It was almost a year ago that I first declared my desire for a Mac. With the release of the MacBook, the features and price became too much to resist, and I bought one on launch.

In the spirit of blogging retrospectives, I have a few remarks to make on the visible aspects of the switch.

The Good

Trackpad & Keyboard. They’re both completely delicious. It was difficult to grasp just how excellent they are, until I was forced into a brief encounter with a Dell… where the keys are undersized, packed together, and the trackpad is like back of a postage stamp. The MacBook “chiclet” keys are sized just like a real keyboard, but more importantly, they have the correct gaps between them, which are extraordinarily helpful in guiding the fingers.

I find myself surprised at how productive I am with the trackpad. I was sure I’d hate the one-button thing, and I was sure I’d hate the no-mouse thing. But after a few days of plugging in my old optical wheelmouse, I found myself just reaching for the trackpad half the time anyways. In a coding or writing environment, where I’m primarily using the keyboard, with the occasional mouse gesture, I like the very short travel between the trackpad and keys; it’s matter of inches to drop the left thumb and right index finger onto the pad.

Sooner or later, I expect to buy an external keyboard and mouse. But it’s not an essential item, as I might have first assumed.

OS X. Biggest plus? You get a native terminal, but with a non-ugly window manager. I don’t use the Dashboard religiously, but I do find the little dictionary and to-do pad useful, as well as the indespensible Screenshot Plus. I also don’t make heavy use of Exposé, but I like that it’s there. Unlike my old Windows machine, I tend to run the MacBook for several days at a time, and the desktop can get to be pretty cluttered… a quick Exposé is a great way to quickly see what all is open, and banish the unwanted.

The Screen. I was concerned about the size (a mere 13.1″) and also about the finish (glossy), but neither of these has been an issue. When I get back into heavier web-dev stuff, I’ll likely end up buying a nice big LCD, but the small one is great for writing and terminal stuff. And as for the glossiness, my feeling is this: It only takes a few moments to find a glare-free position, and then I’ve got the entire duration of the work session to enjoy the advantages of a brighter, cleaner, higher-contrast display.

Size and Weight. It’s slightly heavier than I might have first assumed, but I think this is more just because it’s so small. The weight is density, rather than excess. Compared to the 15″ displays around me, I definitely like the diminutive form-factor allowed by the smaller display. The computer is almost a perfect fit in a satchel alongside regular-sized binders of letter-sized paper.

It Just Works. Apart from a few small issues (below), I have almost no cause at all to complain. Basically, I’m thrilled with it. In contrast with my parents, there are areas of my life where I’ve become sick of the inexpensive mediocre, and am willing to pay a premium for the superb. I began doing this with bicycles a few years back, and now I’m doing it with computer hardware, too.

I never felt more validated in the decision to Switch than when my old P4 blew its power supply, taking down the mouse and keyboard with it. The computer was in the possession of my sister at the time, so it was a drag for her, but something in me wants to believe that a Mac just wouldn’t do that. And before you claim that it’s just because it’s old, see my classmate Brandon’s new Acer that shipped with hosed RAM and now barely functions.

The Bad

Dead Battery Shutdowns. This one’s happened twice, and it really grinds my gears. I realise that battery-level detection is an imprecise science, but there’s no excuse for the two times that it has skipped over the “reserve power” notice and just pulled the plug on me.

Discolouration. I haven’t had it as bad as some people, but after a few months of use, it’s definitely looking a little too chain-smoker for my tastes. I had it into an Apple store several weeks ago, and they confirmed that the stained plastic could be changed under warrantee… provided I could leave the hardware for 3-5 business days. At the time I was busy writing a book on the hardware and therefore not interested in such a proposition; perhaps sometime I’ll bring myself to part with it for a week for this repair.

No Image Cropping Tool. This doesn’t affect all users, but I’m often doing quick crop/resize operations with images, and it’s enormously frustrating not to have a simple tool for this. There are several pay options, but it seems even a fair sack of doubloons can’t get you something as sweet and simple as Irfanview is on the PC. (Yes, the built-in Preview app has cropping, but it doesn’t have precise scaling.)

Lousy Support for UW’s Campus Wi-fi. This affects even fewer users, but I’ve confirmed with a MacBook Pro user and several MacBook-bearing classmates that the uw-wireless network is pretty flaky on OS X. We’ll get connected to it, but it can take anywhere from 3 to 300 seconds for the internet connection to open up and let you authenticate or start surfing. This doesn’t seem to affect Windows or Linux users.

The Whatevers

Bundled Software. Seriously, I just don’t really care. I use VLC instead of Quicktime, Firefox instead of Safari, and Adium instead of iChat. I use iPhoto for browsing, but I haven’t gotten into the tagging thing. I use iTunes, but I’d dump it in a second for a jukebox that could sync properly to my non-iPod MP3 player. Seriously, Apple, you already have the sweetest MP3 player on the planet; you don’t need to rub it in by locking the rest of us out of the media player that ships with your operating system. Just buy Thrupp and integrate it properly.

Mini-DVI for Video-out. It’s nice that for aethetic reasons, they’ve limited the number of ports and things on the side of the computer. On the other hand, it is pretty lame that I’ll ultimately have to buy three separate adaptors (at US$20 apiece) in order to cover movies in the living room, a larger LCD monitor, and presentations on a VGA data projector.

Needing 1 GB of RAM. I scrimped and originally stuck to the 512 MB of RAM that the factory model has. For someone of my usage pattern (run tons of stuff at once, including memory gobblers like Zend, Word, and Firefox), this was quite simply unusable. Fortunately, the Mississauga MacDoc was able to get me a quite reasonable price on 1 GB, and things were much better following that.

Heat. Some people have complained about the heat, I really just haven’t found it to be much of a problem.

So there you are, that’s a few months of being on a Mac.

Mike

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