Back in January, I got my MacBook. We’ve lived a happy life together since then, but I was apprehensive before I got it. Would I get on with Mac OS X? Surely no one could live with just one mouse button?

The actual experience has been… great. Sure, there is just the one mouse button, but there is also Exposé, Dashboard, and iLife. Using Mac OS X has been like an epiphany. Microsoft products have been “adequate” for so long. They do the job, but there’s nothing special in the user experience. No joy, no fun. In fact, with things like Word they’ve been positively frustrating. Apple products all seem to be a joy to use. Things like iMovie just work as I expect them to. That’s not to say they are perfect, but they don’t have those moments you get with Microsoft products where you’ve just got everything perfect and then suddenly everything changes for no apparent reason.

Of course, there is baggage attached to owning a MacBook. That is, the MacBook is the “junior” model in the Apple laptop range. Do I think I should have gone for a MacBook Pro? There are a few features that the Pro has that the MacBook doesn’t.

I think the main ones are a proper 3D graphics processor, a metal case and most tempting of all, a backlit keyboard. On the otherside though, the MacBook does have a couple of things in it’s favour over the Pro though. First off, it’s smaller and therefore slightly more portable. The smallest size you can get a Pro in is 15.4″, whereas a MacBook is a lightweight 13.3″. The second thing is price. It’s a lot cheaper than the Pro model. I haven’t really missed the 3D graphics because the only games I’ve played on here are Civ 4 and Chess. I would love to have a backlit keyboard though and that is perhaps the only thing I envy about the MacBook Pro. I wanted to find the extra few hundred pounds just to have one, but in the end I couldn’t justify the extra cost. After all, most of the time I’m listening to music, writing stuff on my blog or in Pages (the word processor in iWork) or doing some web development, all of which the MacBook does perfectly. So yeah, I’m glad I made the switch to a Mac, and I’m very happy with my MacBook.

Regular readers at a certain Herefordshire based bill payments company may wish to note that my comments about Microsoft products aren’t defamatory