Designer Delight

A thing of beauty that's practical too

It's hard to understate the visual appeal of this thing. From the shiny metal to the thinness of the case and brightness of the screen, it feels more like an art object than a computer.

Like my Canon XL1 (see review), it brings the immediate impression of a product that is expensive, yes, but you can tell why it is expensive and feel comfortable with disgorging the serious money you just paid.

I have heard many of the complaints you have about flimsiness, battery problems, and so on. I must say none of this has been my experience. The machine has worked flawlessly since the moment I turned it on, with one unfortunate exception that was almost certainly my fault (see my review of the Apple Store for details).

Stunning Display

Many reviewers have commented on the size and resolution of the display, but few have noted how bright it is. This display is the first I've seen that has a fighting chance of being visible in natural light. It still won't battle bright sunlight well, but if you put it in an even slightly shaded area outdoors, you won't have any trouble seeing it.

I expected the lower resolution (my previous laptop was a 1280x1024 ThinkPad) to bother me. So far it has not; the display is stunning and the rich 24-bit colours appeal enormously.

Keyboard and Trackpad

The keyboard is very good, outstanding for a laptop. It has a very good feel - not as nice as the old-fashioned "clicky" IBM keyboards, but not half bad, either. The key layout is exceptionally well done, although I would have preferred to have direct PgUp and PgDn keys instead of the FN combinations.

The trackpad is outstanding for a trackpad, but note that I still prefer IBM's pointing stick by a significant margin. The secret to using the trackpad seems to be to use it separately from the keyboard - take your hand off the keyboard, use it to manipulate the pad, and then put your hands back on the keyboard for typing. I don't like this because I like keeping my hands on the home keys, which is a way IBM's pointing stick wins big-time. However, the trackpad is more reliable than the pointing stick, and it's not subject to problems caused by rapid wear in the rubber stick. So for most people it is probably a better choice.

Battery Life

It seems to average around 3.5 hours. This is a lot better than my ThinkPad, which rarely even eked out a full hour, but a far cry from the claimed 5 hours. However, to be fair, I am not generally a power miser when using my computer, so it may be partially my fault. Still, I've gotten similar opinions from others.

MacOS X

I can't find much difference between how MacOS X runs on my laptop versus my dual G4/450 PowerMac. The main performance deficit in the notebook is most likely because of a lack of memory (384MB on the PowerBook, 1.6GB on the PowerMac) rather than any major deficiency in CPU strength.

Window movement is excellent, compiling programs is very fast (it feels about as fast as the 1.3GHZ Athelon I have at work), and only the usual MacOS X bugaboos of window resizing and menu display have marred my experience. I expect these things to all be fixed by the release of MacOS X 10.1 in September 2001.


Support

As mentioned above, I had a problem with the system. I suspect it was my fault; I was trying to run something in Classic that just plain wasn't working right. Unfortunately, the result was a total system crash which required a great deal of help from Apple to resolve.

I was lucky indeed that I was in an area with an Apple Store to help. They did an outstanding job putting my system back together, including putting my old system's data on a FireWire drive so I could re-load it and preserve my files.

See my Apple Store review for more information.

Conclusions

It's hard not to love this laptop. Is it expensive? Sure. Is it outside of the Windows mainstream? Of course, and better for all that, too.

Is it brilliantly designed and executed? Yes. Will your friends be envious? Of course. Will you enjoy using it? Need you ask?

Does it have flaws? Of course. But it looks to me like most of them have been addressed in my relatively late version. In the end, it's a thing of beauty, it's fast, and it looks and feels fantastic. If there's anything else you need in a laptop, I'd like to hear about it.