboard, and I could spend
all day on that keyboard. It’s that good.

Finally, I discovered that even though the display is 1280 x
800, I felt a little cramped in the vertical space. I’m
accustomed to my 23-in Cinema which is 1920 x 1200 and have
spent years and years on 15-in PowerBooks which, despite specs
not much better than the MacBook, don’t feel as cramped
vertically. Even though the vertical pixels on the MacBook is a
respectable number, I still had the subjective feeling of being
restricted, probably due to the wide-screen aspect ratio of
1.6:1 on a smaller physical display. It is one of the oddities
of our Internet life that text, pages, and reading flow are
oriented towards up and down, but our sense of aesthetics in
movies takes us to a 16:9 wide screen aspect ratio. (16:10 for
Macs.) So I would say that if you value seeing a larger chunk of
vertical space over portability and you want or need a more
serious graphics card, then the 17-in MacBook Pro with 1050
vertical pixels makes a huge difference. (But then there’s a
huge price difference.) Either that or be prepared to work with
sharp eyes on a slightly smaller scale: smaller text, icons,
etc. One thing that might help for some MacBook users is a small
Bluetooth mouse with a scroll wheel to allow fast vertical
scrolling. It depends on your facility with the trackpad.

I had a good feeling about this computer, and I’ll end up
owning one some day soon because it’s so perfect for travel.

Black, of course!

John Martellaro