Got my 12" with superdrive yesterday morning, two days before I expected it. Which was a nice surprise. I am upgrading from a dual USB iBook (600 with a 40GB drive) which is used as our main home computer. There's also a snow iMac in the study working as a music server but I think I'll sell that one soon, with the iBook being kept for emergencies and for my girlfriend to use when I am traveling.
I'll be using the PB for the usual, email, web browsing and to take the odd bit of work home with me. Work meaning graphic and web design, light photo manipulation and dtp as well as light video editing. I'll be presenting work to clients on it as well, that was one of the main reasons for getting the smallest PB. Makes it easy to travel with and watching your own movies on the plane is a huge bonus for me.
The first thing that struck me is how beautiful it is. It's stunningly designed and the finish is of the highest possible quality. The keyboard is one of the best I've ever used, and not just on a laptop. I've got a very simple neoprene bag for it that should keep it scratch free without shouting "money" to any passing stranger. Being used to a 12" iBook the screen held no surprises. No dead pixels at all, nice and bright. As it should be. Viewing angles are good from the side and ok from the top.
Started it up and found it still had Classic installed. So, a clean install it was. I always do that to a new Mac anyway. I like to know what's on there and I don't need OS 9 in any of its incarnations.
First thing I liked was that the System software resides on a DVD. No swapping of CDs anymore. So while Jaguar installed I could get on with other things. That done I maxed the RAM. The RAM slot is extremely easy to access, very well implemented. Unscrew four little screws and pop the module in. Airport Extreme installation was also a breeze and took 2 minutes flat. This is a definite improvement over the iBook where both the airport card and the RAM reside under the keyboard.
I then put my iBook into target mode and grabbed my user/documents and user/preferences folder. A couple of GB transferred in 3 minutes, excellent.
Installing all of my applications took the usual time although the CD drive is definitely faster than on the iBook. Apps start up noticeably faster too. This goes especially for Photoshop which used to be somewhat clanky on the iBook. I also did a quick test run on FCP and it was very usable indeed. Much more so than I expected actually.
Took it online to grab Safari and a couple of other things I've got installed (iAddressX and Meteorologist come to mind) and was amazed that contrary to popular opinion the PB had a much better airport reception than the iBook ever managed. I think that the antenna in my iBook might be loose so don't take that observation as gospel. Anyway, I am getting four bars everywhere in the house whereas the iBook managed two at best when leaving the study where the base station resides. Which makes me happy, I like working in the garden during summer. Also browsing speed was greatly improved. I took the iBook to identical pages and was amazed to find that the PB loaded them up to twice as fast. I am aware that this is quite an unscientific way to go about things so take it with a grain of salt. Both computers were sharing a DSL connection on airport classic.
The next thing I did was connecting my T68 to the PB using bluetooth. One of the easiest things I've ever done, network wise. The PB detected the T68 instantly, told me which phone it was and added it to its database of bluetooth devices. Within 5 minutes I had synched all of my addresses to my cell phone. Amazing stuff. It's now set up so I can dial in when I am out of the office or away from home. A truly great feature.
All in all I am extremely happy with this machine. It is plenty fast with X really coming into its own now. Battery life is three hours when surfing and slightly less when working.
Heat is not much of a problem although it does get noticeably hotter than the iBook which runs very cool. If you're after a great little computer with a superb form factor and don't need the extra power of level3 cache then this is the one to go for. I've rarely liked any of my many Macs as much as I do the PB.
Enjoy!
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