white macbook with 1 gb ram, os x 10.5.1, 2.2ghz intel core 2 duo, 120gb hard drive.
i also got iwork with it.
i tried using mail and safari but ended up installing firefox and thunderbird within a day or two.
i'm an old school dos/windows guy since the 1980's but i've always wanted a mac - just i always thought they were too expensive compared to a similar windows pc. i no longer feel that way.
the switch has been rougher than i expected, though. here are my thoughts so far:
i'm not sure it was worth it to switch at this point in time. i have a perfectly good thinkpad running xp pro with 2gb ram and 1.7gb pentium m processor that i've had for a few years now (since 2004) and i really like it. there are a few things i hate about it: the battery life stinks, the sleep/standby/hibernate features stink (though they are far better than they once were), the screen doesn't dim enough nor brighten enough, and i'm constantly wrestling with privacy, virus, firewall, and spyware software worries and alerts.
but there are somethings i really love about it: its got a tough magnesium alloy case, a fingerprint reader that lets me log-in without a password (and it works perfectly!) the wifi connection is strong and easy to use, the keyboard/mouse/trackpad/red eraser pointing stick is awesome, easy, and efficient, basically everything works perfectly and does exactly what its supposed to. its been dropped more than a few times and no problems.
granted i've been using these winpc computers for 20ish years so i know exactly how to tweak them to get them to do just what i want, but i use firefox and thunderbird on it as my most frequently used applications. plus microsoft office and a ton of open source stuff.
that is my starting bias - i'm a windows pc expert and there are a lot of things that bug me about windows pcs. so i'm trying a macbook.
real quick - the things i love about it - the wifi is even better, it picks up signals i didn't even know were there before. when you close the lid it sleeps, happily, and wakes up fast just by opening the clamshell or pushing the spacebar.
this is where its a half a dozen of one versus six of the other between the two computers: in 2004 when i bought my thinkpad i bought it to replace one that had been stolen during a burglary of my apartment. luckily i was using maximum security including whole-disk encryption so the thief could not get into any of my data, and probably had to scrap the whole hard drive when they sold it for parts on ebay, but my primary concern was that all of my data was protected, and it was. i'm so glad that i was using maximum security back then that i've always used it since, and having the fingerprint reader made that very easy - it was impossible to even access the hard drive without a valid fingerprint or password, which makes the computer much less attractive to thieves.
so i try to use maximum security on this macbook. unfortunately whole drive locking is not an option, but i've locked my data using filevault or whatever and require a password every time it wakes up from sleep. this is of course very annoying but i will not do without it after my theft experience. at one point i swore i'd never buy a macbook that didn't have a fingerprint reader, but i caved. i am still sad that it doesn't have one, its such a cheap, powerful, and easy security device for these expensive and easily transportable little machines. at least my data is safe.
continuing on - i love the sleep/hibernate on the macintosh. it works very well. its fast and really saves the battery life, which compared to my thinkpad is phenomenal. the screen has a higher resolution and that's nice-ish, but really not that important. i don't have microscopes for eyes, and while i do have 20/20 uncorrected vision the teeny-tiny text that shows up in programs like iwork's numbers i find to be on the small side. but the screen looks clearer and sharper than my thinkpad's 3 year old screen and i like the nonreflective shiny screen, i think it does make it clearer.
plus, so far nearly everything i've tried to do with this mac has worked perfectly the first time i tried to do it. that's been nice.
some of the hugest annoyances i found were the dialog boxes. i'm a huge fan of using the keyboard as much as possible. i hate mouses and i especially had track pads. i much prefer an actual mouse when one is required and for dialog boxes or little things i got very accustomed to the thinkpad eraser pointer. it keeps your fingers on the home keys so you don't have to go searching for the mouse when you need to click on something. i type pretty fast and switch between kind of a surfing mode, where i'm using the trackpad primarily and mostly reading and scrolling and clicking, and a writing/editing/working mode, where i'm using the keyboard extensively and typing, doing math, etc. and my hands are exclusively on the keyboard. reading email for me is more of a typing thing because i like to reply and so my fingers stay on the home keys mostly. websurfing is mostly mouse based.
so these dialog boxes when i first encountered them, required using the mouse to click on them when sending an email message using
another really annoying thing is when you switch applications using CMD-TAB the top window is often not activated. in fact, no window is activated by default, so while the application is ready you've still got to get a window to focus. i'm not sure if this is a bug in mozilla apps (i've seen it mostly in firefox and thunderbird, my two most used apps) but gosh is it annoying!
just now i flipped from this firefox window to my thunderbird window. i got there and the mail window was dimmed and not accepting keyboard input. i had to use CMD-` to activate it before i could navigate with the keyboard. holy freaking toledo! THIS IS EASILY THE SECOND DUMBEST THING EVER. but again i'm not sure if its a mac os x problem or a thunderbird/firefox/mozilla problem.
continuing on - i tried to connect my mac to a friends to share some music and pictures. she was running an older version, 10.3 or something, on a G4 12" - gosh what a lovely small awesome machine! i am so jealous of its small size and elegance that i am no longer happy with this monsterous brute of a white machine. well i guess the jury is still out on that but this macbook is in fact larger than my thinkpad and far larger than her 12" g4.
but anyway the firewire connection did not work. her mac couldn't read mine and mine couldn't read hers. we tried target disk modes, repartitioning, and all sorts of nonsense but were never successful. we ended up using an external firewire drive to transfer stuff but shiz-nits that was annoying. i thought for sure that this was gonna be one of those things that "just works." maybe my mac karma isn't really there yet.
today i signed on to ichat for the first time. i'm now on aim and gtalk. lovely. i need yim, too, so i had to install another app for that. seems like its working okay but how nice would it be to just have them all in one place? yeah i know some kinda yabber jabber thing gets it done but i want it to "just work."
don't get me wrong, i'm not afraid of terminal. i popped a console screen open when my macbook started to slow down inexplicably when switching apps to run 'top' and see where my resources were going. this is before i discovered activity monitor - basically a colorful 'top' command very similar to the windows process explorer or task manager or whatever they call it. i dig the activity monitor! i like the pie chart showing who is eating my ram. since i've only got a gig and 460mb is active (235 of it in firefox, i'm also running google earth which has about 40mb live and more than a gig swapped out, thunderbird the same, itunes the same, in fact it seems like every app has a gig swapped out.) but i came to the quick conclusion that 1gb isn't really enough ram for this puppy. that is probably why i was getting spinny swirly color kaleidescope circles whenever i switched among biggish apps. i was still surprised to see it lugging so much, this behaviour only happens on my xp box when i really push it. and i often really push it, so maybe i'm just more familiar with how far i can push it -- it just didn't feel like i was pushing this mac all that far. here's what i'm running:
firefox
thunderbird
google earth
itunes
system preferences (i didn't even realize that was still running)
activity monitor
yahoo messenger
spotlight (i barely know what this is but so far its very cool)
ichat
finder
numbers
dashboard client
system profiler (what is this?)
dock
terminal
loginwindow
quicktime player (i gotta remember to quit things i guess)
preview (same)
atsserver (??)
systemuiserver (i can guess)
mdworker
ichatagent
calculator (love! the rpn mode so cool! needs financial functions though)
etc etc.
really not that much stuff if you ask me.
maybe having that extra gig of ram on my pc just really helps that much. i've ordered more memory from crucial to address this problem.
ok so another issue, i was using firefox to view some videos in wmv format and it just didn't work. workaround- save them to desktop and double click. use the flip4mac wmv player. works fine. but why not save these files properly? ANNOYING!
photo booth just crashed. no reason given. i had the camera open in ichat and that seemed to screw things up. i'm just really surprised at all these small things that go wrong, i had this image in my mind of stuff that just worked, and worked right the first time, and worked the way you expected it to.
and this harsh dose of reality has kicked in. the only thing i really miss is the error messages that actually provide helpful information. these ones are incredibly cryptic and confusing. i have no idea why this stuff is crashing or not working, and apparently neither does macbook.
we'll see if as i get better at using this thing if these problems kind of go away or if maybe i'll get used to them and i won't notice them so much.
though i do think that is kind of weak, and that's why i started this blog- so that i could remember my first impressions without them being clouded by familiarity and workarounds.
so i plan to put up everything that bugs me about my new mac here.
and since i bought it after 31-oct i can return it up until 8-jan without penalty. and i very well might do that, unless i really really like it so much more than my windows xp thinkpad.
more soon! cheers.
- g
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