After a few hours I was able to use the new machine quite comfortably. I got used to the application menu in a different location and the fact that everything just worked made the playing with the machine a great fun. Of course I had those small problems with almost everything initially. E-mail account and iChat account haven been setup at the initial configuration time but it took me a couple of minutes to figure it out how to add more e-mail accounts and more IM accounts.

So far it was nice and pleasant experience. And to be honest I was very hesitant before starting this article as I really didn't want to write an article full of complaints. In fact there are very few complaints for the quality and comfort of the overall usage and when we have to talk about quality and comfort it is much more fair to talk about the hardware separately from talking about the software.

I have no single complaint for the hardware. This is top quality product. High resolution 17" screen gives you a plenty of space for comfortable work. I can easily put 3 emacs windows side by side and edit one file while seeing content of 2 other files. The picture is sharp and stable. No dead pixels and no darker/brighter areas.

Another very important element - keyboard. Very comfortable to use. You can very well feel when the key is pressed and when you eventually get used to a different MacOSX layout you will feel like at home in quite short time.

Speakers - the best I have ever seen (heard) in laptop. Loud and clear voice. Just excellent.

Mousepad - well, I hate mousepads, all of them. And this is not multi-touch like in Macbook Air. My impression it is still better then in other laptops I used to use but I grab real mouse whenever possible anyway.

When we speak of a real mouse then we can talk about either USB or Bluetooth. I tried both and both worked very well. Thus I can also say that Bluetooth is working very well. I have Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected at the same time. No problems so far.

WiFi - well it works, just works. My impression, however is that it is not very stable. I guess the software might be a cause but still I can not say too much good about it. You can of course easily find all available networks and easily connect to a selected network. It works for most of the time but sometimes it stops and I had 2 OS hangs which might be related to the WiFi network usage. I try to use ethernet whenever possible which works just fine and I haven't had any problems with it.

All other stuff like built-in camera, USB and Firewire ports work and I haven't had any problems with them. Even though I have many devices connected at the same time: external HDD on Firewire 800Mbit/sec, external digital video camera on USB2 and I am importing video clips from the camera to the external HDD.

Now we can talk about software installed.

Macbook comes with pre-installed Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. Which is a 64bit operating system which sounds really good. It also contains a set of basic application to make use of the equipment: e-mail program, IM client, photo, movie, calendar dvd recording, picture capturing. After the initial setup you can enjoy your laptop and do all the stuff you like on a very basic level.

1. Mail - just as it says, simple but very comfortable e-mail program with messages filtering and virtual boxes - big plus.
2. iChat - IM client and probably you can not call it simple (although easy to use) because it offers voice and video chats. Unfortunately I had to throw it away very quickly. You can connect to many accounts on many IM networks but each connection opens a separate iChat window. Unusable. I switched to Audium. Big minus.
3. iPhoto, iMovie - very basic programs. Don't expect too much. iPhoto doesn't even scale photos. The plus is that they both can import media from everything I have at home and can connect to the Macbook. Still, big plus as they are easy to use and work well if you need just basic functionality.
4. Safari - really good web browser. But still I couldn't find any plugins useful for web development. Installed Firefox and I use both for most of the time. Small plus.
5. Terminal - I work in the terminal a lot. So this application is quite important to me. The program you can find in Macbook is a very good one. It works in tabs and is quite comfortable. Almost as good as Konsole from Kde. The oly significant disadvantage is that it doesn't remember opened sessions between restarts. Still big plus.

There are actually more programs installed but I haven't tried them yet. I guess all of them offer a good basic functionality just enough for start. And that's it for now. Next time I will talk how to make the Macbook a fully functional development platform...