Musings

Well, I’ve already posted about niggling annoyances with my new MacBook. So, to balance things up a bit, here’s part 3 of my series of posts on whether I’m falling in with the crowd of Apple Faithful – or not – and it at least includes a few things that I like about the MacBook.

Very nice body and build quality.

Design is a mixed bag. The single pane glass LCD is  both gorgeous and smart: it’s hard for dust and little particles to sneak in between the bezel and screen, which was a persistent problem with a lot of the other notebooks I’ve owned.

I like the backlight keyboard too. A lot of times I’ve struggled to see what’s on my notebook keyboard when the lights are dimmed. My Thinkpad use a soft light source mounted near the web cam, but the Apple MacBook’s idea is even better.

However: the MacBook design also has numerous fails for me. The number of USB ports at just two is miserly. Even smaller netbooks have 3 USB ports these days. More seriously though… the two ports are placed too closely. A lot of devices I use have USB stubs that are wide, e.g. the Starhub Maxmobile dongle – which means that effectively, I can’t use another USB device when I’m on Maxmobile unless I get a USB extender. !@#!@$%$#@$

The combo audio/microphone jack is a bad idea. The auto-toggling works in OS X, but not in Windows. I’m guessing it’s sloppy drivers on the part of Boot Camp, and I’m not the only person who had difficulty. Hunted around for a solution and found it though – fortunately.

The OS X’s version of Live Messenger has no nag adverts. Nice! No need to use third party software to kill those adverts.

Very nice User Interface in and out. Even the normally drab and all workman like Firefox looks gorgeous in Snow Leopard.

Pretty good battery life. Not quite to the ungodly endurance of some of those Windows 7 / Intel CULV notebooks that are clocking in 9 hours, and a few even 10 hours. But the 6 hours normal use this MacBook offers isn’t too bad. It’s long enough for the Kyushu flight, and longer flights than that I don’t typically stay awake throughout the flight anyway.

But at the end of it, I’m still not a MacBook convert: I’m still solidly a Windows geek. Apart from nifty UIs and that the Keynote software on iWorks churns out nicer presentations than PowerPoint, there’s little else I’ve found that the MacBook can functionally do that I haven’t been able to already do in Windows, and without all the annoyances.

Maybe more time with the new toy will change. Who knows LOL.

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.:)

The MacBook arrived by DHL Express late yesterday afternoon. I’d placed the order on late Thurs night, and the unit had taken a day to bounce from Apple’s warehouse to DHL’s one, and then finally arriving at the latter’s delivery center at a stroke past Friday midnight.

The sales order from Apple’s web site suggested that delivery would be on Monday, but I decided to try my luck by calling DHL directly and seeing if they would deliver on Saturday. Nicely, they consented, and the notebook with the iWorks – Apple’s software for Office productivity – arrived just after 6 pm.

You have to give it to the Cupertino folks: their products exude style, right even in packaging. Packaging contents were pretty minimalist – quite unlikely unboxing a Wintel notebook where it’s always crammed with CDs, manuals, flyers, promotional coupons, modem cables, demo ware etc.

More to come – soon.:)

Well, no one can now say – hopefully – that I didn’t give Macbooks a chance. My NEC Versa E6310 has undergone abuse. It’s switched on at least 10 hours a day, everyday at work for 2 years now, it goes with me whenever I do a public presentation or talk, and I use it as a scratch notebook i.e. I use the notebook to try out all kinds of demo ware that I wouldn’t dare try on my home PC. The screen has now lost perhaps about a quarter of its brightness, and the track pad has a mind of its own i.e. it never does anything I want it to.

I was initially intending to get another Wintel notebook – one of those 11.6” LCD CULV netbooks in fact – soon to replace the aging Versa when a revelation struck me. Why was I coughing up more money to buy another Windows notebook, when I could use that money to buy something that could at least also provide me some learning value? I mean, for all purposes, my productivity level on a Windows machine is operating at peak relative to my ability to work the machine, and as useful as another Windows notebook would be, I wasn’t going to learn anything new with it by way of working in new operating environments.

That’s essentially the reason why I ordered a MacBook Pro late last night, and am expecting delivery of the unit later today or tomorrow. There’re two 13” MacBooks that are priced quite affordably. One’s simply called the MacBook, the other the MacBook Pro. The former is their cheapest Apple OS notebook now, and in terms of computing specification is equivalent to, and in one spot at least, better than its more expensive by $400 brethren. However, the MacBook has a cheaper body – which doesn’t bother me – and a poorer screen – which I disliked after checking it out at Compass Point’s Denki. The limited color gamut and lower contrast doesn’t matter if you don’t do photo-editing, but I do a lot of that. So, I went with the cheapest MacBook Pro model listed.

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It’s interesting now to see my friends, colleagues and students respond to my Facebook status update. I meant it when I reflected in February this year a sentiment that exists among many of us who’re (supposedly?) experts in the use of technology – that many of us dislike Apple OSes as it forces a person to operate at a level of abstraction that, frankly, is both limiting and mildly condescending. For all the hardware weaknesses, vulnerabilities and general all-round ugliness of Windows up to Vista, there’s a lot more potential by way of software range, hardware variety, and enterprise-level development tools that we use that’s only available for Windows machines and not Apple OS ones, bootcamp or virtualization not withstanding.

And many of us have learned to work round the many Windows flaws. Viruses on Windows? I’ve rarely had anything more serious than a virus warning popping up on my Windows notebooks when I stick one of my student’s thumb drives in, and that’s because I know how to arm and properly defend my Windows environment. And it’s far less of a hassle than the Apple faithful would insist – I actually like the sense of empowerment and ability to install, tweak, and customize all those tools. And between a sanitized environment with a limited outlay of toys versus a sandbox with some risk but I have access to a far greater array of toys that can provide better learning opportunities albeit amidst adversity, I’d always prefer the latter.

That’s basically why I can empathize with some of my colleagues when they write a comment that’s the title of this post. They don’t like Macs. Me though, with this purchase of a MacBook – no one can say I didn’t at least try. I’m pretty certain I’ll like its colorful and unified interface a lot at least. As for productivity, I’m not so sure.

Either way, I can still always leave the MacBook at home to keep Ling occupied while I go back to my NEC Versa dinosaur – which while is rapidly losing its color and is getting crankier by the day from overuse, I still can get it to dance a trick and do what I ultimately need it to help me do – i.e. be more productive.)