New MacBook Owner

Just thought I'd pop in and say hi, as I'm sure I'll be making use of the Apple forums far more frequently after placing my order for a MacBook earlier this evening.

As you can see from my sig, I currently use a Dell XPS M1330. It's actually a fairly powerful machine; it also, unfortunately, does not have a good name because of the endemic NVIDIA GPU failure. Mine has not yet gone, but it surely can only be a matter of time, and I'm not willing to compromise my work.

So, after looking at all the notebooks currently available in the 13"-14" range, and deciding that the new aluminium MacBook offers the best build quality in its class, I ordered the following spec:

2.4 GHz (so backlit, etc);
4GB DDR3 RAM;
128GB SSD.

I'm hoping that the SSD will prove a good investment (I have a 64GB SSD in the M1330, and have been pleased with it.)

This is my first foray into the Mac world (I don't intend on booting into Windows, as that sort of defeats the purpose to my mind) so I'm sure I'll be back with lots of questions!

Cheers.

 

Congratulations! You will be very impressed with your machine! If you have any questions, be sure to post, and we will do our best to answer them!

 

Congrats, be sure to compare the two laptops.
I have a couple questions:

1) How did the macbook compare pricewise to the XPS 1330 ?

2) What is this GPU failure thing ?
How common is it etc.

(And note that you might already be having the XPS under warranty for the next year, see my sig)

 

The XPS M1330 gpu is a common failure, I have the XPS M1330 as well and mine has failed once before the 1st year was up and I need to have the mainboard replaced again, this is one of the reasons I went with the mbp. The price for the macbook vs the XPS M1330 are pretty close.

 

i have the latest version macbook before the new macbook pro and coming from using a windows os my whole life i have to say i was very pleased with my macbook

 

Thanks all.

Cost was almost identical - about £1300 GBP in both cases. I did get a good discount on the MacBook (I'm a university professor); without that, it would have been £1750.

As noted above, the NVIDIA GPU problem is very widespread indeed. There are threads in the XPS forum which go on for hundreds of pages, with people reporting the death of their M1330s. Because of that, I've lost faith in the laptop, and lost faith in the brand (I have bought Dell for ten years.)

My only concern with the switch is word-processing; as a university law professor, I do a lot of writing, and the combination of Office 2007 + Endnote on Windows will be hard to beat. Does anyone have any suggestions? Office 2008 for Mac is simply not good enough, IMO, and Pages 09 still cannot do cross-references (a must in most academic fields.)

 

Hmmm... Have you tried the Office 2008 for mac? I've been using it for a couple of weeks and adore it. I dunno if it's gonna disappoint me one day, but for now i've been able to do everything I wanted. From what I saw, Pages 09 is...OK. I haven't used it enough to know it well, but I'd say I prefer office 08 4 mac.
Office 2007 is installed everywhere at school but I prefer working at home...
I'm prolly not doing ''fancy'' stuff enough to face the limits of this office suite maybe...

 

I've used both Pages and Office 2008. I believe Pages allow you to save in Microsoft Word format. I just prefer to use Office 2008 as it's just simple and I already how to operate it. Not saying that Pages is any better or worse. I'm sure they are both very capable programs, but you have to learn it fully.

OP, Congratulations on the purchase. Please post impressions on the SSD as soon as you get it.

 

I have used Office 2008 for Mac (I did actually buy an MBP in 2008, but returned it after the fan failed within a week of purchase), and it simply doesn't cut the mustard. The litany of bugs in the first version was inexcusable, and even after the huge service pack, it is still a much rougher product than its Windows counterpart. I do have a copy of it, so I imagine I'll install it, but only for ensuring compatibility with student essays. I won't be using it for my own writings.

As to Pages 09, it looks very nice, but if it can't do cross-references, the point is moot. I think the jury is also out on whether it can handle very long documents (100,000 words +).

I have seen Mellel, which looks like a definite possibility. Does anyone have anything good/bad to say about Mellel, or any other suggestions?

 

MS Office 2008 is actually pretty good, has worked great for me. NeoOffice is the second best I've used.... Standard OpenOffice is horrid on my machine.. its super slow and locks up and crashes all the time.

 

If you wanna try em, i heard great comments about these two:
- OpenOffice 3
- IMB Lotus Symphony

But I did not have time to go through them.

 

A quick update: the MacBook is (as you Yanks often say) awesome.

As for Word processing, I am using Word 2007 via Parallels (XP Pro) when the occasion demands it, but otherwise I am using Mellel, which is superb.

Anyone want to buy a Dell M1330?! Ha.

 

That's a pretty impressive educational discount. I wish it was like that here in Canada.

Congrats and I'd also like to hear about the SSD performance.

 

Awesome! Glad you like it. And I would also like to know how the SSD works out for you.

 

The SSD is difficult to assess, as I don't have a non-SSD MacBook to compare it to. But, after a couple of weeks of use, I can confirm two things: first, it's fast. Of course, the 2.4Ghz processor and 4GB RAM will be doing most of the heavy lifting, but saving to the SSD is lightning quick.

Second (and more importantly for me), it's (obviously) silent, but it also seems to generate almost no heat at all. I have yet to feel the bottom of my MacBook and it be anything other than cold. And I do mean cold. Even running XP Pro in parallel all day doesn't seem to make a difference. It is by far the coolest notebook I have ever owned. This may be the same for non-SSD MacBook owners (thoughts?), but I can only think that the SSD helps in that regard.

The only downside, perhaps, with the SSD is size - I still have about 70GB free, but this will swiftly dwindle as work docs, music, family photos, etc, pile up. So, I did what any reasonable person would do, and went out and bought a Time Capsule today. I'm storing my itunes library directly on the TC, and will be doing the same with movies, photos, etc, as soon as I've organised everything.

 

Congrats!! I am sure you will love it.
As for office suites, I've found Office 08 to crash every now and then.

Pages 09 on the other hand hasn't crashed yet, so if you use MS Office make sure you save frequently!