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Buying a BlackBook

M

mckyvlle

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Hi All, after 3.5 years with my Dell laptop I've decided to give it up and buy a BlackBook! First time Mac buyer here, so I'm really anxious to see how a Mac will fit in my life.

Would you believe it, the MacBooks are sold out in Macao! I'll have to wait a couple of weeks before they are in stock again. This gives me a short amount of time to ask some questions and avoid buyer's remorse 🙄

Hoping to join the enlightened Mac crowd soon, wish me luck!
 
Enlightened?
come on dude we just all want stuff that works! and not spend an hour removing crap that is unnecessary. I recently changed from a top of the line DELL XPS Laptop, and the only time I looked back was to check ebay for the price of my Dell. Why change you ask? first off I loved XP Pro, but a friend let me play on his Blackbook for a few days and I must admit I was shocked at user ease, yeah MAC does some things different, but most of the time its for the good. besides another friend of mine bought a new machine with VISTA on it and he absolutely HATED IT and downgraded. I am not saying MAC's are the new coming but I will say when they were conceived they had the consumer in mind. Just make sure you play on one before you buy.
 
Welcome to the forums. I hope you enjoy your new MacBook, whenever you get it.

You mentioned buyer's remorse and questions, but didn't ask anything. Is there something you need to know?
 
mckyvlle said:
Hi All, after 3.5 years with my Dell laptop I've decided to give it up and buy a BlackBook! First time Mac buyer here, so I'm really anxious to see how a Mac will fit in my life.

Would you believe it, the MacBooks are sold out in Macao! I'll have to wait a couple of weeks before they are in stock again. This gives me a short amount of time to ask some questions and avoid buyer's remorse 🙄

Hoping to join the enlightened Mac crowd soon, wish me luck!
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure buyers remorse is non-existant when it comes to Mac. Unless you like for things to be more complicated, then stick with a PC
 
Thanks!

As for buyer's remorse, it's nothing major. Just the anxiety of being a first-time Mac buyer. I've been reading the forums and read some trouble the the MacBook keyboard, electric buzz and so on. So hopefully when I get my BlackBook it's as near as possible defect-free.

I really wouldn't want to have it complicated. Having spent most of my computing life in Windows and trying to get things to work, I want my stuff to just work 🙂
 
Got my BlackBook!

w00t!

The MacBooks are back in stock and I got my BlackBook on Saturday!
Spent the weekend playing with it and it's perfect! Keyboard's reponsive, perfect screen (even the glossy bit didn't bug me), and temperature is ok: ~40c during web browsing, ~75c when both cores are at 100%.

One of my best purchases! 😀
 
congrats mckyville!

and welcome to the enlightened 😀

your blackbook should be quite an awesome machine


as you're a first time mac user, i recommend cruising these forums looking for ways to streamline your user experience and such

as a starter, here's some programs i use

- Mail (absolutely fantastic)
- Safari (sounds obvious, but get to know how to use it...there are many worthwhile hidden features)
- Adium (the best messengering service out there for mac atm, and with www.adiumxtras.com you can customise it infinitely)
- iWork (get yourself iWork08...it is much better than Office for mac)
- iTunes (why would you use anything else?)
- VLC (media player that plays every format i've tried on it thus far)
- Toast 8 (the best disc burning program i've ever seen or used)
- Handbrake (great for converting DVD's to readable movie files)
- Mac the Ripper (*cough* rips any DVD *cough*)
- Visual Hub (converts any video file to any video file so far as i can tell)
- Transmission (simple, easy to use torrenting client)

and explore the inbuilt software, there are some gems in there...no matter what you spend your time doing🙂

:apple:good luck and enjoy your mac:apple:
 
Genghis Khan said:
congrats mckyville!

and welcome to the enlightened 😀

your blackbook should be quite an awesome machine


as you're a first time mac user, i recommend cruising these forums looking for ways to streamline your user experience and such

as a starter, here's some programs i use

- Mail (absolutely fantastic)
- Safari (sounds obvious, but get to know how to use it...there are many worthwhile hidden features)
- Adium (the best messengering service out there for mac atm, and with www.adiumxtras.com you can customise it infinitely)
- iWork (get yourself iWork08...it is much better than Office for mac)
- iTunes (why would you use anything else?)
- VLC (media player that plays every format i've tried on it thus far)
- Toast 8 (the best disc burning program i've ever seen or used)
- Handbrake (great for converting DVD's to readable movie files)
- Mac the Ripper (*cough* rips any DVD *cough*)
- Visual Hub (converts any video file to any video file so far as i can tell)
- Transmission (simple, easy to use torrenting client)

and explore the inbuilt software, there are some gems in there...no matter what you spend your time doing🙂

:apple:good luck and enjoy your mac:apple:
Click to expand...

Thanks for the great info. I just bookmarked this thread so that when I FINALLY get my Macbook (Come on Santa!), I will know what to immediately go for.
 
np guys🙂

enjoy them...and also...many other people have created their own lists on the internet of their favourite mac programs...well worth a look🙂
 
mckyvlle said:
Hi All, after 3.5 years with my Dell laptop I've decided to give it up and buy a BlackBook! First time Mac buyer here, so I'm really anxious to see how a Mac will fit in my life.

Would you believe it, the MacBooks are sold out in Macao! I'll have to wait a couple of weeks before they are in stock again. This gives me a short amount of time to ask some questions and avoid buyer's remorse 🙄

Hoping to join the enlightened Mac crowd soon, wish me luck!
Click to expand...

lol thats crazy.. im just about to buy a blackbook after having a DELL inspiron 9100 for 3.5 years! 🙂. Will be sad to say goodbye to 1920x1200 res and 128mb graphics card, but the noise and weight of that machine meant it was pretty much useless for uni, unless I wanted to break my back carrying it!.

will buy my blackbook hopefully v.soon :-D good luck on urs mate. This will be my first one too
 
Genghis Khan said:
congrats mckyville!

and welcome to the enlightened 😀

your blackbook should be quite an awesome machine


as you're a first time mac user, i recommend cruising these forums looking for ways to streamline your user experience and such

as a starter, here's some programs i use

- Mail (absolutely fantastic)
- Safari (sounds obvious, but get to know how to use it...there are many worthwhile hidden features)
- Adium (the best messengering service out there for mac atm, and with www.adiumxtras.com you can customise it infinitely)
- iWork (get yourself iWork08...it is much better than Office for mac)
- iTunes (why would you use anything else?)
- VLC (media player that plays every format i've tried on it thus far)
- Toast 8 (the best disc burning program i've ever seen or used)
- Handbrake (great for converting DVD's to readable movie files)
- Mac the Ripper (*cough* rips any DVD *cough*)
- Visual Hub (converts any video file to any video file so far as i can tell)
- Transmission (simple, easy to use torrenting client)

and explore the inbuilt software, there are some gems in there...no matter what you spend your time doing🙂

:apple:good luck and enjoy your mac:apple:
Click to expand...

Getting a BlackBook sometime in 2008 and this list looks great, thanks!
 
I just bought mine on black friday.
I got $90 off from my EPP apple site. Then they also added on the $101 off for black friday. Now i just need to buy apple care sometime next year also need to max out the memory to get vmware fusion to run better
 
Add these to the list:

NeoOffice: a free word processing client for OS X
MainMenu: a great little maintenance tool
 
phungy said:
Congrats 🙂 Upgrade that beast to 4GB RAM 😛
Click to expand...

Definately! Ordered a 4GB RAM kit from OWC, it's shipping already and should be here by the weekend 😀


> tianuk3
Mine's an Inspiron 8600, 15.4'' lcd @ 1680x1050. Like you said, I love the screen estate too. But now I'm flying around alot more, it's just too much to lug around. Hope you get yours soon! I'm glad I got mine! 😎


Say, any thoughts between Parallels and VMware Fusion? Is there any significant advantages of choosing one over the other or just a matter of individual preference?

Cheers!
 
Thanks guys for the software suggestions!

What (un-)archiving do you guys suggest? I mainly have to deal with zip, gzip, tar, bzip2, 7-zip and the occasional rar archives. Used to use 7-zip on Windows, but there is only a commandline version on the Mac.

Any ideas?
 
hi,

I have not read this thread in full but just wanted to let you know of some things that I felt were rather important when I bought a blackbook.

1. File Sharing with windows PC

this was really important to me because I have a main PC at home and it has all the music and videos on it.
It is possible to access files from your home PC, but you would have to have a wireless network set up.

I hope you will enjoy your mac!
 
Thanks!

I never had good experience with filesharing in Windows, even between Windows machines... It's hard to connect sometimes and sometimes it just won't work.

Anyway, my office has a sadistic router rules that blocks certain traffic. I decided it's far easier for me to setup a Web server and share my files that way. Works well between Mac, Linux and Windows 🙂

Really am enjoying my Mac!
 
mckyvlle said:
w00t!

The MacBooks are back in stock and I got my BlackBook on Saturday!
Spent the weekend playing with it and it's perfect! Keyboard's reponsive, perfect screen (even the glossy bit didn't bug me), and temperature is ok: ~40c during web browsing, ~75c when both cores are at 100%.

One of my best purchases! 😀
Click to expand...

I've not yet managed to get my CPU above about 70 😉
Although I don't do any video editing or 3D modelling so 🙂

Also on the matter of the RAM, max out for sure.
I had 2GB of compatible RAM in my old laptop and switched it to the MacBook and as of now I have 16MB free :/
This could probably be assigned to the massive memory usage of Safari but I was still surprised just quite how much OS X uses
 
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