This will be the first Mulling It Over post composed with my new laptop. It is definitely a beautiful piece of engineering, with two exceptions.

1. The nails-on-chalkboard screeching sound it’s making. People have been calling it a ‘whine’. It’s not a whine. It’s the sound of fingernails moving slowly and purposefully across a chalkboard. There are hacks to fix it, but these end up reducing the performance either by enabling the video camera at all times or by disabling one of the cores No, really. Apparently practically every one that’s been sold is making this sound. Don’t believe me? Check out the 500+ post thread on the Apple forums. I’m surprised they’re not issuing a huge recall. People are reporting sending their laptops in for the fix, waiting weeks, and getting them back making the same damn noise.

Update: About five minutes after dropping this post I came upon a workable fix from the Red Sweater Blog. The MBS: SystemLoad will also do in a bind. Both still tax the CPUs and ultimately cost battery life. I suspect this is why Apple has been so skittish about making promises about battery life. With the screech in full effect, the MacBook can be equivalent to the PowerBook. However, with the screech-silencing hacks in place keeping a processor awake, the battery life inevitably suffers and drops to sub-PowerBook levels.

2. It can’t play Windows Media files. Can’t. No, really. There’s a third-party plugin for Quicktime that’s supposed to do it, but it’s not avilable for Intel Macs. No word on when it will, either.

So if you’re looking for some schadenfreude, there you go. Frankly I’m a bit confused why Apple would go to all this trouble to make the switch to Intel chips and b0rk their flagship product in this way.

Other than that it’s alright. I kinda wish I had gotten a Thinkpad. I haven’t heard of the Thinkpads making nails-on-chalkboard sounds or being unable to play WMVs.

Update: Ok, so it’s not as bad as I make it out to be. I can run Windows Media Player 9 under Rosetta, and it seems to play some (but not all) of the WMV files. However, it’s a PowerPC app. Running it with Rosetta makes it a memory hog and causes the fans to wind up to near-hoover volumes. On the bright side, the 1GB stick of RAM is en route which should help.

Last update, I swear: The gigabyte of extra RAM I ordered arrived today. Newegg is on the other side of town, which is nice. I’m now rocking with 1.5 gigabytes of DDR2 5300. It feels good.