Things I love in my MBP:

  • the overall design and hardware quality (if you except the heat of the carter close to the right bottom of the screen when I build a debug build of xulrunner, I found only one issue : when you insert an ExpressCard, the blocking click happens too late. If like me you want to use an expresscard to read SD cards, it's really hard to push your card far enough in the mac)
  • the incredible quality of the iSight cam compared to what I had in my Sony laptop; and that one was already good.
  • Parallels. I started with a trial version but it's worth every penny.
  • the battery life.

Things I like:

  • the quality of the keyboard
  • the glossy screen, although I haven't tried yet outside of my flat or the office
  • the new touchpad, very very cool

Things I dislike:

  • the french mac keyboard just totally sucks when you're a developer. Key combinations are needed for {}[] \ and | and that's a bit painful when you code
  • more important, the metallic edge of the palmrest is a bit too sharp and it's slowly shaving a portion of my skin at the bottom of both arms... When the bone becomes visible, I'll sue Apple :-)
  • I miss the delete key and the page up and page down keys.
  • I really miss the ability to resize a window from any edge or corner.
  • iPhoto is very slow when it imports a laaaarge image library. Roughly twenty times slower than Picasa...

Things I hate:

  • gdb...

Things that surprised me:

  • the HD is a 1.8" Toshiba and I can hear clicks coming from it ; it's probably the most fragile part of this laptop.
  • the cpu fan is not of the best quality ever...
  • MacPorts installation broke once, twice, and only third attempt (I manually set CC env variable) installed it correctly. Yeah, I know, I found afterwards it's a known issue but still, very surprising.
  • I just updated the touchpad driver. I must say I did not have a single issue with that touchpad even before updating.
  • the USB ports are on the left hand side; when you use your right hand for an external mouse, it's not very convenient unless you have a wireless mouse.
  • Thunderbird surprised me too: first the junk mail controls did not work at all because it was a fresh install from scratch. There's a bug about this in bugzilla. I managed to have emails manually tagged as junk be moved to my Junk folder but other things are still broken. I also miss the incoming email notification in the windows version of Thunderbird. There's probably an extension meeting my wishes.
  • context menus do not work inside the menupopups of Firefox's personal toolbar. A bit painful when you want to delete a bookmark there.
  • lack of a good MSN Messenger client with full video and audio support. Fortunately, Parallels makes it easy to use the builtin iSight with Windows MSN Messenger.
  • the max angle between the keyboard and the screen is only 135°.