My first MACBOOK!

Where did you buy it? For someone new to Mac it's probably best to get one at an Apple store where you can at least be shown the basics.

 

I love my mac, I have had it for over a year now (i got one of the first macbook pro's) and it is still running perfectly. For everything that I use it for it is far superior to a pc. The applications have seemless integrationg, play with it and all of its features will come to light, they are great machines!

If you have any questions I may be able to help you just send a pm

Matt

 

Anyone have any experience with the MAC Mini? I won't be doing a lot of 'high-intensity' computing - web surfing, music transfer to iPod, some beginner digital imagery (photos), limited MS Office stuff. Will the Mini do it all? It seems like a great value....

 

Thats excellent news, I've got a Macbook Pro 17" Core Duo 2.16 GHz system. I think the new powerbooks are running the same specs if not better than my current system. Your going to be pleased with the ease of use with these machines.

 

I REALLY dislike my MacBook. I fell for the hype, should have gotten a higher-end Wintel box for cheaper

 

it depends upon the intensity we are talking, because the high end mini has a decent amount of memory 512 mb and an 80 gb harddrive, for my use of my computer whether it be running highend software and storing a lot of music photos etc, it would not be enough. The mini would have trouble running windows through boot camp or anything like that. Also the processor is a little slow in my opinion but not bad, and like you said a good value. Also I would wait until Lepoard is fully out I am not sure if it is, but its the new operating system that will have tons of cool stuff.

Matt

edit: now that i reread your post, you could probably do all that you wanted to on a mac mini, but it wont be the fastest horse in the race

 

why do you dislike it, I have a few friends with macbooks and my brother has one too? All I know is I love my macbook pro. What have been your problems?

 

I bought a mac once. It was so simple it was confusing. I sold it.

 

Congrats on getting the Macbook.
I could never get used to the keyboard.

Did you get the free ipod and printer from the student discount?

 

hmmm did you use mac mail, its a great program, alerts you when you get an email on your desktop, I love it

 

What's wrong with it? I am leaning in this direction, for nothing other than the fact that I can use bootcamp on it.

 

Bah, bootcamp. VMWare Fusion with Unity is where it's at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIApJMzGzDQ

I've played with it in Beta, and it's everything you could imagine. Seriously.

To the orig. poster: congrats on the purchase. Make sure you get Apple Care. Search for the various Mac convos on this forum; you'll get plenty of tips.

 

That's pretty slick, but I have apps that run too slowly under a vm.

 

My wife gave me a new MacBook on Sunday and I really like everything except Safari. Some web pages (Charles Schwab Bond Screening tool) crashed using Safari 2, so I loaded Safari 3 beta and now an occasional page is not rendered properly. Even eBay flagged my browser last night (The messaged called it Safari 1) and suggested that I upgrade to FireFox!!! Mark me as "the jury is out."

 

Can you let me know on what pages things don't work?
I try to help with dev on webkit, bug reporting and what not; I am interested.

BTW: Webkit, the rendering engine for Safari is one of the most compliant engines in dev today -- if doesn't render correctly in Safari the site code is borked, not Safari (just saying, I know it sounds like an excuse...)

 

Which apps are those?
Just curious.

I play Red Alert 2 and Age of Kings through virtualization. I love how technology is getting so advanced these days that you can be completely hardware independent.

 

How much memory?

Ideally, I'd want 4GB with 2 to the main OS and 2 to the VM... That's what I just set up for a guy I work with... runs quick.

 

I've got 2gb on my Macbook Pro.
I wish I waited for now, I think you can get 4gb in them

I dedicate 512mb ram to Windows XP in a virtualized environment. I run a stripped down install that I hand-tune after install so that it runs pretty slick. It ends up being about 20 processes including from system to gaming to folding@home. It's pretty lightweight and snappy. It's perfect for virtual machines like VMWare or Parallels.

I've been thinking hard to experimenting with CrossoverOffice or compiling Wine for OS X myself, but I don't think I have the patience to actually NOT-run Windows... I'm not that entrenched in the camp lol.

With ram prices dropping so quickly these days, it's almost brain dead to just load up your system with 4gb ram. I wonder if we'll get apps that'll properly take advantage of the ram though rather than just adding bloat

It's also really interesting to see how far KDE and Gnome / Linux fall back in terms of interaction. From what people have told me, x11 was designed in a low bandwidth environment. On a decently powerful box, you can see the delay even though it shouldn't be there considering the speed of the box. Just a different perspective in designing the entire OS. One built with a gui as an afterthought versus on designed with the gui in mind.

 

Hope you do better than this guy.

http://consumerist.com/consumer/videos/man-teaches-apple-to-not-repair-his-macbook-by-smashing-it-with-sledgehammer-270968.php

 

Two other users note the Schwab bug on macintouch.com.....

" downloaded and installed Safari 3.0 and it installed and loaded just fine after the reboot.... So I started checking out sites in my bookmark bar... For some reason when I log into my Schwab account the header navigation buttons fill the screen... and if I scroll down I will see the content I need to see... These buttons render about 50 times larger than neeeded... Not sure what the reasons are... also, just like in older versions of Safari I am still unable to view news items as I get a session error... It looks like a javascript error... anyone else have troubles viewing Schwab.com?"

http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/safari3/topic4613.html

 

Have you attempted the site with the latest update --> Safari 3.0.2 ?

It adds a number of enhancements and IMO it shows that Apple is serious about making a cross-platform browser to be used as a development kit for the iPhone.

 

Still broken. I e-mailed Schwab last night and offered to send screen shots.

 

I do the same. Nothing like classic Windows bloat.

I found Crossover to be terrible.

This is my biggest gripe with Parallels - memory management is TERRIBLE. Unless I kick off my VM right when the Macbook boots, my computer tends to grind to a halt. Though I haven't investigated it that thoroughly, it seems like it doesn't allocate on the fly, and if it does, it does a really poor job of balancing with the host OS.

I'm getting used to Gnome on my other laptop (I have a Macbook Pro and a Gateway loaded with CentOS to replicate my server environment when I'm doing dev work). No eye candy whatsoever though. I tried Enlightenment and it was slow as molasses (on a dual core 2.0 with 2 gigs of RAM). Interesting take on it though - 2 sides of the same coin - OS X was built on BSD, X11 built on Linux; you would think both would be considered "afterthoughts"...