The first exciting week of living with Mac is over and, I guess, it’s time to share my impressions. Although, I wasn’t using it too much (you might remember that it’s Kate’s personal workbench), I had several nice moments during this week when I was granted the permission to spend several hours wandering through the system and trying various applications. Overall, I’m very positive about Mac. All the way I was using it, I had a smile on my face. It was the smile of pleasure as I was thinking how intuitive and highly integrated things could be if they are done right.

I had a pleasure to try various development tools and what was really astounding that the iBook G4 1.42 (1Gb of ram) performed much better than my HP nx9005 Athlon 2400+ (512Mb of ram) working under Ubuntu Linux. And the difference became more noticeable when I plugged out the power cable. The performance of my HP laptop dropped very low and it became nearly impossible to use it as a development station with high-load compilation and debugging sessions, while the difference in performance of iBook maintained subtle.

The other important and outstanding aspect is an amount of noise produced by Apple hardware. Again, my HP laptop is quite noisy and often when it comes to lots of compilations and other CPU-intensive activities, like gaming and graphics processing, it sounds like hell. In contranst to it, iBook is always barely audible, whatever load I give to it.

Battery life is something not to forget about. I have only kind worlds in my mind regarding the power consumption of the machine. I made an experiment when I had an opportunity to work nearly whole day on iBook. So, I plugged out the power supply cable and started to do what I usually do during the day — lots of coding, compilations, profiling sessions — all are quite CPU and disk intensive. To my astonishment, it worked more than 5 hours in my usually high tempo without even a sign of slowdown. Amazing! I wouldn’t tell you how different these parameters are from what I have on my other laptop. I always callibrate my battery there according to the schedule (yes, it’s true, I have the schedule of callibrations entered in my mobile organizer) and it still can’t barely be compared to Mac.

As I already mentioned, I had a very nice time playing with this notebook. Hope to have another good and lengthy session soon. Do you hear me, Kate? :)