puppy dog imagining just how big that treat is that you’re hiding behind your back. I mean, c’mon man, it’s got duo-freakin’ cores! Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Yee haw, cowboy!

Truth be told, three times since I bought the MacBook I’ve sat down to do a head-to-head speed comparison with my old PowerBook 867Mhz, wanting to see if it really is any faster than a three-year-old Mac.

Sure, it’s faster. But not neck-snappingly sinus-clearingly bleating faster. The Safari icon still bounces on aimlessly while loading, iPhoto still coughs and stammers along while scrolling through my photos, and Office still takes forever to do pretty much anything (okay, okay, it’s running under Rosetta, fine).

I did notice, however, that when I boot into BootCamp it’s wicked fast.  *cough*

If only Vista wasn’t so damn ugly.

06 Ooh, a gig of RAM! (Go buy some more)

I used to run Microsoft Office, Microsoft Virtual PC, Mail.app, Safari, and a bunch of other stuff on my

PB12 867 with 640MB of RAM, and never once thought twice about how much RAM I had. It just worked.

But last week I finally relented and bought a second GB for my MacBook, maxing it out at 2 GB of RAM. It’s no longer swapping furiously to the hard drive all the time, at least. I’m hoping that the Intel-native versions of Office will reduce the memory footprint, but I’ve already bought the RAM, so it’s pretty much a moot point.

07 The glossy screen

Have you ever seen those articles about the people that put a computer display in a bathroom mirror? When the computer is off, it’s a regular mirror, and when you turn it on, it becomes a display. Same here, minus the bathroom and the creepy guys putting a computer in the mirror. Oh, but it’s supposed to make your photos and DVDs look better. That’s fantastic, during the eight minutes in an average day when I’m doing media.

08 Well, at least it didn’t explode

My wife did something absolutely shocking

recently. She closed the lid of her MacBook on Friday, when it was half-charged, and put it in her bag. When we opened it up on Sunday evening, the battery had died. Not ‘out of juice, plug it in and be happy’ died, but ‘good god, where did these people study physics’ died. “Big black ‘X’ on the battery icon” died.

I did a little Internet research on the topic. The answers vary, but they can be clumped into two general groups: (a) it’s borked, take it to an Apple store and they may give you a new battery, which (a.1) may or (a.2) may not solve the problem in the (a.3) near term or (a.4) long term, if you’re lucky ... or (b) you’re an absolute tool for ever letting your battery drop below 20%, and it’s your damn fault for not treating your battery charging cycles with kid gloves.  Update: walked into Apple store with my MacBook, walked out with a brand new battery 15 minutes later.  Annoying, but decent.

09 Not exactly random reboots, but close

Ah, the random reboot. The juicy little snack in the middle of a long working session where you were completely in the flow and just streaming thoughts