So, what about the MacBook?
I was talking to one of the kids working at the apple store and, of course, as soon as you start talking about graphics cards, their eyes glaze over. But I was smitten - what a great price, and the screen was bright and it was a great proportion. (Other perks, although unrelated, are the two-finger scroll, which works great, the built in camera, and the remote, fun stuff.) I was going to install a demo of sketchup and see what a large file looked like while at the store, but I just bought it, instead.... care to the wind.
I brought the thing home, and I am amazed....
First thing I did was put Sketchup on the laptop with an 8hour trial. I opened the largest model I had in the G5 over the wireless networks. It's a 14MB file with a detailed countoured site, lots of trees, detailed buildings, cars, people, etc.
Sketchup took a second or two longer to open than the G5, because of Rosetta, I think, but once open, it was just as snappy, it opened the model fine. Once inside I was able to spread the drawing in HD format and move around inside the model without the display converting to wireframe. Shadows re-render, and there are some rough edged lines on coplanar faces, but very, very nice. I think I may have gotten used to the soft anti-aliasing of the ATI drivers on the G5, but considering this thing has the paltry 2 256MB ram chips, it's great.
I put the G4 ibook next to the Macbook with the same web pages open on my back "veranda" in full sunlight and the glossy screen is incredible. There is a tiny bit of reflection, but the text was clear and the page was bright, while I had to squint to see the page on the iBook. The same thing goes for the Sketchup model. Indoors it's even better. The screen is simply beautiful. The reflection is minimal, but the brightness is noticeable.
I bought white, because black is too "Dell". The bottom gets warmer than the iBook, but not painfully so.
I hope to give BootCamp a shot with AutoCAD LT to see how it does (future post)
The keyboard takes getting used to, but is kind of addictive after a period. My bluetooth mouse and keyboard from the G5 connected without a hitch.
Buying advice:
If you need to walk through highly detailed models while connected to an external projector, you may want to spend the extra bucks for a Pro, but as a road warrior, or even as a primary machine for models under 10MB, this is a great machine. There's alot of perks packed into this machine for such a price.
