Geek

My Shiny New Macbook

I promised a post on my thoughts about our MacBook, but the last few weeks have been a blur so I’m just now getting around to it.

My first impression is that I’m amazed that everything just works. It’s part of having the hardware and software built to work together from the beginning. Apple doesn’t have to worry that the OS has to work with every piece of hardware and software that its partners can dream up 10 years from now and has dreamt up in the past 20 years. It’s a closed system, which does have negative effects (find a game changing improvement to the Apple OS, I’ll wait).

So, what do I mean by everything just works? I’ll give you a few examples.

When I’m done working, I close the lid on the laptop. I’m ready to work again, I open the laptop lid and within 10 seconds my desktop comes up exactly as it was before. On my wife’s work Dell laptop, if you close the lid (even accidentally for a moment) the computer freaks out and enters the twilight zone where it’s not quite asleep and not quite awake. To get the laptop back alive, you have to hard restart the laptop. That can’t be good on the OS.

For most programs you simply drag an application to the “applications” folder to install it. While it took me a few tries to figure out what to do, that’s incredibly better than the fifteen screens and options it takes to install Windows programs. Want to uninstall? Drag the icon from the applications folder to the trash and it’s done. All of the files for the program are contained in a folder that looks like the icon. You won’t end up with thousands of orphan .dll files because you aren’t absolutely sure that they are not used by any other applications.

Worried about spyware? The OS won’t install anything without asking you first, which is simply amazing if you think about it. I haven’t logged into the Admin account since first setting up the laptop. Why? Because unlike Windows’ “Run As…” dialog, installing items is really possible from the limited accounts. The OS asks you for the administrator username and password and that’s it. You can run the program from any of the limited users without issue (which I found wasn’t often the case with Windows).

The last nicety really only affects notebooks. I love the two finger scrolling technique. Want to scroll a webpage or document? Simply flick down on the trackpad with two fingers. When I heard about it, I thought it would be awkward. When I was on a Windows laptop, it drove me nuts that I had to use two hands to scroll (hold button and flick).

So, what don’t I like? Well, some of the issues I had with Windows with user rights isn’t fixed with OS/X. The “shared” user really isn’t shared among users and you still have to be in the same user that created the document in order to edit it. I ran into this all the time with Windows. Even things in “Shared Documents” required the Administrator account to edit.

That’s not to say that an Apple is for everyone. While I found the transition easy enough (with a little help of David Pogue’s book) my wife called it a “whole different universe”. Even she’s appreciative of the little touches, like the scrolling and right clicking with two fingers and she has a hard time going back to her Dell laptop without those features.

Overall, I love my Macbook. I do miss Microsoft Money and have yet to find a replacement, but I’m doing okay with OpenOffice and Mint as replacements. I doubt we’ll ever buy a Windows product again. Thanks Vista!

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© 2008 Kirk Walsh.