[imitchellg5]

I'm in need of a new laptop. I was thinking iBook but then I decided I wanted something brand new. What I'm thinking about is a new black MacBook. I'll get 2 Gb of RAM. It will be used for PowerPoint, Keynote, Final Cut Express HD (3.5), GarageBand, Reason, Illustrator and Photoshop CS3 work. I'll be recording events live with Reason and/or GarageBand. I have a nice speedy FireWire HD. Will this MacBook be speedy enough for the next two years for this kind of work? I plan on getting a MacBook Pro as soon as I graduate, but right now I don't really want to get one right now since the parental units are buying the Pro when I graduate.

[mduell]

Yea the MacBook should be fine as long as all those apps are Universal or Intel (I'm not sure about FCE 3.5 or Reason).

[itistoday]

Yes, every application you listed should work great, and natively (Reason and FCE are Universal).

[shinykaro]

What about screen space? Do you plan to use it with another monitor? It'll be a great notebook, but you might find yourself frustrated if limited to 13" all the time.

[ibkc]

I think that for all you want to do, especially live events, you're going to find the limited USB/FireWire and lack of an Express Card slot to be pretty frustrating. The small screen space could be a problem, too, for all the apps you listed, but especially the graphics. You could get an external monitor, but for the price of the MacBook and decent monitor you could get a MBP. Two years is a long time.

[ajprice]

I've had my Macbook for a few days now, and its my first laptop. The apps you have listed should work fine, but as the ithers have said, the only downside is the screen size and resolution. 1280x800 on a 13" is denser than your average desktop screen, but you are still getting less pixels than a 17" iMac, and probably about evens with a 15" desktop screen (if there is such a thing as a 15" widescreen monitor??). It's not a problem for me because I have a Dell 2407 to connect to.

Other than that, the macbook is fine, the keyboard is nice to type on, I've got used to the one finger/two finger stuff with the trackpad now. I've posted in another thread in the Macbook forum and the photoshop benchmark thread in the mac pro forum about performance. but the short version is that Warcraft 3 runs at full bananas on the macbook and on the dell screen at 1920x1200, with 45-50fps, and photoshop speed test is just over 1 minute, which is G5 Power Mac speed.

[imitchellg5]

Thanks for the replies. I do have an external monitor already that I used with my PowerBook. 2 years isn't really that long in my opinion (see sig). Screen space while I'm away from my monitor is the biggest issue for me, but I think it should be livable (coming from a 12" PowerBook).

[andreas_g4]

From my experience as a pretty heavy user (no, not drugs) the screen size is not actually a problem. The CS3 apps employ the new palette system from Adobe, which saves some space, and evey other app has been used on the 15" PowerBooks which had almost the same res than current MacBooks (excluded the last PB revision).

While nobody would deny that screen real estate is a good thing to have, the MacBooks have some advantages that may or may not weigh equally all together: Size, durability, price and battery life.