I recently pulled the trigger and bought myself a new 13" Aluminum Macbook 2.4 ghz with 4gig of RAM. The following are what I installed in the ALUM:
Mac OSX
- Photoshop CS4
- Adobe Lightroom
- Sugarsync
- Firefox (with Foxmarks bookmark and Mouse Gesture)
- Parallels 3.0
- Superduper
- Snapz Pro
- Quicksilver
- Toast Titanium 9.0
- Canon iP90v printer drivers
Windows (under Parallels)
- TextAloud
- Microsoft office 2007
- Mindmanager Pro 7.0
The number is about half of what I installed in the old Macbook. Obviously, this also reduced the amount of time for me to get the ALUM up and running. It took me around two hours to install everything with most of this time eaten up by the XP installation. There was no need to synchronize email (I leave that to Gmail) or any files (done for me automatically by Sugarsync).
The following are what I like most about the ALUM:
Thin. At about 1/10 of an inch thinner that the old Macbook, I was surprised that it fits snugly in my favorite netbook bag.
Speed. It launches applications significantly faster than the old Macbook 2.16 ghz with 2 gig RAM. I guess the 4 gig ram and the 2.44 ghz processor is a good combination.
Battery Life is much improved. I now get between 4-5 hours of normal use (wifi-on, running parallels only when I need to). Even the old battery geek also works which gives me an additional 2-3 hours runtime.
If I really must say something that I don't like about the ALUM, it has to do with the software update 10.5.6 from Apple. You will note from the picture above that I have not downloaded this update yet due to reported issues with the 4 gig ram. So far, I have not experienced a single incident where the ALUM froze just like what is being reported by a number of users in the Apple forum. I will update mine only when I am sure that this issue with the 4 gig RAM has been resolved. Or, let me make a bootable image of the ALUM first using Superduper and depending on how daring I am on that day, I might give 10.5.6 a try.
I guess that with the arrival of the ALUM in THQ, the question that begs to be answered is, "What happens now with the netbook?"More on this in my subsequent blogs.
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