The northlondonhippy

I’ve now had my brand new, shiny, lick­able, 2.16 Core2Duo, 2 gig, black Mac­Book for 2 weeks and man, oh man do I dig it!

What’s not to love? Apple have out­done them­selves in the design and exe­cu­tion of this very high-end con­sumer lap­top. I’ll say it right now, for those of you con­sid­er­ing a lap­top pur­chase in the near future…buy a Mac­Book and you won’t go wrong!

I’ll also state, for the record, that I am a big fan of Apple prod­ucts. I owned an Apple com­puter back in the mid 80s (an Apple //c for you true geeks out there) and returned to the Apple fam­ily in 2005, with the pur­chase of a 20” G5 iMac. It was the smartest and coolest pur­chase I ever made.

I saw how amaz­ing Mac’s oper­at­ing sys­tem, OS X worked, how sta­ble, easy to use and intu­itive it all was, I was sold.

Once I put my entire music col­lec­tion into iTunes, I knew I was onto some­thing. When I synched my con­tacts with Address Book and my diary with Cal­en­dar, all paired with my Blue­tooth phone, in less time than it takes to brew a cup of tea, I knew my life changed.

Apple makes the things you actu­ally want to do with a com­puter, eas­ier. Like set up the sys­tem. Edit video. Store and organ­ise your music, or pho­tos. It all just works, right out of the box.

For exam­ple, take my new Mac­Book. Guess how long it took to go from the time I signed for deliv­ery to the point where I was online, look­ing at the Google home­page on the gor­geous 13.3 inch LCD screen?

6 min­utes and that included unbox­ing it slowly and care­fully. OS X walked me through the set-up process, set by step, includ­ing join­ing my exist­ing wire­less net­work with straight­for­ward ease.

If com­put­ers intim­i­date you, or you’re tired or wrestling with bull­shit Win­dows pref­er­ence screens and Bios set­tings, come over to the light! You’ll never see that dreaded “blue screen of death” again.

My shiny new Mac­Book replaces an iBook that I sold a few months back.

The iBook I had, the 2nd to the last revi­sion sold, was a good, solid lit­tle lap­top and had the Mac­Books not come along, I would still own it. It was a very portable size, reli­able, and easy on the eye, but the Mac­Book just offers more.

A faster proces­sor, a bet­ter brighter screen, built-in iSight, mag­netic latch, MagSafe power adap­tor, thin­ner, lighter and it came in black – I had to have one!

The design is very sleek and min­i­mal, and typ­i­cal for Apple. I paid the extra for black, which many of you will think is silly. You can get a sim­i­larly spec’d white one for around 70 or 80 quid less.

What can I say? I like the black bet­ter, so I spent the extra money. Rac­ing stripes don’t make your car go any faster, yet peo­ple pay extra to have them put on. Is this any different?

Using the Mac­Book is a dream. It is very fast and respon­sive and I espe­cially like the “multi-touch” track­pad that can sense when you are using 2 fin­gers or one.

Tap the track­pad with 2 fin­gers and you pro­duce a right click, which is a rev­e­la­tion for me. I use con­text menus quite a bit and being able to repro­duce a right click with one hand on a lap­top is a very good thing. Drag 2 fin­gers on the track­pad and the dis­play scrolls, up, down or side-to-side if the appli­ca­tions allows. Very cool.

I wasn’t sure how I would like the glossy dis­play, but after using it for 2 weeks, I think it is great. I was con­cerned about glare and see­ing my face smugly reflected back at me, but this is not the case. The screen is so bright; even with the bright­ness reduced to con­serve bat­tery power, that it remains stun­ning and sharp.

I down­loaded some trail­ers from the Apple site, in glo­ri­ous 720p Quick­time HD good­ness and they played back with­out a stut­ter and looked pos­i­tively amazing!

I haven’t done much with the built-in cam­era, but I’m not much of an inter­net chat­ter or web­cam­mer, so this is not sur­pris­ing. When I was set­ting up my user account on the Mac­Book, Pho­to­Booth came up and I was offered the chance to take a photo, right then and there, to use as my login and sys­tem pic­ture. A cool fea­ture, that shows you right out the box, how user-friendly this com­puter is.

The mag­netic latch clamps shut with a sat­is­fy­ing, firm thud and the MagSafe power adap­tor lit­er­ally leaps from your fin­gers into the socket on the Mac­Book when you bring it very close.

Bat­tery life seems decent, I’ve had the Blue­tooth turned off, but the wi-fi on most of the time and I’m get­ting nearly 5 hours.

Rip a CD, or play a fea­ture length film from the hard drive and you can see the bat­tery drain faster. I’m guess­ing you could prob­a­bly watch 2 fea­ture films back to back on a full charge, but if you’re con­cerned about using it on a long flight, they do sell a MagSafe air­line power adap­tor as an optional accessory.

As far as every­thing else goes, what can I say? It’s a Mac, it’s as sta­ble and solid as my iMac and that goes for the hard­ware and software.

I’ve been on OS X for com­ing up on 3 years and I have never had a sys­tem crash. I’ve had appli­ca­tions crash, sure, but the actual oper­at­ing sys­tem doesn’t go down with it. I don’t know any­one with a Win­dows com­puter who can say the same thing.

I ran Win­dows at home for years and I still use it where I work. I was never a fan, but now that I am a Mac-head I pos­i­tively despise it! I restart my PC at work repeat­edly, because it’s always crash­ing or freez­ing. When some­thing goes wrong, the IT guys (who seem to travel in pairs these days), spend a lot of time scratch­ing their heads and going off to thing about what the prob­lem is, rather than actu­ally fix­ing it.

Look, if you like Win­dows, and you think its great, and you are happy with it, fan­tas­tic and well done you! But if you’re like me and you think it is bloated, messy and about as sta­ble as the SS Posei­don on New Year’s Eve, then I implore you to inves­ti­gate Apple computers.

Have you ever met any­one who enthuses over his or her Win­dows PC? Or Win­dows? Find some­one else who has a Mac and ask them if they like it. Pre­pare to have them go on and on, in glow­ing terms just as I have.

There’s a rea­son why peo­ple are enthu­si­as­tic about Apple. The toys they sell live up to the hype. Have you got an iPod? I bet lots of you do. Do you love it? I bet you do. Well, Apple com­put­ers are even bet­ter than their iPods!

Got an iPhone? Want one? I think we all fall into one of those two cat­e­gories, with the sec­ond one cur­rently being the larger of the two. Wouldn’t a match­ing Apple com­puter be nice?

You have no rea­son to fear Apple; Steve Jobs is your friend. He makes stuff to make your life eas­ier; to make your life better.

Bill Gates makes stuff to com­pli­cate your life and frus­trate you; at home and at work. He is very suc­cess­ful at this, that’s why he is the rich­est man in the world. You don’t have to buy what he sells; yet you do, anyway.

Apple com­put­ers are not more expen­sive, when you fac­tor in all the soft­ware you get. I have read count­less com­par­i­son stud­ies done on com­pa­ra­bly spec’d sys­tems, with sim­i­lar soft­ware pack­ages and the Win­dows ver­sion always costs more. By the time you add all the extra crap you need to bring a Win­dows PC up to the level of a Mac, you’ve ended up spend­ing a lot more money.

Let me describe my cur­rent home set-up:

- My 20” iMac, my main sys­tem, a desk­top. I use it for surf­ing and writ­ing, some down­load­ing and I dock my iPod with this sys­tem, so it has my mobile music library on it. I also use it for my seri­ous heavy lift­ing, like video edit­ing on Final Cut Express and record­ing music on Logic Express. The G5 proces­sor is show­ing it’s age though, espe­cially com­pared to the Mac­Book and even my MacMini, so if the rumours are true about a major over­haul to the iMac line…I could be replac­ing it some­time soon.
– My MacMini – con­nected to a 32” Sony LCD and my stereo, it also streams music to two Air­port Expresses. Used for all things media, it has my com­plete music library (my tunes, plus Mrs. Hippy’s), it also han­dles all film and tv down­loads, stream­ing video con­tent and video play­back. This sys­tem gets used a lot, I like my media

- My shiny new Mac­Book – surf­ing on the sofa while watch­ing TV and all of my mobile com­put­ing needs. I write on-the-go and it will be going to work with me. Now if I can access the com­pany wi-fi net­work, my work-porn needs are solved!

- Air­port Extreme – brand new, pur­chased with the Mac­Book. Only set it up a cou­ple of days ago and I have to say, the set-up was a bit Un-Apple. I’ll do a sep­a­rate post on this, but in the end, it’s now work­ing flawlessly.

- Air­port Express num­ber 1 – used to be my wi-fi hub, it is now in my bed­room, con­nected to a set of speak­ers, which receives music from iTunes via a wi-fi con­nec­tion and is rebroad­cast­ing my wi-fi net­work upstairs. I think that’s called WDS.

- Air­port Express num­ber 2 – Is in my kitchen, con­nected to a 2nd set of speak­ers. All this one does is receive music.

- My 60gb black video iPod – holds my entire music col­lec­tion and a few videos. I can’t say I have used the video very much, but as a music player, it sees loads of use. I have a dock in the car that is an FM trans­mit­ter, which lets me play it thru the stereo. It’s a Macally FM Cup and it works very well, even in cen­tral London.

I’ve edited films, turned them into DVDs, recorded songs with real musi­cal instru­ments and MIDI, I’ve writ­ten 2 nov­els and blogged my moth­er­fuck­ing socks off, all on Apple computers.

I can play the same music, at the same time, through­out my entire house. It makes blitz­ing the place with the Hoover a lot more pleasant!

I’ve been rec­om­mend­ing Apple sys­tems to all my friends for a lit­tle while now and every sin­gle one of them is grateful.

If you take my advice too and end up all grate­ful, a lit­tle gift wouldn’t go amiss. This hippy likes presents, so please send me some­thing cool and prefer­ably expen­sive! Just post it off to “the hippy” in north Lon­don and let the post­man do the rest. I’m famous, just like Santa Claus, I’m sure the pack­age will reach me just fine!

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