Well, the MacBook arrived today. A coworker of mine got his about a week ago and he advised me not to boot up the laptop until i'd given the battery a full charge cycle. It would only take about 4 hours. I don't know about you, but when i get a new toy like this i can't wait 4 hours to play with it. Nevertheless, i followed the advice and i charged the battery first. Luckily, only 90 minutes later it was fully charged and i was ready to play.
Everything worked out of the box and after downloading the latest updates (all 5 of them) i downloaded Parallels Desktop. This product is truelly amazing. It's like VMWare or Virtual PC except without the suckage. So i get ready to install my virtual copy of Windows XP Pro (or as i consider it, my shell for running Visual Studio) and Parallels offers me an automated XP install option. I simply selected the .iso file and let Parallels work its magic. 17(!!) minutes later i had an XP desktop running within my OS X session.
Now as most of you know, i can't stand Windows. There's something about it that quite frankly annoys the hell out of me. Once again, it's Parallels to the rescue. Enter "Coherence" mode. This allows you to hide the XP desktop and it nicely integrates your windows apps into your OS X session. I'm too lazy to create screenshots but if you visit the link earlier in the post you'll see what i'm talking about. Allright, what's next? Well it is Windows after all so we better get all the updates. Luckily, my install CD already had SP2 slipstreamed. So about 95 updates later (and no, that wasn't a joke...) i had a fully patched XP system. I then installed Visual Studio 2005 Professional and the MSDN documentation. So far, i'm extremely impressed with the performance of windows apps within Parallels. Overall, i'd say Parallels is definitely worth the $80. And there's nothing like setting up an XP system to make you appreciate OS X again. I really do have a newfound respect for Windows users now. The crap they willingly go through... simply astonishing!
Ok so that covers the Windows side of things. What about OS X? It ran very smooth on my 1.6Ghz G5 iMac, and it obviously runs even better on this 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo. I know most of you aren't OS X users so i won't go into further detail about how cool it is. Sooner or later, you're going to experience this yourself anyway 
So what about the hardware? Well, the macbook itself looks gorgeous. The attention to detail is incredible and just looking at it makes you wonder why Dell can't even manage to create a laptop that looks halfway decent, let alone one that isn't downright laughable. When running, the machine is hardly audible. In fact, you really have to stress the CPU or put a CD/DVD in the drive to hear anything at all. The keyboard is a joy to use, and in my humble opinion it feels better than the macbook pro's keyboard. The screen is fantastic... at first i was a little worried that the glossy screen would be annoying, but so far it hasn't bothered me yet. I'm actually very impressed with it.
So all in all, i'm very happy with my purchase and i'd definitely recommend this laptop to anyone 