Some notes on using a Macintosh.

I borrowed a MacBook from work for the weekend. Let's do some comparisons. First, facts and figures:

My usual laptop is an HP DV1000 series, about 18 months old: 1.5GHz Pentium M single core processor, 512MB RAM, 15" 1280x768 screen, Intel i845 graphics, with built-in wireless (B and G), a DVD burner, three USB 2.0 ports, ethernet, a modem, 2 PCMCIA slots and a multi-form-factor memory card slot. It was about $800 on sale. I run Debian Linux with the XFCE environment.

The MacBook is a 2 core 2.2GHz cpu, 2GB RAM, 15" 1280x800 screen, Intel i945G graphics, same wireless, DVD burner, 2 USB ports and a FireWire port, ethernet and a remote control. There is a built-in iSight camera.The OS is MacOS X, version 10.4.9. Outiftted with all that and a 3 year AppleCare warranty, the Apple price is $1800.

The keyboard is significantly better on the HP. Much more key travel. The touchpads are about the same, but the nod goes to the HP, which has two buttons, an extra button to turn it off if you are using an external mouse and don't want to hit the pad by accident, and better sensitivity. The Mac screen has a slightly higher resolution and a little less physical space. The Mac is slippery and won't stay on tilted surfaces that the HP clings to. When I adopt the laptop-on-chest slouching position, the Mac has sharp corners that hurt my wrists. Nevertheless, overall hardware build quality seems higher on the Mac. Perhaps I'm saying that because the backlighting on the HP screen has stopped working, rendering the screen completely unusable, but the Mac does feel tighter and denser. Battery life appears better on the Mac, too. And it weighs a little less than the HP, by half a pound or so. Just enough to notice. I think blacks were deeper, less washed-out, on the HP, but I can't compare side to side right now.

My Linux environment is reasonably customized. I don't have too many needs: ssh and a decent xterm-alike, Firefox, a Jabber client, an AIM client (better if these two are the same, an MP3 player, and the occasional game for diversion -- something more interesting than MineSweeper, less demanding than Civilization. Frozen Bubble is good. I rely heavily on virtual screens, keeping 7 or 8 occupied at once. I like focus-follows-mouse with a zero delay for autoraise, and scroll-wheel on the desktop shifts virtuals. Yes, this is the classic UNIX-sysadmin-with-ADD configuration. No, I don't have ADD. I just like instant responses to my changes of attention, and I have this front-end processor in my brain which will hold a minimal conversation with you while I'm busy thinking about other things. If a question comes up which requires some thought, as opposed to retrieving a fact from cache, it issues an IRQ and gets my attention, then feeds me the last few lines of the conversation. That's not ADD. Really. I do digress easily, though.

Mac OS X is very well integrated with the hardware. It's like a Linux box where a good sysadmin has already loaded all the right drivers and put in little desktop widgets and so forth. The problem is that she doesn't like exactly the same software that I do. Adding Firefox and Adium (I usually use Gaim, now Pidgin) was relatively straightforward, and Expose with a window-corner activation is almost, but not quite as good as a virtual screen. Everything flows about as smoothly as on the HP, but much of that has to be attributed to about 3x the processing power and 4x the memory, counterbalanced by software that must be much slower. Is there an option for logging in as a second user without killing off the first user's session? Linux can do that, no sweat.

Overall, I'd say that using MacOS X is very much like going to a Commonwealth country: they mostly speak the same language, but it's all a bit different and the choices you are used to making aren't the same choices you get at home.

Some notes on using a Macintosh.

I borrowed a MacBook from work for the weekend. Let's do some comparisons. First, facts and figures:

My usual laptop is an HP DV1000 series, about 18 months old: 1.5GHz Pentium M single core processor, 512MB RAM, 15" 1280x768 screen, Intel i845 graphics, with built-in wireless (B and G), a DVD burner, three USB 2.0 ports, ethernet, a modem, 2 PCMCIA slots and a multi-form-factor memory card slot. It was about $800 on sale. I run Debian Linux with the XFCE environment.

The MacBook is a 2 core 2.2GHz cpu, 2GB RAM, 15" 1280x800 screen, Intel i945G graphics, same wireless, DVD burner, 2 USB ports and a FireWire port, ethernet and a remote control. There is a built-in iSight camera.The OS is MacOS X, version 10.4.9. Outiftted with all that and a 3 year AppleCare warranty, the Apple price is $1800.

The keyboard is significantly better on the HP. Much more key travel. The touchpads are about the same, but the nod goes to the HP, which has two buttons, an extra button to turn it off if you are using an external mouse and don't want to hit the pad by accident, and better sensitivity. The Mac screen has a slightly higher resolution and a little less physical space. The Mac is slippery and won't stay on tilted surfaces that the HP clings to. When I adopt the laptop-on-chest slouching position, the Mac has sharp corners that hurt my wrists. Nevertheless, overall hardware build quality seems higher on the Mac. Perhaps I'm saying that because the backlighting on the HP screen has stopped working, rendering the screen completely unusable, but the Mac does feel tighter and denser. Battery life appears better on the Mac, too. And it weighs a little less than the HP, by half a pound or so. Just enough to notice. I think blacks were deeper, less washed-out, on the HP, but I can't compare side to side right now.

My Linux environment is reasonably customized. I don't have too many needs: ssh and a decent xterm-alike, Firefox, a Jabber client, an AIM client (better if these two are the same, an MP3 player, and the occasional game for diversion -- something more interesting than MineSweeper, less demanding than Civilization. Frozen Bubble is good. I rely heavily on virtual screens, keeping 7 or 8 occupied at once. I like focus-follows-mouse with a zero delay for autoraise, and scroll-wheel on the desktop shifts virtuals. Yes, this is the classic UNIX-sysadmin-with-ADD configuration. No, I don't have ADD. I just like instant responses to my changes of attention, and I have this front-end processor in my brain which will hold a minimal conversation with you while I'm busy thinking about other things. If a question comes up which requires some thought, as opposed to retrieving a fact from cache, it issues an IRQ and gets my attention, then feeds me the last few lines of the conversation. That's not ADD. Really. I do digress easily, though.

Mac OS X is very well integrated with the hardware. It's like a Linux box where a good sysadmin has already loaded all the right drivers and put in little desktop widgets and so forth. The problem is that she doesn't like exactly the same software that I do. Adding Firefox and Adium (I usually use Gaim, now Pidgin) was relatively straightforward, and Expose with a window-corner activation is almost, but not quite as good as a virtual screen. Everything flows about as smoothly as on the HP, but much of that has to be attributed to about 3x the processing power and 4x the memory, counterbalanced by software that must be much slower. Is there an option for logging in as a second user without killing off the first user's session? Linux can do that, no sweat.

Overall, I'd say that using MacOS X is very much like going to a Commonwealth country: they mostly speak the same language, but it's all a bit different and the choices you are used to making aren't the same choices you get at home.