I’ve lived with my Mac for about a month now. It’s had its ups and downs. I’ll start with the high level summary, then delve into details.
Pros:
- Sexy Hardware
- Built in iSight, great feeling keyboard, magnetic power cord
- MacOS is fun
- Can run both Mac & Windows apps (and linux, I suppose, but I’m not a freak fanboy)
- Enthusiastic Boot Camp support community
- Glossy display
- Killer MacOS Apps:
- Quicksilver
- XTorrent
- NewsFire
- Parallels
Cons:
- No official Vista Boot Camp support
- Corrolarry: issues in Vista when dual booted
- No 3D acceleration in parallels
- Hard Disk too small and too slow
- Low resolution display
- One button on trackpad
- Trackpad is absurdly large, so easy to hit by accident
- MacOS can’t write to NTFS / Windows can’t read or write HFS+
- Slightly weak graphics card
- No pc-style delete key
NOPs:
- .Mac
Details:
Hardware
The MacBook Pro is a nice piece of hardware, no doubt. The metal feels nice and solid. The screen stays put at whatever angle I set it. The Core 2 Duo is a killer proc and at 2.33GHz, fast as hell.
The glossy screen is gorgeous. Let me put this with the precision to help the reader to understand: glossy LCD displays are superior to matte LCD displays. There’s plenty info about the physics of this online, but suffice it to say that this is not a matter of opinion — it’s a matter of fact. And the glossy screen on the MBP is absolutely fantastic. The colors are vivid. The pixels are sharp. My only complaint with it is resolution. It’s 1440×900 pixels. I would really rather it be 1920×1200, or failing that, 1680×1050. I like a nice high-res display. But it’s not that big of a deal.
The trackpad is absurdly huge. Seriously, it’s like 4" wide. Do I really need to be dragging my finder around that much? Probably not. What’s worse, my palms constantly touch it while I’m typing. The drivers are supposed to detect when this is happening and ignore it, but they’re not perfect and sometimes my mouse zips away. This basically means you can’t use mouse focus, which is too bad.
MacOS / apps
MacOS is nice. It’s really the apps that make me love it. Shareware for the mac is just higher quality than for the PC. I’m not 100% sure why this is the case. I can only assume its because Mac users will more typically pay for shareware, so it’s more profitable on the mac. In any case, shareware apps on the mac are just better looking and feeling than on the PC, whatever the reason.
As some examples, look at NewsFire, XTorrent, QuickSilver, Saft, Delicious Library, Democracy, etc. These apps are great. Better than their commercial or shareware counterparts on Windows.
As for MacOS (Tiger) itself, it’s an OS. What can I say. They’re all about the same. It’s got search integrated in. It’s relatively snappy feeling. Comparing it to XP, it’s probably better. Comparing it to Vista, it’s probably not quite as good.
Vista’s glass look is prettier than Mac’s aging Aqua interface. The sidebar is a bit more useful than dashboard, I’d say. I like that the sidebar is always up. I never actually go to the trouble to push F12 to bring up the dashboard on MacOS. The one feature MacOS has that I wish Vista had is Expose. Win-Tab is nice, but hitting one button than clicking the window I want is far superior to scrolling through 30 windows.
As far as perf goes, MacOS is definitely faster on this hardware. But I feel that’s a driver issue. The perf bottleneck on the Vista side appears to be disk i/o. The queue is always full when I’m doing much of anything and sometimes even when I’m not, causing access times to get into the 100-200ms range. This, obviously, slows things down quite a bit. That said, even when Vista is being slow, it still does what you tell it to. MacOS, on the other hand, just shows a pinwheel and you have to wait and hope for the best.
When it comes to security, I feel a bit more secure on Vista than on MacOS because of all the work that’s gone into it and the man-centuries of effort put into cracking it. MacOS is kind of virgin territory. It seems pure now, but if the hackers of the world turned their sights to it, I have no doubt that it would crumple quickly.
Parallels
Parallels is freaking amazing. If you have an Intel mac and any interest in running Windows, buy it now. The mode where you can run the same partition as you use in Boot Camp, though, isn’t stable yet. Avoid it. Otherwise, this is can’t-live-without software if you need to use some Windows apps (I need to use Outlook to see corporate mail and Mac Office doesn’t yet support the Office 2007 file formats everyone at work is using).
There are, however, some issues with Parallels:
- Running 2 OSes really eats up system resources. 2GB RAM is the bare minimum. I should have bought 3GB.
- You have to have 2 windows installs – one for Boot Camp and one for parallels. They’re working on this, though, and have a beta of support for XP boot camp partitions, but this is not stable enough to trust yet.
- No 3D support. This means Games don’t work and Vista looks lame.
- The keyboard mappings in parallels are bunk. I want the apple key to act as control on windows so I can copy/paste between apps and OSes without remembering what OS I’m currently working in.
- Only 1 virtual CPU. If you want to do perf intense work in Windows, you need to boot into boot camp.
Boot Camp
Boot Camp is the great hope for Mac gamers who want to use Windows for real. However, it only currently officially supports Windows XP SP2. Once you’ve used Vista, there’s no going back to XP, so I’m stuck trying to kludge it in Vista. It’s going ok (this post is written from Windows Live Writer in Vista from Boot Camp), but there are definitely some issues. Driver installation is a headache. You have to manually unpack the boot camp driver CD to a folder on the hard drive, then grovel through the device manager upgrading the appropriate devices (wireless ethernet, iSight, trackpad, keyboard, etc.). This is obviously annoying and not something for the average Mac user. Hopefully Vista support will be forthcoming in the next Boot Camp verison and this issue will go away.
The second issue is perf. Vista seems to have some disk i/o issues under boot camp. I’m not sure if these are because of Vista, the hardware, or the drivers. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future beta. If not, I need to round up some io devs at work to investigate.
The other issue is stability — Vista in Boot Camp under heavy load hangs. It just flat out stops. It looks like the computer is overheating or something, because it just stops dead — no bluescreen, nothing. I hope this is addressed in a future release, but I’ll keep investigating.
.Mac
Summary: Not useful for me? .Mac would be great for a few types of users: mac only users whose friends also only use macs, n00b users who don’t know about superior, free alternatives, users that never need windows.
.Mac provides a small amount of storage (1GB) space that is shared between mail and files. For mail, I use both Windows Live Mail and GMail. Either one is superior to .Mac mail except that .Mac mail offersStorage in "the cloud" isn’t really useful to me. I have, let’s see, 3 computers at home, my macbook, a tablet and 2 desktops at work. That’s 7 computers I can use to store files on. And with FolderShare, I have backups of all my important data on at least two of them, typically more, which I can access from anywhere and recover easily. Not to mention FolderShare works on both Windows and MacOS.
Overall Summary:
If you have money to spare and any interest in MacOS, buy a Mac. If you’re used to MacOS and don’t care about games, buy a Mac. Otherwise, buy a PC.
as for parallels… I forwarded your feedback directly to dev team.
3D graphics support for Vista will be the next big milestone, but it\’s still in embryo state.
Thanks for forwarding the feedback, Alex.
I have a MacBook Core 2 2.0 Ghz and have had it since late 2006. Its my second MacBook and my 4th Apple. I had a iMac and a iBook before the MacBooks. I switched to Apple for the security plan and simple. I do not think Apple computers are any better then a Dell or HP. In fact as somebody who does repair on computers I can tell you that much of the hardware is not A+ but rather run of the mill. Apple uses it\’s looks and cult power of long time user\’s to get new customers. It\’s no secret of this just watch a Steve Jobs presentation and you see how Apple lover\’s hinge on his every word. You don\’t see that when Michael Dell speaks.I like my MacBook but I will never become a Apple cult follower. Frankly after a year of ownership I have developed a long crack on the bottom of the case and since upgrading to Leopard have seen battery life diminish and problems with crashes. Which was never a problem in Tiger. For me I do not feel Apple provides enough product to justify the prices it charges. The Macbook was easily $150 more than it should be because it lacks some things such as a card reader and PC card slot for things such as a Wireless card. Even the cheapest Dell\’s have these items. I have always thought Apple made a mistake not offering a better low end system, even my wife school has switched to PC\’s from Dell after many years of being Mac only simple because of costs.Apple needed a EMac computer and the Mac Mini was not it. I think a eMac made similar to the iMac with a smaller screen and lower priced CPU could have filled this gap. Their again Apple chose to ignore the educational community. I realize they offered a cheaper iMac but it was only $100 less. They bought Dells and saved $300 a piece. That\’s a chunk of change! Sorry about the rant. John