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A week ago, I finally filled the gap I’ve had since giv­ing up my Power­book G4 back in May and I bought a base model MacBook.

• 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo
• 512MB (2x256MB) DDR2-667
• 60GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Disk
• Slot Load DVD/CD-RW
• Air­port Extreme
• Blue­tooth 2.0+EDR
• Mac OS X 10.4

All that and a 2GB iPod for $1049 using the stu­dent pur­chase pro­gram. I financed it through Apple Credit, which was a bit of a has­sle (more on that some other time), but it allowed me to get this nice note­book for $25 a month rather than fork­ing over $1000 in one shot.

As a two time pre­vi­ous Mac owner, I’m not going to go in to detail about the “switch­ing” process, since I alreay had it planned out and most of my appli­ca­tions were avail­able for Mac anyways.

The hard­ware that makes up the Mac­Book is leaps and bounds above the pre­vi­ous iBook mod­els. Cowork­ers of mine have both second-generation G3 and G4 iBooks, and nei­ther hold a can­dle to this. It feels like a qual­ity piece of hard­ware, on par with an IBM Thinkpad or upper-level Dell. The Core Duo is also an amaz­ing chip. When com­par­ing pure CPU per­for­mance, this note­book can hold its own against my 2GHz AMD Athlon X2 desk­top, though the faster hard dri­ves and quadru­pled RAM give the desk­top the advan­tage in all real-world situations.

The unusual key­board and glossy screen were con­cerns of mine before pur­chase, but at this point I can say that nei­ther have turned out to be real prob­lems in day to day use. I’m sure I’ll find some sit­u­a­tion where the glossy screen gets annoy­ing, but hon­estly none of my past note­books have been very usable out­doors either.

Right now, the only upgrade I an cer­tain to do to this machine is max­ing out the RAM to 2GB. Like all mod­ern OSes, OS X loves mem­ory, and 512MB just isn’t enough. It is my opin­ion that even the low­est of low end com­put­ers should have at least 1GB nowa­days, and 2GB is a start­ing point for enthu­si­ast machines (gamers, mul­ti­me­dia, etc.). I am con­sid­er­ing a hard drive upgrade, but it seems more likely that I will just upgrade the drive in my desk­top and place the old one in a Firewire enclo­sure to use as an over­grown floppy disk and backup medium for all my computers.