The new MacBook impressed me, but that might not be enough

BY Evan Selleck

Published 29 Apr 2015

MacBook live

Despite the fact that the new 12-inch MacBook is a device that’s missing ports and could probably use some more battery life, it’s a portable that Apple can’t seem to make enough of.

Or, perhaps, didn’t make enough of initially. Whatever the case, shipping times for the newest MacBook are still between four to six weeks on Apple’s Online Store, and if you check Best Buy, their shipping times are just as egregious.

Finding a MacBook is hard, but it isn’t impossible. Especially if you’re lucky. Like I was, last night. On a whim I decided to stop into the local Best Buy and see what their stock looked like. I knew that about a week ago they had put out a floor model of the MacBook, so I figured I’d take the shot and see what happened.

Sure enough, they had one Space Gray in stock, with the Intel Core M processor clocked at 1.1GHz. Not the exact model I wanted, but it was there, and there was only one left with the Best Buy rep telling me that he had no idea when they’d get more. I figured I had to do it. After all, I wanted to buy the MacBook way back on April 10, and now I finally could.

So I went home with a MacBook yesterday.

The Space Gray is ridiculous. I was a huge fan of the black MacBook way back in the day, but this is something all on its own. I’ve got a Space Gray iPhone and I’m not the biggest fan of the color (I still prefer the black iPhone), and I’m perfectly indifferent towards the Space Gray iPad. However, it looks so nice for a MacBook. I’ve become so accustomed to the silver over the years that switching to this darker hue just works. I can’t wait for the other MacBooks in Apple’s lineup to adopt this color scheme.

Otherwise, the wow factor for the new MacBook revolves mostly, in my own opinion, with the keyboard. The new butterfly mechanism is a huge change. I’ve always considered Apple’s MacBook keyboards some of the best, if not the best, when it comes to laptop keyboards so I was excited to see how they could improve on that design. I don’t think there’s any getting around this design hearing into other MacBook models at some point in the future, so seeing how it faired against the other design intrigued me.

MacBook keyboard live

Simply put, I think this is one area that will make or break the MacBook for most people, I think. The keys have no travel at all, and their bigger design makes intrinsically sliding to the next key necessary to build a word a little strange to begin with. Yes, I got use to it, and I’m typing this up on the MacBook, but I can also still admit that I’m not entirely sold on the new design. It’s plenty fast, but it’s still hanging me up. I’ll probably need more time with it to get fully accustomed, but I’ve never really had that issue in the past (bad keyboards notwithstanding), so I’m remaining skeptical about it.

The single USB-C port doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I don’t remember the last time I plugged my phone or tablet into my computer, or anything else for that matter, so I’m not missing any USB ports. (Also, the MacBook charges up super quickly, so that’s nice.)

There’s nothing new about the software on this Mac, so there’s not much to talk about there. The new Force Touch trackpad is certainly an interesting update, and its functionality is quite the selling point. For me, though, I just haven’t been using any of those new features. I still use the new trackpad like the old trackpad, and I don’t think I’ve used the new features once yet. Just haven’t had a need to, yet.

Everything was great last night and early this morning, I was using the MacBook to look up sites, listen to music, and watch some movie trailers. And then at almost exactly 10:00AM local time, four hours after I had begun using it, performance took a dive off an incredibly high cliff. I had to Force Quit Safari several different times over that stretch because it simply stopped loading pages, and failed entirely at other times.

I’m not a heavy user. At any given moment I might have two Safari instances open, with maybe four tabs going between the two, Spotify running and an email client. That’s it. And that’s what I was doing this morning, too. This is not heavy usage by any stretch of the imagination, and yet transitions from one home page to another slowed to a crawl at some points. Even bringing up the Dock took way longer than it should.

I wasn’t worried about the 1.1GHz Intel Core M processor initially, just because I’m not a heavy user, but I definitely am now. I can probably get used to the keyboard, but if the software can’t keep up with me, I won’t be able to make that work.

Unfortunately, it’s been a persistent problem pretty much all day, even after a restart, so it’s not looking all that positive right now.

In the end, the MacBook is indeed the future in a lot of ways. USB-C is going to get adopted across the board at some point in the future, and machines are going to continue to get lighter and more portable than they already are. There’s a lot to like with the MacBook so far, and I’m happy that I got to check one out. The question at this point, though, is whether or not I’m going to keep it or switch back to the MacBook Pro.