A quick follow-up to my First Impressions of the MacBook:

Note that I’m busy working on WebnoteHappy 1.1, but I’m not ready to announce what will be in it yet. But please check out WebnoteHappy and let me know what you’d like to see in future versions. :)

So first to answer andrea who asked in the comments: “I’m curious, what’s up with the button on the Macbook? It felt weirdly flexible in the store and didn’t always register a double-click. Have you noticed this?”

I went back to the Apple Store Tysons Corner last night. Its nice and convenient – whenever my wife needs to go get something, I always try take a quick detour through the Apple Store. This time I spent some quality time with the White MacBooks. I played around with the button and it clicked just fine.

Its quite possible that the first batch of MacBooks that are on display are of varying quality. I think they showed up on the day of the announcement. And you can be sure that they have been banged on and tried out thoroughly. But you won’t ever buy those models, you’ll get a later revision. If you do have a problem, Apple seems to deal with the ones I’ve had well. The extended AppleCare especially is like a big, warm fuzzy blanket compared to some of the stories my Windows friends have told me about their Big Consumer Electronics Store Laptop Warranty experiences. Hopefully Apple will make sure that the stores get the later models every so often that are fresh so that everyone will have a great experience while trying them out in-store.

Double-clicks seemed fine too. I even went into System Preferences and turned on “double-tap registers as context click” which means if you tap with two fingers, it is like doing Control-click. That’s right-click to the Switchers in the audience. That seemed to work ok. I also did the two fingers up and down drag to do vertical scrolling.

I also tried sleeping the MacBook and noticed that there still is a sleep indicator, but its way on the right, slightly to the left of the remote control IR port.

I deal with a G4 iBook occasionally and so I noticed a few differences between that and the MacBook which stand out:

1. The MacBook can do monitor spanning, the iBook only does mirroring.

2. The MacBook has F12, whereas the iBook doesn’t. This is important for activating Dashboard.

3. The MacBook has a way bigger trackpad, about the size of a MacBook Pro

So… am I getting a MacBook? Probably not. As a programmer, I really NEED a lot of screen real estate. A lot. Which is why I have a 17″ PowerBook G4. Also I’ve realized that Intel testing is actually not as difficult as I thought. Perhaps this is because I’ve built WebnoteHappy so that it only runs on Tiger and uses Cocoa + Core Data + Bindings as much as possible – that helps insulate me from platform differences. I also have a great team of beta testers – many who have Intel Macs. This makes getting an Intel machine a little less urgent. Though I would like to have faster compile times, I have to balance this out versus things like going to WWDC.

That being said, I am going to recommend a MacBook or an iMac to all my Windows friends and family – especially since they are priced well for Switchers AND they’ll be soothed by the ability to run their current software via Parallels or Boot Camp.