Anyone had their hands on a MacBook Intel Duo machine?

Interested in views - some reviews are mixed saying it is very fast BUT only with a limited amount of software and interpreted apps through Rosetta run more slowly.

Feedback would be appreciated

 

There's a lot of opinions on here
http://forums.macrumors.com/

Some good, some bad.
I've ordered one though

 

David,
Apps such as Microsoft Office 2004 and Adobe's Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, and others) are currently not optimized for the new Intel Macs. This means they will run through Rosetta, which means they won't be as quick as they would be when running native.

The thing to bear in mind is that the Macbook is quicker than the iBook it replaces, so that could make up for it running through rosetta.

I've run photoshop and office here and they seem fairly snappy (1.83GhZ Intel iMac with 1.5GB RAM - I'd strongly recommend at least 1GB RAM as a minimum) but nowhere near as quick as they would be when native. Steve Jobs said when the intel machines were released that for the casual user it should be ok, but for graphics professionals they'd not be overly happy.

As for limited software, it depends on what you actually want to do with the machine.

 

One of the students at college has bought one He bought it with the intention to use Music/Audio Apps.....

As yet, there's still quite a few compatability issues from what I can see.

Personally, I looking at getting one, but not until next year. By then the issues will have been sorted (I hope!) I can remember OSX when it first came out. I had Kernel Panics EVERY day!!

Dan

 

I'm probably going to get one next month. I love the black colour but can't justify the price difference. Way to much for the Specs.

Are they any issues with cooling/temps when running windows? Heard there were some for the MacBook Pro.

Also I understand that the memory and Hard drive are much easier (ie, even basic user can) to upgrade.

 

Yup, upgrade of RAM and HD are very very easy indeed. I had to replace the HD in my iBook and you have to basically dismantle the machine, not something you'd ideally want on the consumer model of a machine, you'd want it to be super easy to do, and thankfully it now is.

This vid shows you how easy it is.

 

Thanks Markus.

Forgot I had seen that video!! Is it possible to do-it-yourself upgrade the optical drive? I imagine that is much harder - and I wouldn't want to invalidate warranty that way.

I currently have a G4 iBook - considered upgrading HDD - read some articles and decided against it!!

 

Have a look at this site. Seems to already have guides for the Macbook. Looks like it's easier than with the iBook, but not as easy as RAM or Hard Drive replacement.

Have a look on that site for the G4 iBook upgrades as well. I did mine the other week and it was a pain, but it did work.

 

 

No problem at all. I had a couple of screws left over from the HD change, plus I never moved the little torx screws attached to the hard drive over, which I've not just done, plus found where the other screws were meant to go

 

What problems are they still with intel mac's?
The only one thats a major is Adobe stuff. As for office what does it matter no one can type at over 12Mbits so the fact that it runs under rosetta doent matter. As for the ram yea id always go for 1Gb plus now

 

Office is a lot more than just Word.

I do a lot of multimedia presentations in Powerpoint and that can be powersapping.

I need PPT as all my clients use it.

 

David,
I've had a thought. Have a look here and see if there's an Apple center near to you, give em a ring to make sure they have a macbook there, plus ensure Office 2004 is on there (and anything else you might want to try out) then pop down with your docs on a cd and give the machine a whirl, if you take your existing laptop with you then you could do a side by side comparison.

 

Honestly office runs fine under rosetta there is hardly any difference IMO and if that still fails you can run PPT's through Keynote which is native

 

Office 2004 runs just fine. Its not exactly a taxing set of apps.

Quark 6.5 runs fine, but Adobe CS2 does see the beachball quite a bit.

I'd recommend 2gb for the Macbook and the iMacs