My father got a new laptop the other day. He has FINALLY gotten a Mac, now all I need to do is get mom switched over and I’ll have my computer troubleshooting life taken care of… Anyway, I moaned and groaned a bit about the new macbooks because they dropped the firewire port off of them. I still don’t like that, but my father had never heard of firewire, so the new one was fine for him.
I gotta say, the new macbooks are pretty sweet. I shouldn’t really be surprised, Apple keeps doing this and it should be expected by now… It is noticeably zipper than mine despite having the same clock speed and amount of RAM. There have been enough improvements that the overall speed has noticeably improved. I didn’t really care about the new manufacturing process, but the result really is nice. This is the first computer I’ve felt that I like to touch, the aluminum has a very nice tactile feel to it. The screen is nice and bright, and the keyboard is fine. I do like the trakpad, I already miss some of the multi-touch features. In short, I imagine that I will end up owning one of these sooner or later. I’ll get around the firewire limitation somehow (damn you Steve Jobs). I didn’t think my computer was all that bad until I used the new one…
He also got an internet thingy for his computer. Since he’s out in the sticks, cable and DSL were out of the question. Satellite is just too expensive. This thing uses the phone company’s network, a 3g one I suppose. It’s not bad. It’s not quite up to a cable modem type of speed, but it is a huge improvement over the dial up he was on before. So those of you out of reach of cable modems might want to look into this, it’s an easy way to get into the 21st century…