As regular readers of this blog might (both) know, I have been loudly praising my rather nice little Acer Aspire One netbook.

However, just before I left the BBC, and in no way connected to the BBC staff discount at the Apple store, I bought myself an Apple MacBook Pro. I needed a computer powerful enough to do some of the jobs my netbook wasn’t capable of – like video encoding, for example – and one to do inspiring and exciting presentations on. And I really didn’t want to use Windows for that; I seem to equate seeing the Windows interface with being at work.

I’ve spent six weeks or so with this computer now; long enough for the Apple love-affair to rub off, and for reality to set in. So here is a moderately considered long-term review of this beastie.

I was concerned about the chiclet keyboard – nearly putting me off this unit completely – but it does appear to work well. The keyboard is my favourite aspect of the Acer Aspire One: I got on very well with that unit’s 89% keyboard – both its responsiveness and feel, but also its size: I actually find the MacBook Pro’s full-size keyboard is almost too large. One thing I don’t like is that the black keyboard does show finger-grease fairly quickly and obviously. I do, however, really like the keytop illumination, which makes the machine very usable in dark surroundings.

The USB positions are annoyingly close together. Plug in a 3G broadband dongle into the front USB socket, and you cannot plug in an iPhone into the adjacent USB socket, nor can you easily plug in an SD card into the SD slot. Putting these plugs together so closely is just stupidity, nothing more. Quite why SD cards don’t fit flush into the unit is odd. And don’t even get me started on the absence of a standard VGA output without a £20 adaptor. Grr. Having said that, the magnetic power adaptor plug is genius, however; as is the battery life, which is simply excellent. That, alone, makes this the computer I carry around.

This machine is damn heavy. Weighing 2.04kg, it’s over twice as heavy as the Acer Aspire One’s 950g, but feels considerably heavier still, particularly with the (also larger) power supply (the Acer’s is just 0.15kg, though I can’t work out how heavy the MacBook’s is). Because it’s larger, it’s not as easy to carry around, and while it does fit into my man-bag, it’s certainly not as sensible to schlep around with it as the netbook; and because it’s a more expensive piece of kit, it’s less sensible to just chuck in my bag unprotected (as I do with my sticker-laden Acer Aspire One).

Ubuntu’s 3G support really was as simple, for my Huawei USB modem, as plugging it in; it recognised it and set it up immediately. Unfortunately, Apple’s 3G software inside Snow Leopard isn’t quite as nice; while better than the horrid 3Connect software that the modem comes with, it is irritatingly buggy – thinking that it’s connected when it’s not, for example, or needing me to unplug, count to five and then plug the modem back in. It pops up dialog boxes complaining when it can’t connect, and the 3G modem seems considerably more ‘deaf’ than when inside the Acer Aspire. This is very poor when compared to Ubuntu, where the dongle simply sits there, silently connecting and reconnecting when required.

In terms of the software – iCal and Apple Mail are truly execrable pieces of software. When editing an event inside iCal, flipping to a different program to check the details manages to take iCal out of ‘edit’ mode, which is hugely annoying; the ‘today’ button isn’t sensibly near the calendar, but the other end of the app’s window; and the ‘Location’ bar consistently displays some kind of alert, and I have no idea what it’s alerting me to. Apple Mail is slower than Gmail – which isn’t big or clever – and less flexible than Gmail too.

It’s not all bad though – I’m using Fluid to use Google Mail and Google Calendar as separate apps, which works perfectly – particularly with Gears, meaning I’ve still got access offline. Fluid is really rather excellent, and a godsend for power-users (since I can tweak the webapps as much as I like). Keynote is excellent presentation software; QuickSilver is every bit as excellent as its equivalent, “Gnome Do”; and the BBC iPlayer’s desktop software (for which I forget the internal project name) works beautifully, even in HD.

For presentations, therefore, this is a great machine. Frankly, for schlepping around the capital (or even for doing work on Media UK at the office), I’m rather hankering after the netbook. I might buy it a bigger battery.

Photo: Lauri Rantala; used under licence

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