[Mancini]

I recently had a Macbook Pro for one week and used it extensively during that time. My PC laptop was experiencing hardware failure and I managed to get a killer deal on the Mac, so I made the switch.

Keep in mind that I wanted to like the Mac. I truly did. It was a beautiful piece of kit and OSX has it's benefits.

I returned it. Here was the deal breaker for me. I play lots of compressed video formats (avi, mkv, etc). These videos look blocky and pixelated on the Mac. It seems that the codecs for macs aren't as good as the ones for pc. mp4/h264 may be fine on the mac - I didn't test them - but many [most?] other common formats don't work well...to the extent that it repeatedly gave me a minor headache. This was not only evident on the laptop screen itself but also on an external monitor. I played the same videos on the same external monitor that looked fine on my pc - an inferior spec pc - it wasn't a hardware issue. I tried multiple players and posted on many forums trying to resolve the issue. It seems generally (but very reluctantly) accepted that this is simply the way it is.

Some lesser irks:

I use my laptop as a desktop replacement 95% of the time while hooked up to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. The other 5% makes it worthwhile for me to have a portable system. This leaves me with only one system to purchase and maintain and I like it that way. My windows pc always recognizes my external monitor and uses it by default when its connected. The mac doesn't. You need to close the lid (and reopen it if you don't want it to get too hot) to divert to the external monitor. You need to do this every time you boot up or take it out of sleep mode. Not a deal breaker but extremely annoying over time. Especially when your expectation is to have an "easy to use" system.

I've never heard anyone complain about this before so it might be just me; I find that the text in macs gives me eye strain. Text is jagged (for example, look at a "w" in the menu bar) and fuzzy and/or not crisp. While surfing the net with both safari and firefox I found text to be too small. I played with settings extensively to alleviate all these problems and never got text looking quite right. Maybe I could have, but I had already decided to return it.

Another frustration; for everything else I'm used to doing on the pc I found roughly equivalent mac programs. However, where there are a multitude of pc programs to choose from, sometimes I would only find one mac program to perform the same task. If I didn't like that particular program I just had to suck it up and use it. I ended up feeling a bit pigeon-holed.

There may be workarounds for some of these issues. If so, I'd be genuinely interested in hearing about them. I just decided to stop fighting it and returned the system while I could still get my money back.