New MacBook and a new convert

My girlfriend Martina has had her current Acer 12" laptop for quite some time now and she recently asked me whether she should start looking for a new one. As the Acer is equipped with the original Core Duo Intel processor (yep the really shitty one) I told her she is ready for a refresh.

When picking a new laptop her main priorities were size, weight and compatibility – she works as a professional translator and needs a lot of Dictionaries that don’t necessary run on Linux and Macs. Nevertheless when choosing we have actually eliminated all windows laptops and came to the conclusion the new MacBook would be the best choice.

The size is about right, it’s quite light – she didn’t want the original plastic MacBooks due to weight concerns and in addition it’s quite powerful. As far as the compatibility is concerned I helped her by testing all the stuff she needed on my MacBook Pro and to my pleasant surprise all of her applications either run on Mac OS X, have good replacements or you can run them through CrossOver. With her fears silenced she went on and bought the 2.0 GHz new unibody MacBook. In the coming days I will be helping her with the migration to the Mac and I hope she will get accustomed quickly. And if I come across anything interesting I’ll post it here.

Blu-Ray and the new Macbooks

And one additional post in regards to the new MacBooks / MacBook Pros. I’m not sure if people who didn’t follow the announcement noticed this but in the Q&A session Steve Jobs answered a question regarding Blu-Ray  and let me quote him:

"Blu-Ray is a bag of hurt."

What he basically elaborated on is the fact that licensing is a huge issue with the new format and currently it is a chaotic situation. In fact the new Nvidia chipsets support Blu-Ray and therefore it seems it is really not a technical issue. I personally think that Hollywood asked for some crazy fees if Apple would put Blu-Ray drives into their new MacBooks and Jobs just felt it wasn’t worth it yet. The moment the studios become reasonable I think we will see upgrade options for Blu-ray superdrives.

The Mac-Convert effect

My girlfriend is a professional translator and interpreter (if anyone needs one – I can supply a contact) and she uses a 2005 (!!) Acer Travelmate 3012 WTMI as her main computer. Now I know what the common opinion is regarding Acers product lines but I must say it served her quite well. It has a nice build, decent performance (2005 context) and is quite small/light (12"). The problem is obvious – it’s old and needs to be replaced by something a bit more – well current. As I am a recent convert to the Mac platform and Apple just released a new portfolio of great notebooks I’m thinking a beautiful new MacBook would be the best choice for her.

We all know this situation – me a tech guy, recently jumped the Windows ship and am happily swimming in the Mac sea – am trying to persuade my girlfriend that this new 1300 $  MacBook is a perfect solution to her problems. Smell bias? Normally I would say she absolutely does not care about tech – she just needs to get her work done – but these new Macbooks have really penetrated the ignorance aura of a completely un-techie person. This means two important things:

1. I think I can get her to buy it:)
2. Apple did hit a cord with the non-ethusiast consumer with the new Macbooks

As I mentioned in the earlier post – the decision made by Apple not to go to the low-cost notebook market seems to have a decent chance of paying of. The new Macbooks are really polished, beautiful looking and powerful which does not only justify the higher price but also gives you the feeling your main tool for work is not some grey box but a work of art made by people that enjoy their work.

It will be perfect for her. Or is that just the Mac-Convert effect?

Anyway I still have to get all her stuff running under OS X – especially dictionaries. Anyone got experience?