{"id":120,"date":"2006-12-24T00:28:02","date_gmt":"2006-12-24T08:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jsholmes31.wordpress.com\/2006\/12\/24\/macbook-1-month-later"},"modified":"2006-12-24T00:28:02","modified_gmt":"2006-12-24T08:28:02","slug":"macbook-1-month-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2006\/12\/macbook-1-month-later\/","title":{"rendered":"MacBook &#8211; 1 month later"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"msgcns!6C72B8E39DF8C4E1!743\" class=\"bvMsg\">\n<p>I&#8217;ve lived with my Mac for about a month now. It&#8217;s had its ups and downs. I&#8217;ll start with the high level summary, then delve into details.<\/p>\n<h4>Pros:<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Sexy Hardware\n<li>Built in iSight, great feeling keyboard, magnetic power cord\n<li>MacOS is fun\n<li>Can run both Mac &amp; Windows apps (and linux, I suppose, but I&#8217;m not a freak fanboy)\n<li>Enthusiastic Boot Camp support community\n<li>Glossy display\n<li>Killer MacOS Apps:\n<ul>\n<li>Quicksilver\n<li>XTorrent\n<li>NewsFire\n<li>Parallels <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Cons:<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>No\u00a0official Vista Boot Camp support\n<li>Corrolarry: issues in Vista when dual booted\n<li>No 3D acceleration in parallels\n<li>Hard Disk too small and too slow\n<li>Low resolution display\n<li>One button on trackpad\n<li>Trackpad is absurdly large, so easy to hit by accident\n<li>MacOS can&#8217;t write to NTFS \/ Windows can&#8217;t read or write HFS+\n<li>Slightly weak graphics card\n<li>No pc-style delete key<\/li>\n<\/li>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>NOPs:<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>.Mac<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Details:<\/h4>\n<p><u>Hardware<\/u><br \/>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s plenty info about the physics of this online, but suffice it to say that this is not a matter of opinion &#8212; it&#8217;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&#8217;s 1440&#215;900 pixels. I would really rather it be 1920&#215;1200, or failing that, 1680&#215;1050. I like a nice high-res display. But it&#8217;s not that big of a deal.<\/p>\n<p>The trackpad is absurdly huge. Seriously, it&#8217;s like 4&quot; wide. Do I really need to be dragging my finder around that much? Probably not. What&#8217;s worse, my palms constantly touch it while I&#8217;m typing. The drivers are supposed to detect when this is happening and ignore it, but they&#8217;re not perfect and sometimes my mouse zips away. This basically means you can&#8217;t use mouse focus, which is too bad.<\/p>\n<p><u>MacOS \/ apps<\/u><br \/>MacOS is nice. It&#8217;s really the apps that make me love it. Shareware for the mac is just higher quality than for the PC. I&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>As for MacOS (Tiger) itself, it&#8217;s an OS. What can I say. They&#8217;re all about the same. It&#8217;s got search integrated in. It&#8217;s relatively snappy feeling. Comparing it to XP, it&#8217;s probably better. Comparing it to Vista, it&#8217;s probably not quite as good. <\/p>\n<p>Vista&#8217;s glass look is prettier than Mac&#8217;s aging Aqua interface. The sidebar is a bit more useful than dashboard, I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>As far as perf goes, MacOS is definitely faster on this hardware. But I feel that&#8217;s a driver issue. The perf bottleneck on the Vista side appears to be disk i\/o. The queue is <em>always<\/em> full when I&#8217;m doing much of anything and sometimes even when I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to security, I feel a bit more secure on Vista than on MacOS because of all the work that&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p><u>Parallels<\/u><br \/>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&#8217;t stable yet. Avoid it. Otherwise, this is can&#8217;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&#8217;t yet support the Office 2007 file formats everyone at work is using).<\/p>\n<p>There are, however, some issues with Parallels:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Running 2 OSes really eats up system resources. 2GB RAM is the bare minimum. I should have bought 3GB.<\/li>\n<li>You have to have 2 windows installs &#8211; one for Boot Camp and one for parallels. They&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li>No 3D support. This means Games don&#8217;t work and Vista looks lame.<\/li>\n<li>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&#8217;m currently working in.<\/li>\n<li>Only 1 virtual CPU. If you want to do perf intense work in Windows, you need to boot into boot camp.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><u>Boot Camp<\/u><br \/>Boot Camp is the great hope for Mac\u00a0gamers who want to use Windows for real. However, it only currently officially supports Windows XP SP2. Once you&#8217;ve used Vista, there&#8217;s no going back to XP, so I&#8217;m stuck trying to kludge it in Vista. It&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>The second issue is perf. Vista seems to have some disk i\/o issues under boot camp. I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>The other issue is stability &#8212; 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 &#8212; no bluescreen, nothing. I hope this is addressed in a future release, but I&#8217;ll keep investigating.<\/p>\n<p><u>.Mac<\/u><br \/>Summary: Not useful for me? <a href=\"http:\/\/mac.com\/\">.Mac<\/a> would be great for a few types of users: mac only users whose friends also only use macs, n00b users who don&#8217;t know about superior, free alternatives, users that never need windows.<\/p>\n<p>.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\u00a0to .Mac mail except that .Mac mail offersStorage in &quot;the cloud&quot; isn&#8217;t really useful to me. I have, let&#8217;s see, 3 computers at home, my macbook, a tablet and 2 desktops at work. That&#8217;s 7 computers I can use to store files on. And with <a href=\"http:\/\/foldershare.com\/\">FolderShare<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<h4>Overall Summary:<\/h4>\n<p>If you have money to spare and any interest in MacOS, buy a Mac. If you&#8217;re used to MacOS and don&#8217;t care about games, buy a Mac. Otherwise, buy a PC.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve lived with my Mac for about a month now. It&#8217;s had its ups and downs. I&#8217;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 &amp; Windows apps (and linux, I suppose, but I&#8217;m &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2006\/12\/macbook-1-month-later\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">MacBook &#8211; 1 month later<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3ictG-1W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":160,"url":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2011\/08\/setting-up-a-new-mac\/","url_meta":{"origin":120,"position":0},"title":"Setting Up A New Mac","author":"john","date":"August 13, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"When Apple released new revs of the MacBook Air and the Mac Mini, I decided to go for it and get one of each. \u00a0As I find migrating my old stuff to a new computer distasteful and somehow unclean, I set them up from scratch. \u00a0Here's a rough description of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Computers and Internet&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Computers and Internet","link":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/category\/computers-and-internet\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":294,"url":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2014\/02\/setting-new-mac-redux\/","url_meta":{"origin":120,"position":1},"title":"Setting Up A New Mac Redux","author":"john","date":"February 26, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Since I get new Macs somewhat more regularly than most folks and since I want a consistent work \/ productivity environment across all of them, I have gotten a pretty decent way set up for going from zero to hero on a new, tabula rasa Mac. It basically comes down\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Computers and Internet&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Computers and Internet","link":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/category\/computers-and-internet\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":114,"url":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2006\/10\/oh-boy-oh-boy\/","url_meta":{"origin":120,"position":2},"title":"Oh Boy Oh Boy","author":"john","date":"October 31, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The new MacBook Pros with Core 2 Duo chips came out last week. I've been wanting one since God knows when, so I bought one. I ordered it last Thursday for something like $2600. 2.33GHz of dual core goodness, an ATI Radeon 1600 mobility graphics card with 256MB video ram\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":133,"url":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2008\/08\/my-blog-has-moved\/","url_meta":{"origin":120,"position":3},"title":"My Blog Has Moved","author":"john","date":"August 11, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"After being on Windows Live Spaces since it started, the time has come to move my blog to a dedicated blog platform.\u00a0 I chose WordPress, signed up with a web host, and used a domain I registered for a while back: forawesome.net.\u00a0 So check out my new blog and let\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 1 comment","block_context":{"text":"With 1 comment","link":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2008\/08\/my-blog-has-moved\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":179,"url":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2011\/09\/nas-drobo-vs-freenas-vs-synology\/","url_meta":{"origin":120,"position":4},"title":"NAS: Drobo vs. FreeNAS vs. Synology","author":"john","date":"September 16, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been psyched for Drobo ever since the first time I saw their video years ago where the guy played back a movie while pulling out and putting back in drives. \u00a0Wicked awesome. But they haven't kept up, imo, with the times. \u00a0They still have some really cool underlying tech,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Computers and Internet&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Computers and Internet","link":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/category\/computers-and-internet\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":123,"url":"http:\/\/www.forawesome.net\/blog\/2007\/04\/the-end-of-an-era\/","url_meta":{"origin":120,"position":5},"title":"The End of an Era","author":"john","date":"April 26, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"After something like 5 years on the MSN (now Windows Live) Messenger Team, I'm moving to a new role at Microsoft. 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