Due to the Fourth of July holiday I didn’t have time to explore it as much as I would have any other non-holiday time of the year. I am just now getting around to looking at things in depth.

The Specs
- 15″ screen
- Intel Core i5
- 4 GB memory
- 320 GB hard drive
- SD card slot
- Built in battery (8-9 hours)
- Intel HD graphics
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M with 256 MB

The specs are straight from the apple website. Maybe some of this means something to you, but to me it looks mostly like geek speak (okay, that’s an exaggeration).

The built-in battery bit of this computer concerns me. This computer is supposed to last me for four years in college, and because I paid so much for it, I expect it to go even beyond that. I’m no genius, but I do know that the battery life of all electronics, whether it be a computer, cell phone, or MP3 player, decreases its hold over time. It doesn’t so much concern me now, but I hope there is some way of buying a replacement battery in the future.

Right now I don’t have all of the programs I would like and/or need on here, so I cannot speak of its performance in that area. But compared to my windows laptop, the loading speed and Internet speed are slightly faster. It’s not so much faster that I would recommend changing your windows computer for a mac, but I figure it’s worth mentioning. Keep in mind there aren’t any programs on here to slow this machine down.

The biggest adjustment from a windows to a mac laptop would have to be the track pad and keyboard shortcuts. For instance I am used to pressing “ctrl” + “enter” on my windows laptop to get a “.com” automatically added when I type in a website. On my mac I have to press “command” + “enter/return.” I also had to change my settings to enable right clicking. Before I had to press “control” and click, which got to be too much of an annoyance.

There is also no task bar. Instead mac has a “dashboard,” which consists of programs you can automatically have there and whatever you have open that is minimized. This took me well over a day to figure out. I cleared the majority of things out of there and dedicated that to my “task bar.”

If I had a decent photo editing program on here I would take screen shots and post them on here so you could know what I am talking about. Maybe I’ll figure something out like that for another day. As for now it’s off to work for six hours.

Filed under: Review by virgospl