The MacBook; Don’t Believe any Negativity

So it seems by reading the many reviews of the new 12” Retina MacBook that your either going to love it, or hate it, without much room in-between. By most accounts, the single USC-C port and the new mechanism on the keyboard seem to be the biggest points of contention, with the Intel Core-M processor getting a few mentions. Well before you decide those arguments are enough to sway your decision one way or the other, read on.

First thing, you cannot argue with how convenient this machine is to use because of it’s size; it’s really thin and light. This makes it very portable, and equally easy to use on your leg or on a coffee table. Right now I have it sitting on my leg while I am watching TV and writing this review. Yes that’s right I am writing this entire piece on the MacBook, using Apple’s Pages to compose it. Pages seems to be a very capable and easy to use word processing program, and it’s included with the MacBook.

Which brings me to the keyboard, I have read where some say that typing on this all day will make your fingers sore because of the short travel of the butterfly mechanism under each key. Well I am pretty sure that if you treat it like a conventional scissor mechanism keyboard with longer travel, it might get tiring on your fingers. But the real question is why are you trying to type on a butterfly keyboard with the same pressure that you would use on a scissor style? One of the things that make us human is the ability to vary the force at which we do something. You wouldn’t exert the same force to lift a piece of paper that you would a 25 pound weight, so why are you typing with the same force?

There are other points to the keyboard as well, first of all there are individual LED lights under each key, rather than the light bar that illuminates most other keyboards. This results in less light leakage around the keys, and a more uniform appearance to the backlighting. Also for a machine so small, the keyboard is full-sized, which makes for a very nice typing experience. (Did I mention I was typing this on the MacBook?)

Now the single USB-C port; simply put, on a machine like this, it makes perfect sense. The computer is built with diminutive size in mind, and by eliminating ports, Apple was able to achieve this, and if you think about it, it is really not an issue. I have a MacBook (unibody 2008) a MacBook Pro (2010) a MacBook Air (2015) and this MacBook (2015), and I don’t have anything attached to any port on any of the aforementioned machines, except for the power cable. Now yes, I do miss the MagSafe port for power that is on the other machines, I have to be careful because if I bump the cable on this MacBook it will not pull out, the computer is hitting the floor, but that is my only complaint. Even when I travel, I don’t usually connect my memory card and external hard drive to my computer to transfer images; I found that when I do, I forget about them and usually end up tugging on one or the other when I move the computer on my lap. So if you are someone that usually connects multiple peripherals to your notebook, that’s something to consider because you’re not doing that here without a dongle.

Ahh the dongle, something else to remember, right? Perhaps, but if you’re like me and your full-frame DSLR uses Compact Flash cards, you’re carrying one anyway for the card reader; most laptops don't have a slot for CF cards. Even if you don’t you still need a cable to plug an external drive in, so it’s simply adding one (I always keep a USB-C cable in the case for the MacBook)

Now about that performance thing, well that’s really up to you. I must say I don’t like ill-performing machines, I have a Windows tablet with an Atom processor in it, and I am not really happy with it’s performance. It is basically slow, and that’s even on Facebook games, something that I don’t feel any machine built in the last 2-3 years should be slow on. This MacBook plays those same games with no slowing, no hiccups whatsoever, it just works smoothly. Now I don’t have a benchmark suite here to run this machine on, and really that doesn’t much matter to me. A computer can do good (or bad) on a synthetic benchmark, how it performs in your hands is what matters most to me.

Price? Yes you are going to pay for it, but cutting edge technology is rarely cheap. Is the MacBook a value, well that would depend on the purchaser. There is really nothing to compare it to as far as size and weight, if you’re going by raw processing power or onboard storage, well that might be a different story. In the end it boils down to is it worth it to you; a Rolex and a Timex both keep time, the value of the price difference between the two is up to the consumer. 

So in my opinion, the MacBook is a great computer, and I am glad that I did not dwell on all of the negative reviews that I read, and focused on the positive. Yes there are some things that will take a little bit of getting used to, but with progress comes change. For those old enough to remember the first portable mobile phones, they were the size of a landline, and you carried them in a bag with a battery that did not last that long. Then we got hand-held sets that were still large, but had decent transmit power and a self-contained battery. As phones got smaller so did the keys (sound familiar), and the output power dropped as batteries got smaller, but we learned to adapt. 

The MacBook is not so much of an adaption as a purpose-built machine; it’s designed to be very thin and very light and it does that splendidly. If you’re looking for thin and light with a few more ports, then the MacBook Air is a better choice. But if you want the ultimate in portability, the thinnest and lightest notebook out there, then the MacBook is for you. In the theater that it’s designed to perform in, it is an A-List machine!