have a nice big screen, a large hard drive, and great WiFi range. But they’ve also been the source of a number of disappointments as well - from bad design decisions to faulty hardware - that make me yearn for the carefree days of me and my PB12 (and my wife and her IBM ThinkPad addiction, fed by her previous employers).

I’m no Apple apologist, so here’s the list of problems, pixel-for-pixel:

01 The razor edge wrist rest

The edge at the front of the case, on the near side of the wrist rest, has a nice sharp 90-degree edge on the plastic. When the MacBook is closed, it looks fantastic. But when it’s open, it’s grinding away at the skin on my wrists the whole time I use the computer.

02 The boxy keyboard

I could absolutely fly on the PB12 keyboard, with very few mistakes even after a long day of typing. And my wife on the ThinkPad - she’d make a court stenographer blush with envy. But the MacBook keyboard is average at best. I mean, key travel is

fine, and the layout is familiar, but there’s something about these squared-off keys that makes me lose my rhythm in the later hours of the day, especially after capturing user comments for 10-12 hours when doing field research.

03 The ever-smudge case

Just moments after I took my black MacBook Core 2 Duo out of the box, I knew I had problems. I’m a clean kind of guy, wash my hands from time to time, don’t eat Doritos and nacho cheese while working on the laptop, you get the picture. But good grief, this thing will suck the fingerprints off of you from six inches away and leave word of every time you’ve touched the case in the last week. I assumed I was going to get a nice matte black case like the old PowerBook G3s, but it’s more like a crime scene investigator’s toolkit.

And the keyboard, yeesh. Again, clean guy here, not greasy guy. But my keyboard (especially the spacebar and the track pad) is all shiny, like someone waxed it. Examine the keycaps, do a little letter frequency analysis, and you can figure out which language I’ve been typing in most.

03b The ‘skid marks’ case

Ahh, remember skid marks? If you’ve got kids, you know what I mean (and I’m not talking about something to do with the car). My wife is also a clean type, but her white MacBook wrist rest has the telltale brown circles under the wrists. And I haven’t even tried to clean it off, because a good Google search will tell you it’s pretty much impossible.

Update: the Apple store just ordered me a new keyboard, and should have it in by Monday.

04 While we’re beating up on the case, how about some cracks?

Yup, never dropped the MacBook, but there they are, long hairline cracks at four or five stress points on my wife’s white MacBook: especially between the hinges on the back and next to the hard drive. They seem to be surface cracks, for now, but disconcerting for a laptop that’s less than 90 days old.

05 Core 2 Duo my butt

I dunno, maybe I was just a little too eager, like a