Continuing my monologue....
We ventured to Meadowhall (aka Meadowhell) at lunchtime to look at the Macbooks in the Apple Store. I/we were thinking of treating my/ourselves especially as Sue gets a 14% discount through working in a University.
So I had a good play, and I have to say that the GUI is very glitzy and the whole thing has a lot of visual appeal.
But...
1. The 2.4GHz model is still £968 even after the discount.
2. I have a load of music files in a mixture of formats - mainly MP3 and WMA. Apparently iTunes won't play WMA files.
3. The screen viewing angle wasn't too good, especially vertically. This is typical of laptops but I'd hoped for something better at this price.
4. Before we went we'd watched the latest Wallace & Gromit on the BBC iPlayer in high quality mode using my 2+ year old Acer 5612 laptop running Ubuntu Intrepid. The quality was very good. We watched the start of W&G on the Macbook in the store, and the quality was also very good - but no better.
5. No doubt the Macbook would be better at 3D games, having an Nvidia 9400M graphics card instead of the 7300 GeForce Go in the Acer. But I don't play 3D games.
6. The 2.4 GHz processor in the Macbook would also be faster than the 1.66GHz Core Duo in the Acer. Having said that, applications like Safari etc didn't seem to start any faster than Firefox on the Acer.
7. I could run Photoshop CS4 on the Mac, but I don't use Photoshop, and Bibble runs on any platform.
8. I think I've just saved myself nearly £1000. I haven't totally given up the idea of a Mac, but right now I can't really see the point apart from the eye-candy which I could have with Ubuntu if I wanted.
The invitation is still open for Mac fans to tell me what I'm missing.
