“Please don’t Sleep the pre-production MacBook”
Oops, too late. Sorry.
Along with giving the booth worker a heart attack after closing the new portable’s display, the following are my first impressions of everyone’s favorite new ‘Book.
- MagSafe: Genius. No polarity on the plug. Not to hard, not to soft, the magnet seems like the right strength. Booth workers assure us that having a magnet of such strength neighboring the other laptop components is “not an issue”. *cough*
- Relocated wireless antennas: Fear. They are now located at the base of the display hinge (the matte silver insert). Does anyone else remember the joys of wifi on a titanium PowerBook? Booth worker response: “It’s better than the previous generation”. So is the current hydrogen bomb.
- 8 is Great! No wait, the marketing fluff said 4x faster. Whatever. It was noticeably faster, Safari page renders where better than G5 towers I’ve worked on. The IR port on front is distracting and ugly, it’s a shame they can’t solve that (little) aesthetic issue. We can put men on the moon but IR port covers will forever remain a startling black-red.
- Built-in iSight camera: A natural conclusion. I’m sure these will appear in every CPU from now on (except of course towers). If they don’t appear in the next rev of the displays, someone missed a meeting.
- $1,999: Worth every penny.