It was mainly meant for a (now postponed) trip so I could use VMware Fusion effectively, but the difference was immediately noticeable when I went to fire up WoW as well. Normally, running WoW on my laptop grinds and chugs and stutters a lot, mainly because I always have Firefox open as well, and together the two just use up too much memory. Now though, it’s smooth as silk, with WoW loading only a little bit slower than it does on my desktop machine.

There’s decent support for the iPod under amarok now, so it might be fairly painless to sync it up with my existing library on the Linux server. Or I might experiment with the ‘proper’ iTunes way for a bit too, especially if any of those games catch my eye, though it’ll be a bit more of a pain to keep the library synced then.

The download went without problems, and I could even start playing it while it was still downloading, but the playback of it was rather no-frills, with a lot of the usual controls missing. No subtitles (which I occasionally like to use for muddy or quiet dialogue), no chapter marks, no stream info, no extras… The picture quality was about on par with a DVD, but HD was not an option, since you specifically need an Apple TV box before you’re allowed to rent those.

Overall, it worked well enough, but I think the price was a bit high ($4 rental, $15 to purchase, but most are even higher) for what you get, and I probably won’t be making a habit of it.

Performance is definitely much better than the old iBook, of course, and I no longer feel as constrained about what I can run at the same time. It’s nice not having to worry about whether Firefox is chewing up too much memory or CPU to launch MythTV reliably, or if VLC is going to be choppy because of swapping. I should also now be able to run more things at the same time that I wouldn’t have bothered with before, like Skype.

There are still some hardware quirks I’m running into, too. The space bar is a bit insensitive in that presses on the very ends of it often don’t register, so I have to make sure I give it a good hard tap a little further in. Gaming might be a bit less feasible now that I’ve experienced it running at full load for a while; the fans aren’t too bad, and could be drowned out by the game’s sounds or by wearing headphones, but the CPU quickly makes my lap just a little warm…

I also had a weird time figuring out what was ‘wrong’ with the LCD’s backlight. It seemed like its intensity would fluctuate a bit, often noticed just out of the corner of my eye while typing, but if I sat there and stared directly at the screen for a while, nothing would happen. There were other weird cases too, where I would have the backlight at half-intensity, pick it up and carry it a bit, and the backlight would suddenly be set at full. What I didn’t realize though, is that the ambient light sensors on the Pro units aren’t just for the keyboard backlight; the LCD backlight is by default set to automatically adjust as well. I guess the ambient light in my living room and the typing of my hands were enough to make it a bit erratic, and it’s now stable after disabling the option in the system preferences.

Some things are still weird when Windows is running, though. You have to double-touch the pad and click if you want to emulate a right-click, which makes it easy to accidentally trigger a scrolling action in the process. And the Alt and ‘Windows’ keys are backwards from where they’d be physically located on a traditional PC keyboard, which is being hard to get used to. I’ll have to dig around and see if I can adjust these, though there wasn’t any obvious settings that I’d noticed.

I also experienced the infamous Windows wireless bugaboos, with the connection cutting out in the middle of a file transfer and Vista refusing to recognize any more wireless APs at all, even though the iBook sitting right next to it could see them all just fine. That also hung the command prompt that was doing the transfer, forcing me to hard-power-off the system since it wouldn’t let me shut down while it was still hung, either. Wheee. That was pre-SP1 though, and it hasn’t reoccurred since, so far.

I still have to get around to installing apps and games on it, now. It’s not exactly blazing fast, as it only gets half the 3DMark06 score of my desktop machine, but on the other hand, the entire MB Pro probably weighs less than just the video card in the desktop… Since I don’t want to be dragging a bunch of discs around with me, I’ll be focusing mainly on games that can run without requiring one in the drive. Fortunately, I’ve got quite a few such games already via Steam and Stardock.

And by buddy, I mean replacement of course, since my iBook will probably now sulk in the closet while a fine layer of dust accumulates on top of it.

It’s just the base 15″ version, since I wasn’t really looking for a full “desktop replacement” model. I debated a bit about whether to get an upgraded plain MacBook or the Pro; the main functional difference between them now is that the Pro has a much better video chipset, but was that really worth the $700+ price difference… I finally figured that having the better video would probably let me squeeze an extra year or two of life out of it and in the end the per-year cost would be roughly similar anyway, so I may as well get all the frills of the Pro.

There are some things that are going to take a bit of time to adjust to, simply because they’re different. The bottom of the keyboard has a hard edge rather than a smooth ramp all the way up to the top, for example, and the gap between the keyboard and the trackpad is a little bigger than I’m used to. There’s no gap between some of the function keys like there was on the iBook, so my usual reference for finding F5 (the all-important Refresh key) is gone. The ports are laid out a bit nicer for the way my living room is set up though, so I don’t have to criss-cross network and mouse cables in the back when I’m using them.

As for new features, the multi-touch is nice, though I’m going to have to get into the habit of using it, since I often find myself still going to the scroll bars. The magsafe power port caught me a bit by surprise since it takes quite a bit of force to pull directly out, until I caught on to the bend-it-away trick. And I haven’t done much with any new Leopard features yet, though I did notice that Terminal has improved a lot, to the point where I don’t feel like I need iTerm anymore. I might not even bother with Time Machine, just sticking with my rsync-to-the-Linux-server scripts instead.

Now I still have to finish migrating most of my data over…

MacBook Air: Meh. Not for me, since I’m fine with the form factor and weight of my iBook as it is, and I’m more interested in having better performance and functionality. I don’t actively hate it though, since it doesn’t really replace the other notebooks, so we’re not being ‘forced’ to upgrade to it.

iTunes Movie Rental: Irrelevant right now as it won’t be available here for a while yet. It looks like pricing will be about the same as the XBox Live Marketplace, so it’ll come down to a battle between which has the better library of titles. I also don’t have an easy way to stream iTunes to a TV right now, but that might be resolved by the time it’s ready here, though there’s an implication that HD rentals are only available through the AppleTV, and I’m not buying one just for that.

iPhone updates: Looks nice, but I’m still not a cell phone person.

Time Capsule: Now this is actually interesting. One of the things that really annoys me about my MythTV setup is that it runs on a really large, noisy tower PC right now. If I could replace that with say, a Mac Mini as the server, stacked on a Time Capsule acting as the storage, and using a USB capture card instead, it would be a lot smaller and quieter… And then I hear my wallet go “OW!”

Otherwise, I’m still holding out for a MacBook Pro update, which should be due sometime soon.

At least not by itself. I’ve gotten a lot more use out of my iBook than I expected (browsing the web from The Comfy Chair is so much better than at the desk), but it’s almost four years old now, and is starting to show its age. It has trouble keeping up with even Youtube videos without a bit of stutter, the screen still feels a bit cramped, it bogs down a bit even with the maximum amount of memory in it, it would be nice to dual boot to Windows once in a while, and so on.

I think I’ll wait until the next hardware refresh though, just to make sure I get the latest-and-greatest, and by then there should be a dot release or two of Leopard out to help stabilize things, too.

I’m still not sure whether to go for a MacBook or a MacBook Pro this time around, though. The primary difference (based on the current specs, anyway) would really be in the screen size, resolution, and video chipset. A higher res would be nice to relieve the cramped feeling a bit, and it would be nice to have enough horsepower to run some games that are still usable on a laptop. But is that niceness alone worth the $600 difference? Hmmm.

And hopefully they’ll also adjust the prices to account for the recent currency surge. I’d actually save over $250 by ordering from the US Apple store instead of the local one, right now.