Will US MacBook work in the UK?

Hi - I'm going to the US on business and thinking of buying a MacBook (2.0Ghz) as the pound is so strong at the moment (£879 uk price vs. £662 bought in the US). WIll the machine work in the Uk ok (with a 2 pin adaptor), and am I likely to get hammered at customs in the UK?

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers

BG

If you claim it in customs, then yes, you're likely to get hammered (although the difference in cost may still end up being less than the duty you pay). I've been through Heathrow eight times now and never been stopped in customs (then again, I've always come through as a tourist and never had anything to claim). I don't know if you can file a form to get a refund of the sales tax you paid in the states as I've done in the EU when leaving, but if you've got to pay ~8% in sales tax and then 15% VAT as duty, you'll probably just about break even. Just a guess.

Otherwise, yes, your MB will work fine in the UK. You can even get a set of international plugs from Apple that will adapt the power brick to look just as if you bought it back home. Keep in mind however that the US keyboard has a slightly different layout. You can certainly configure OSX to think you've got a UK keyboard, so for example, you won't have to hit option-# to get the £ key and shift-option-2 to get the € as I do, but it will look different than you're used to.

To be honest, even though the keys are in a different place, I use the OS X configured to the US layout even though I have a UK keyboard. I use # far more often than I use £, being a perl developer The \ and ` keys are in a different place on the UK keyboard, and there is an extraneous § key that I only use as a handy 'shortcut activator' (like a programmable softkey) but the keycodes are the same so the keymaps are interchangeable.

Nice... I've often wondered how many of us bought Macs partially because of the ease of Unix scripting. I love being able to hack out perl, html and php code using vi

Yep, my macbook replaced a long line of Linux laptops. OS X comes with Vim, and I use gvim for my 'general purpose' editor.