MacBook review

Whoot, so I got a MacBook. Here's what I think about...

OS X complaints aside, it's an awesome laptop. It is exactly what I want. It's small, lightweight, looks great and is a hell of a lot faster than my old big clunky Pentium M 15.4" Dell laptop.

What I really like about it is its usability. It's the first laptop that I have owned where I don't feel the need to plug into an external keyboard/mouse/monitor. The keyboard feels great -- 90% as good as typing on a full keyboard. The track pad is fantastic. I love two finger scrolling (horizontally and vertically) and two finger tapping (right clicking). Between those two genius UI features, I barely miss mouse (highlighting text still isn't as easy).

It's not hot at all. I use it for hours on my bare legs and it's just warm.

The screen is pretty small (13.3") with low resolution (1280 x 800), but I wanted a small (1.08" x 12.78" x 8.92"), light (5.0 lbs) laptop, so that was just a compromise I had to make.

The only real complaint about the MacBook is the weak graphics processor (Intel GMA X3100). Expose and Spaces isn't nearly as smooth a Compiz Fusion in my 5 year old desktop with a budget Nvidia 7200 series graphics card. Who knows though, that might actually be an OS X problem.

Btw, VMware Fusion is the coolest, most mind blowingly awesome piece of software ever made. Ha, I've been saying that about VMware Workstation for years, but the Unity feature in Fusion takes the cake. ... but that is really for another blog post.

iPod Nano Brick

Picture says it all... you will brick your iPod Nano (3rd generation) if you use the stopwatch feature while listening to music.

I happened to Aimee and it could happen to you too! Jeez, we haven't been having a very good Apple experience thus far. Oh well, still beats the hell out of Windows.

OS X Leopard Woes

(Image plucked from Google Images)

I've been talking about getting Mac for a long time. I'm kind of tired of tweaking, configuring and sometimes battling Linux. I just want a simple home computer (mostly for Aimee and her new iPod) that "just works."

And that's Mac's big schtick (sp?) right? They just work. Ask anyone who uses ones and they'll tell you... they'll never go back to the broken PC/Windows world. It seems like Mac/OS X is so awesome, that converts don't just become fans... they become fanbois (that's super extreme fanboys).

Well, I finally picked up a Mac Mini with OS X Leopard... here's my take on it.

Home/end/pgup/pgdown keys don't work as expected.
Home and end take the cursor to the beginning and end of a line respectively in EVERY F-ING OS IN EXISTANCE... except for OS X. And that's fine... I'll just learn the Mac way to move the cursor to the end of the line. Well guess fucking what... it's different for different applications!! Here's a sample of what the keystrokes are for beginning /end of a line for different OS X apps. Most OS X programs: command+left / command+right Terminal: ctrl-a / ctrl-e Firefox: who fucking knows / command+right

Massive security issue.
The first day I had the machine, I had to reinstall the entire f-ing OS because for some god knows reason, it was starting every program as root (administrator for you Windows people). There is a long thread about it that ended with the guy throwing in the towel and reinstalling OS X, just like I had to.

Sluggish and hiccups.
Sometimes when I'm typing, the cursor will just freeze for a sec and then when it unfreezes, all the characters come out all at once. Also, minor hiccups (slight delays) when choosing menu items, sending instant messages, or closing apps. There is a thread on Apple's support site about it.

The mouse acceleration is crappy and non adjustable.
Wtf is Apple such a pretentious piece of shit that they force their users to buy a $20 shareware app to adjust something that should have been adjustable in the first place?

Answer: because Apple isn't about choice or freedom... iTunes + iPod.
iTunes -> iPod is a one way street. There is no way to get songs on your iPod back into iTunes (say, in the case of reinstalling the OS like I had to do the first night I had the machine). Also, imagine this... You happily use iTunes and your iPod with your home computer, but then you take your iPod to work and decide you want to download a song and put it on your iPod to listen to at the gym on your way home from work. Think again, asshole. Can't do it without erasing all the songs already on your iPod.

No focus follows mouse policy.
This is just a personal gripe. If you're a seasoned Unix user, you might understand.

Doesn't reconnect to wireless network after waking up.
Aimee loves this one. Almost everytime she wakes up the computer, she has to connect and enter in our WEP password manually to reestablish the internet connection. I think I've tracked this down to a Keychain Access issue, but it's still not resolved 100%... and it pisses me off because....

I thought Macs "just worked."

Apple Innovation: Stacks and Spaces

This is just a rant that started as an IM conversation with a friend. Understand that this is just a lighthearted rant and I'm an Apple fan with a recently acquired Mac Mini with a possibility of buying a MacBook in the near future.

Apple is starting to pull Microsoft's bs marketing crap now... "Look how innovative we are. We created this incredible UI paradigm called Stacks." Are they kidding? That's called dragging a folder to the task bar in KDE and it's been around since the 90's (or earlier?). In fact, it's such a basic concept in any Linux desktop GUI, that it took me a while to even grasp what Stacks was because I thought it was something "new".

Same deal with Spaces. It's called multiple desktops, again a basic concept in Unix as far back as I can remember. "Oh, but Apple was the first to make a cool UI for managing them." Wrong. Compiz/Beryl/CompizFusion was around well before Leopard.

Biggest Apple Rip Off Yet

I was reading (and agreeing with) someone's gripe over Apple putting a combo drive in their "low end" MacBook when I realized that offence is nothing in comparison to their memory prices.

Recently, Apple quietly upgraded their MacBook lineup, which included officially extending the maximum supported memory to 4 gb. Great! The more the better, especially since I would be using VMware Fusion to run Windows and Linux along side OS X.

Here's the kicker, configuring a MacBook through Apple's online store will cost you $850 for 3 gb of memory. Yes, that's eight hundred and f-ing fifty dollars for a mere 3 gb of memory (remember, the 1st gb is including in the base price).

Let me put this in perspective. You can buy 4 gb of Patriot memory, specifically made for Mac notebooks, from Newegg for only $189. Yes, that's one full gb more for approximately $650 less than what Apple is charging.

Am I the only one outraged?