“Jesus Christ, that is one cute, black laptop.”

So I got the Macbook yesterday, and that bit above is exactly the first thought that popped into my head upon seeing it. Sure, I’m probably just biased from working exclusively on a PC for the past 2 months, but seriously, this is one cute, black laptop.

So although it’s a few pixels shorter than a standard 15.4″ laptop, it’s also significantly wider. That means that you have enough space for a bigger keyboard.

Unfortunately, I have yet to actually put the machine through its paces (I spent all of yesterday in an installation frenzy). The most I’ve done is maintain a couple of YM conversations while playing music, downloading some torrents and installing Office for Mac and iWork. I might as well have been working the Calculator for all the stress that put on the system. Over the weekend I’ll probably try doing some 3D games or something along those lines, if I can get around to it.

Although my experience overall has been pretty favorable, I do have a few quick gripes.

1. YM for OSX is supreme suckage, both in its older, stabler version, and in the new beta. I’ll probably uninstall it and switch to Adium pretty soon. (Google Talk doesn’t work either.)

2. Transmission, the de facto Mac bittorrent handler, is pretty so-so. It’s decent enough, and if I didn’t know that it was possible to have twice as many features in one-fourth of the file size and memory footprint *cough* uTorrent *cough* I’d actually think it was above average.

On the flip side, there’s a crapload of things that are far easier and quicker to do on a Mac than on a PC. Quicksilver alone is unbelievably efficient (on my old desktop, I was using a combination of Launchy and Google Desktop to accomplish the same thing), and little things like installing Applications or Fonts are really easy.

The other utility I’ve found to be really cute/ridiculous is Lilt, an app that takes advantage of the ambient light sensors on the Macbook to detect hand gestures. So, theoretically, you could wave your hands to the left or right to, say, switch to the previous or next track on iTunes. I say “theoretically” because I could just barely get it working when I tried it (the left sensor is unfortunately a lot more sensitive than the right one, so the results are not very consistent).

Lilt also reads the tilt of your laptop and can assign actions to say, the laptop tilting forwards, or leftwards, or whatever. I’ve yet to think of a use for this other than perhaps when I happen to be at a rave party with my Macbook (and I could thus swing it over my head and have it quickly scroll through a series of Flickr photos or something equally silly).

More stuff as I discover them.

Update: I have given my Black MacBook to my sister as a gift on her 18th Birthday. I bought myself a MacBook Pro as a replacement. All I can say is that it rocks!