"After being entrenched in Microsoft Windows territory for many years, due to professional necessity and excellent experiences with the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad product line, I decided to take a leap back into the Mac fold in February of this year. At the time I was still sporting a nearly four year old ThinkPad as my personal laptop, and while this was an absolute workhorse system, it was time for something fresh. On February 5, I walked into my local Apple Store and purchased a 13″ white MacBook, essentially the base model, for $1099. Certainly no beast with its low-end specs (by Mac standards), and only an 80GB hard drive, I was simply looking for a decent machine to take with me on trips, enjoy while not working, and primarily use as a way to "learn" Mac OS again."
Dave is a friend of mine who made the trip back to the Mac, and after a bit of a rough start he seems pretty happy with his Whitebook. I would say his experiences match most returning Mac users' experiences pretty well. A little bumpy at first (even with the occasional hardware failure) but after that, it's all smooth sailing. Mostly. Check out his article, though. Very well-written and well-thought out.
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Current Apple Stuff: 24" iMac, iPhone 4, AppleTV (original), 4gb Shuffle, 64gb iPad 2.
Nice read and I mostly agree with his evaluation. However one thing struck me as - well, just stupid. What's up with the problem ejecting a disc? Old way - drag to the trash can. New and easy way - press the eject button. Did I miss something....?
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XBox 360 S, 16GB iPhone 4S, iPod Classic 160 GB, Dell Inspiron Mini 1018; Macs: Mac Mini 2.4 GHz 6 GB RAM; Macbook 2.0 GHz 3 GB RAM; MacBook Air 11", 24" Cinema Display
Nice read and I mostly agree with his evaluation. However one thing struck me as - well, just stupid. What's up with the problem ejecting a disc? Old way - drag to the trash can. New and easy way - press the eject button. Did I miss something....?
Thanks for the kind words.
The eject button is ostensibly for ejecting, but has a success rate of less than 75% on my machine. Dragging to the trash is equally smooth. Luckily, I can usually find a 12 step key-press combo that works, or a series of shutdown/reboot/remove the battery scenarios.
The eject button is ostensibly for ejecting, but has a success rate of less than 75% on my machine. Dragging to the trash is equally smooth. Luckily, I can usually find a 12 step key-press combo that works, or a series of shutdown/reboot/remove the battery scenarios.
Sorry for the "kind words..." but I was actually shocked to read that, although I see in the comments of your original article that someone else was experiencing the same issue. I have 3 Macs here including a 5 year old Powerbook G4 and that's one problem I've never had. My Macbook is a bit older than yours (I've had mine about 1.5 years) and the keyboard has been replaced and the battery (both under warranty) but the eject button has worked like a champ, although honestly I don't use the CD/DVD drive on any of my machines very often.
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XBox 360 S, 16GB iPhone 4S, iPod Classic 160 GB, Dell Inspiron Mini 1018; Macs: Mac Mini 2.4 GHz 6 GB RAM; Macbook 2.0 GHz 3 GB RAM; MacBook Air 11", 24" Cinema Display
Hmm, for me sometimes the eject key doesn't work with a press, but if I hold it down it always seems to. But I just usually click the eject icon next to the DVD in the Finder sidebar to eject disks, and that always works.
I hate to suggest it, but you might want to consider another trip to the Genius Bar . . .
Sorry for the "kind words..." but I was actually shocked to read that, although I see in the comments of your original article that someone else was experiencing the same issue. I have 3 Macs here including a 5 year old Powerbook G4 and that's one problem I've never had. My Macbook is a bit older than yours (I've had mine about 1.5 years) and the keyboard has been replaced and the battery (both under warranty) but the eject button has worked like a champ, although honestly I don't use the CD/DVD drive on any of my machines very often.
I actually was thanking for kind words, "Nice read," etc. I was not offended in the least.
Interestingly, I found a fun reference to this in this month's MacWorld thanks to a commenter on my post. In the 25th Anniversary retrospective, in a section titled "6 Things Apple Needs to do Right Now" there is this:
Quote:
Don't Just Tell Me You Can't Eject the Media: Tell me which damned file is in use by which application. Either that, or give me a name, an address, and an appointment so I can slap the OS engineer responsible for this behavior, for a minimum of 40 minutes.
Seems this issue doesn't happen to all of us, but when it does it is quite maddening!
Hmm, for me sometimes the eject key doesn't work with a press, but if I hold it down it always seems to. But I just usually click the eject icon next to the DVD in the Finder sidebar to eject disks, and that always works.
I hate to suggest it, but you might want to consider another trip to the Genius Bar . . .
Actually, after an update to Tiger, the eject button functionality changed due to people accidentally shooting discs out. They made the required action a press and hold rather than a tap. For a lot of people it was a very jarring experience ;-)
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Current Apple Stuff: 24" iMac, iPhone 4, AppleTV (original), 4gb Shuffle, 64gb iPad 2.
I think I also should point out, as an addendum to my review and after seeing V make a few comments about the topic, my MacBook had no problem sleeping and waking like a champ. Worked properly every time I closed the lid and reopened, amazingly.
Returning to the Mac: 1 Year Later
Linear Mode
