I have my MacBook for a year now and have suggested to other people to get one ever since. It was my first Mac ever and I have to say, I love OSX. I got infected with the Ipod virus 3 years ago: first a Nano and recently a Touch and have been loving it ever since.
However my enthusiastic advertising to friends for the MacBook has diminished. There is a simple reason. It’s built very cheap… As many others already wrote, the MacBook gets these cracks opposite of the screen protection bumps. Take a look MacBook pics or read the article from newsvine (via df).
The MacBook, although it looks cool, is just built on the cheap side. And that is really surprising, thinking about my incredible iPod Touch. Its glass screen is basically indestructible. Believe me – I dropped it so often, it’s not even funny…
Back to the MacBook: I’m pretty lucky, since I have 3 year Apple care from my University’s Buying Program anyway, but it flat out sucks to have my laptop broke after a single year. Nowadays I would get a 15″ McBook Pro, I guess. I thought I wanted to go small (I love small laptops), but if you look at the MacBook, the encasing around the screen is really thick, so my “small” 13″ is not really that much smaller than the 15″ MacBook Pro. Size and weight are marginal and there is a benefit of: “Encased in sleek and sturdy aluminum” as described above. My next buy will definitely be a MacBookPro.

What do I love about OSX:

- Seamless integration of a very easy to use, intuitive GUI with power full UNIX in the back. Although I’m far from using a lot of the UNIX features, some basic functionality I need for work and play. Nevertheless, I mostly prefer clicking and scrolling to cryptic command line calls, grep’ing and piping.

-X Code provides me with the opportunity to easily get everything I need for my software development.

-Many talented people provide ingenious tools for OSX such as Quicksilver or Textmate, that make my computer work so much easier. (For a good overview of cool apps on the mac, see Christian Plessl’s list.)

I just feel very content when using my Mac, and that’s a first for me: I always felt that Windows constrained me way too much. On the other hand, I feel Linux is way too complex and not user-friendly.

More later on MacPorts, command-line magic and Python development on the Mac…