Ultraportable laptops are great and all….. but price! That’s the netbook killer feature, size/price. The tradeoff is power.

For most things I’ll do on a computer, it’s fine. Assignments, coding, email, web, taking notes. For anything else (CAD, FE) I have that rather large desktop at home – which I now find I rarely use.

I badly needed a new laptop, my old Acer ultraportable is on it’s last legs. Third hard drive failing, cooling issues (worn fan), wifi issues — it’s thoroughly worn out. While I wanted a 13.1, the price simply was too much.

I ended up with a 1000HE at a very very good price. Phenomenal battery life. That’s it’s other killer feature. I can treat this thing like my mobile phone. Just charge it overnight and I’ve got enough power to go for a few days.

IMHO the main screwup with netbooks is the screen resolution. What moron came up with 1024×600? 1024×768 is only slightly bigger, but significantly more usable and is the minimum most websites are designed to.

heya James

it’s true — my original piece was about netbook pricing, but I changed the focus as I wrote. The real reason I was able to afford this Mac was because of selling my Wind, the iPod Touch 8GB that came with the purchase, and the student discount.

However, if price isn’t a huge issue because it’s a student looking for a new computer or a desktop user looking to be a bit more mobile, I side with you on the moronic screen size argument. Most everything else about the netbooks is great, and the price is what convinced me to buy one initially. However, once you factor in the need for a 6-cell battery, most netbooks around Canada seem to cost $400-500 CAD. It’s actually not all that cheap if you think about it as a laptop, especially when the laptop’s screen size is something that works against it in some cases.

Glad you’re happy with the 1000HE though and that we have a real user backing up the battery life claim. I could get a good 3.5-5 hours from my Wind. This Macbook seems to last around 4.5-5 hours in total. I’m pretty happy with that.

Just as a feedback on the 1000HE battery life, it depends significantly on usage. Realistically I get about 7.5 hours, with wifi and firefox operating continuously. I can easily get over 8 if I set wifi power saving to maximum and didn’t leave firefox running when I was not using it.

One huge battery saving tip – keep gmail and similarly heavy AJAX/Web2.0 apps closed. Gmail is continuously communicating with Google, keeping the wifi active and preventing the CPU from dropping to it’s lowest power save level. This makes a significant difference to battery life.

” What moron came up with 1024×600? 1024×768 is only slightly bigger, but significantly more usable and is the minimum most websites are designed to.”

1024 x 600 is between 16:9 (1024 x 576) and 16:10 (1024 x 640). Widescreen 16:9 and 16:10 monitors are becoming more common than 4:3 with the proliferation of widescreen videos. Also, websites used to all be optimized for 800 x 600, so maybe they’re trying to split the difference.

Thanks Thomas,

Are you running Windows on your Macbook at all? If so, I’d be interested in what configuration works for you.

–an about to be a Macbook owner

Hey Michael,

actually I was wondering about how to run all of my beloved Windows programs when I bought my Mac — but when I turned it on and played around iwth the OS I decided to just make OSX my home instead. However, I did give Parallels a shot for a little while. It let me run a virtual machine right inside of OSX, and the newest version even seems to support Windows 7 RC’s. Parallels even has this cool feature where individual applications can look like their own Windows — so they blend right in on OSX. You don’t always have to be running Windows and look like you’re computing from inside a box. My MBP has 4GB and didn’t seem to slow down at all with Windows running inside of OSX, but I wasn’t doing particularly heavy lifting either.

Another possibility is Crossover for Mac. That lets you run Windows programs without even installing the OS. That one seemed really cool, but I couldn’t get it to work with Windows Live Writer, which s what I used on Win to post to JAMM.

And if all else fails, you can just try BootCamp for dual booting

Anyway hope that helps!