[Fury]

My old 3 year old Fujitsu-Siemens notebook died last week. In a way I am glad it did because it was a heavy brick, a whopping 3.5kg including AC-adapter. And now I have a good reason to buy a new notebook.

It didn't take me even 10 minutes to know what I wanted; a black MacBook. I hope to have this baby with me by friday.

I decided to buy a Mac because this was a good opportunity to see myself what are the pros and cons of Macs and OS X. Yes, this will be my first Mac I have bought.

[Col. Fishguts]

Ha, mine came 2 weeks ago. I also got the black one, because it screams less "HAY looks at me, I'm a Mac!"

In short, it kicks quite some ass. It's small, quiet and has raw processing power to waste. The Intel graphics chip has a solid performance, but don't expect any wonders.
It's the first Mac I own, but not my first time with MacOSX, so know shock there. The ability to install WindowsXP or Linux on it also made it a good choice for me.

[Fury]

Fishguts, any "must-get-apps" recommendations?

[Col. Fishguts]

Well, it comes with a nice selection of tools.

What I've put ion it so far: VLC + DivX for Mac, ScummVM, Starcraft (for ad-hoc-LAN-party purposes), Darwine (OSX port of Wine) but not much runs with it. And I've installed X11 (the install package is on the DVD that comes with it) to get better multi-platform support.

If you wanna test the graphics power, here are some nice game demos: http://www.games4mac.de/content_g4m/downloads/demos.php, beware the page is in german.

[Fury]

If you wanna test the graphics power, here are some nice game demos: http://www.games4mac.de/content_g4m/downloads/demos.php, beware the page is in german.

What power? I'm not going to expect much from GMA950, not going to use this notebook for gaming anyway. MacBook Pros come with Radeon X1600 which is pretty nice for notebooks, I wish the regular models would have X300 or X600 which would be better than GMA950. But can't have everything.

[Col. Fishguts]

Yeah, it's not much power. And it passes a lot of the newer shader stuff on to the CPU. But Homeworld2 runs quite nicely.

[vyper]

Two words: Boot Camp.

[Fury]

Boot Camp might be nice addition for desktop macs which have enough horsepower to run latest games. For non-gaming notebooks it's kinda useless.

[Sesquipedalian]

Quicksilver.  Quite possibly the most useful program ever written.

Also useful:
VirtueDesktops works for virtual dekstops (*nix users will be familiar) until 10.5 comes out in the spring.
MacTheRipper and Toast Titanium 7 for backing up your legally owned DVDs.
FinkCommander if you are into building stuff from source code.
And if you plan to use Safari as your webbrowser, I suggest AcidSearch, PithHelmet, and SafariStand.

In general, make friends with VersionTracker.com and MacUpdate.com.  You'll find just about anything and everything listed on there.

[IceFire]

Interesting....I too am considering buying a MacBook.  Probably the middle version as it seems to be a good choice between features and price.  The GMA 950 worries me a tad but I've had some time on a few MacBooks (just to help some users with installing software - I BTW know nothing about installing software on OS X but I somehow magically know more than the owners) and I'm intrigued.  I'm especially interested in iPhoto and Front Row for managing and showing off photos plus having a laptop is just nice.

[Corsair]

I recently got a MacBook Pro, installed bootcamp, and it's running games far better than my old IBM R40 ever did. Halo for PC, C&C: Generals... they look so much better. Now, if I could only get FSO to work and find my copy of Homeworld 2.

As far as the iLife software, I don't really use much of it for anything except for iPhoto, which is pretty good at what it does.

[IceFire]

Do you or have you used Front Row, the remote, and a TV hook up at all?

[CmdKewin]

If you wanna test the graphics power, here are some nice game demos: http://www.games4mac.de/content_g4m/downloads/demos.php, beware the page is in german.

What power? I'm not going to expect much from GMA950, not going to use this notebook for gaming anyway. MacBook Pros come with Radeon X1600 which is pretty nice for notebooks, I wish the regular models would have X300 or X600 which would be better than GMA950. But can't have everything.

Uhm. If we keep the discussion on raw processing power only, the GMA950 is on average equal to the X300. The "only" thing it's missing, it's version 2 shaders. But then, any game older than 1 year won't use them anyway, so, no big deal I was planing to buy a macbook for my sister, this christmas, will see how big this year's bonus turns out to be

[Fury]

I haven't yet gotten my MacBook but I found this site and gathered a few useful looking apps.
http://macspecialist.org/content/articles/essential_apps/

Browser:
http://www.caminobrowser.org/

IM:
http://www.adiumx.com/

IRC:
http://homepage.mac.com/philrobin/conversation/

SFTP, SCP and SSH:
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

FTP, SFTP
http://cyberduck.ch/

Media player:
http://www.videolan.org/

RSS/Atom:
http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php

System:
http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/

Office:
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/

Of course, I'm not even familiar with the default set of apps that OS X 10.4 comes with.

[Corsair]

Do you or have you used Front Row, the remote, and a TV hook up at all?

The remote I have and I liked it a lot... sadly I accidentally stuck it in my pocket one night and went out to a club, where it promptly got lost. It was handy until then though, because I'd use it for music if I was having a party in my room or something. The TV hookup, no and Front Row, see what I said for the remote.

[IceFire]

Ok...interesting.  Yeah I'd like to have a go with the TV adapter to S-Video/RCA because my greatest frustration is not being able to show clips of all the photos I'm taking.  Hooking up to a TV (a remote is totally bonus) would be awefully nice.  I know iPhoto lets you do DVD's as well.  I'm sure there is software on the PC, I know Picassa from Google does it but I haven't been as impressed as the stuff I've seen done with iPhoto and apparently its quick.  I'm curious and I'd love to get my foot in the door...I did Linux and now its time for Mac OS I think.

Plus we have no laptop in the family.

[Sesquipedalian]

I haven't yet gotten my MacBook but I found this site and gathered a few useful looking apps.
http://macspecialist.org/content/articles/essential_apps/

Browser:
http://www.caminobrowser.org/

IM:
http://www.adiumx.com/

IRC:
http://homepage.mac.com/philrobin/conversation/

SFTP, SCP and SSH:
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

FTP, SFTP
http://cyberduck.ch/

Media player:
http://www.videolan.org/

RSS/Atom:
http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php

System:
http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/

Office:
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/

Of course, I'm not even familiar with the default set of apps that OS X 10.4 comes with.

I tried Camino for a while, but in the end I don't use it for anything.  It is built on the Gecko engine, like Firefox, but doesn't support Firefox's plugins.  I just have Firefox instead.  But give it a shot.

AdiumX is nice, but if you go with Fire instead, you'll get IRC built in to your IM app and therefore won't need a separate app for that.

Cyberduck = 

Get Videolan's VLC player, as it supports practically every format and codec in existence, but also install plugins for Quicktime (Apple's own video player), as VLC's interface is kind of clunky.  DivX and Flip4Mac are good ones to have, and you can find others here

For RSS, Apple's own Safari browser is also a (basic) RSS reader, just so you know.

Instead of menumeters (which waste space in your menu bar ), I suggest either iStatPro or iStat nano, which go in your Dashboard (think Konfabulator but less obtrusive ).

Finally, for OpenOffice, you will do much,  much better to use NeoOffice.  It is OpenOffice fully ported to run natively on OS X.  OpenOffice.org's own port is half-hearted, in that it runs inside of OS X's X11 environment, which has certain downsides compared to running natively.  NeoOffice is made by Mac users unsatisfied with OpenOffice.org's version.

[Thor]

http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/quicksilver

my friend runs this on his mac...it seems quite useful and he swears by it...

i would love a macbook pro.

[Sesquipedalian]

Do you or have you used Front Row, the remote, and a TV hook up at all?

Like Corsair, I find Front Row and its remote very nice.  I've never hooked it up to a TV-out, but I expect it would make a very nice photo presenter.

[IceFire]

Do you or have you used Front Row, the remote, and a TV hook up at all?

Like Corsair, I find Front Row and its remote very nice.  I've never hooked it up to a TV-out, but I expect it would make a very nice photo presenter.

Yeah...thats definitely one of my aims.  I think I'm going to wait for Leopard and see how the dust settles and see what I'm going to be doing with my life over the next several months and then I'll consider the plunge!