Day 2 of using the MacBook. I spent all of last night installing my productivity software and also Vista Ultimate on a Boot Camp partition. And the little irritating nuances are already showing.
The first couple of applications I installed in OS X had no instructions of any kind – just a pop up window with two large icons and no advice what I should be doing. I spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure it out until I went online and found my solution.
I have to throw more money at Apple if I want to project my display onto an external device. Every Intel notebook I’ve owned had an inbuilt VGA output, and in more recent cases, HDMI ones even. Apple has their own proprietary standard – i.e. I have to fork out money for different mini-adapters just to do what I’ve always been able to do for free.
Playback of 1080p HD videos encoded in MPEG4-AVC/H.264 was horrible. Crazily sluggish with dropped frames and artifacts galore. It’s apparently from some sort of compatibility issue between the VLC Media Player – which is one of the few players that can even play these files for the Mac OS X – and the operating system itself. And I’m not alone – plenty of complaints about it here. Ironically, I Boot Camp back to Vista and play the same HD video file using Windows Media Player with the K-Lite Codec Pack… and it does so flawlessly.
I miss the hard disk activity light found in every Wintel notebook I’ve owned. You can tell from a glance the activity level for a program. No such thing on the MacBook, and whether a program is just accessing main memory or driving the hard drive nuts I have no clue.
Couldn’t believe I can’t kill the irritating startup “KA DENG” sound without relying on third party software that I have to hunt for, unless I mute all sounds from the notebook altogether. Seems like showmanship on the part of Apple.
For a notebook that touts itself as dual OS bootable, I’d assume it’d be easy to toggle and restart between OS X and Vista. Hell no. Apple installs an icon in Vista for you to quick restart in Mac OS X, but they don’t give you an icon for doing the reverse. Talk about sending not so subtle messages telling me how I should use my notebook.
One of Windows’ best freebies is Windows Live Writer, a multi blogger platform that lets me compose WYSIWYG blog posts offline, then post them all up when I’ve got a connection. No such luck in Mac OS X – you have to fork out money, and they’re inferior products even.
Thing is: the Apple Faithful would have you believe that the Mac OS X is a superior product to Windows in every possible way. Not so from my experience so far. At best from what I see, it’s going to be great in certain aspects which matter to a lot of people, but unfortunately poorer in many aspects that matter to me.
Oh well. It’s all part of the learning – so the next post I’ll write about the positive stuff in the new experience.:)
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