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Flirting With Mac OS X
An anonymous reader wrote to us with an article on Byte from Moshe Bar about flirting with using OS X. Taco and I are both strongly considering beginning to use OS X as a primary laptops - anyone else looking at doing this? And anyone from Apple that can get me a good price on super TiBooks? *grin*
Its really pretty easy to understand why the /. crowd would like OSX. If you need business apps and Unix apps what are your alternatives:
/. crowd?
dual boot -- a pain in the neck and you end up spending almost all your time in either Linux or Windows
Windows + Cygwin -- too weak on the Unix side, things rarely compile correctly
Linux + Wine -- very weak on the windows side too many things don't run correctly
The Unix side of OSX is getting very close to being as good as FreeBSD; and the Business side is very close to being as good as Windows XP (better in terms of interface worse in terms of inexpensive app availablility). Then you toss in Classic and you pick up a few of the Mac 9 apps.
What is so hard to understand why this combo would be appealing to the
My first-gen TiBook (which I admittedly got second-hand from a liquidating dotcom) cost, when it came out, a good $2000 less than my Dell Inspiron 8000. The TiBook is theoretically under-powered, but it easily holds its own against the top-of-the-line Dell. And what's more, the TiBook can stand up to a 3-year old's bashing and smashing, while my Dell gave me exactly 7 months of service (discounting the blue screen of death the first time I turned it on) before falling apart (hardware and software) so badly I have to run it closed plugged into a CRT all the time to avoid the godawful screen. A very expensive desktop.
Macs may not be as fast as PCs (anymore...and for how long?) but they make FAR better hardware. The reason I don't own a 2-button mouse is because Apple has yet to make one. 3rd-party hardware always feels so creaky and crumbly to me... just like the hinges on the Dell. You don't appreciate a Mac till you grab an iBook by the top of the screen and carry it into another room, just swaying, not even considering how stupid it is to do that.
Now for desktops, building your own might be a better idea, but for latops, no one beats Apple. There are no other small-form-factor power laptops around.
(the Dell's fan is whirring today which is why I'm so sour on PCs right now)
The world's only surviving livewriter.
You know, with a bit of search and replace, almost all of your arguments would have applied to Linux when it was at the same stage of development (say four or five years ago.) In fact, I heard some of my Unix using colleagues use those arguments for sticking with HP/UX, Tru64, and even SCO. Give Apple a little bit of time.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Hi
I bought an iBook about two months ago, and below is a review of the machine. I jusst bashed out the review, so my apologies for the poor structure etc.
I am a PhD student, and I wanted a laptop for the following reasons:
1. To write papers and my thesis on, using LaTeX.
2. To watch movies on if I'm travelling to/from meetings and conferences.
3. To surf the web and send/receive email.
4. To edit code. I didn't want to actually run my code on the laptop, becasuse my experiments often take several days to complete on a high-end PC.
5. To 'log in' to my work machine to check if code is running, channge settings, get a file etc. My work machine runs Windows (sigh), so the laptop has to talk to that remotely.
6. To use on the uni's network, and use my 'home' account (in this case a Windows account).
7. To drive projectors, for presentations at conferences.
I'll focus my review on the above, but first I'll talk about the reasons I picked an Apple.
Laptops are expensive. But in my line of work (OK, I'm a student, stop that sniggering at the back...), I need a computer that I can use when I'm running an experiment on my main machine. It helps to be able to write code/papers on a laptop, so I can sit in front of the TV, or at my girlfriend's place, or in a coffee house.
I originally wanted a Dell, so I could install Linux, but there are problems with this:
1. Linux isn't supported by Dell.
2. Drivers for laptops often come out ages after a new laptop has rolled off production (if at all), and their quality varies. So there's no guarantee that Linux will work and be stable on a laptop. I accept that desktops are another matter -- I have RH7.3 on my home Dell desktop running fine.
3. Dell's aren't cheap.
4. I don't really want to have to pay for a MS OS that comes pre-installed if I'll never use it.
A friend told me about a TiBook that his work colleague has and how wonderful it was. I started checking out the apple.com website, and became quite interested in OS X. Then I saw a colleague's iBook. That convinced me. I could do everything i wanted on the iBook. I bought one.
Firstly, the price of the iBook was cheaper than a similarly-specced machine. It's a 700MHz G3 (which I reckon gives similar performance to a 1GHz Celeron) with 256MB of RAM and a 16MB 3D graphics card. The screen is a 12" 1024x768 TFT LCD. I opted for the CD-ROM version, rather than the DVD-CD/RW combo option because of price (I already have a CD/RW on myn desktop, and I'll discuss the DVD/movie watching later). Apple give an educational discount, which means that the machine cost me just under £1200 (UK Pounds) and that included a 3 year warranty (also discounted). At the time, I could have bought an entry-level Dell laptop, without the 3 year warranty, with a similar spec (but perhaps a DVD drive, and definitely a larger screen (well, in terms of inches, the number of pixels would be the same)).
The first iBook arrived dead. It didn't work. The Apple helpline people were friendly and efficient, and ordered me a replacement, which arrived just over a week later. Although this was a bummer, the Apple helpline people sounded amazed that this happened, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that my experience was unusual.
When the second one arrived, I was amazed. The design is flawless. There isn't a laptop (or desktop) in the PC world that is as well designed as the iBook. The screen, although seemingly small, is wonderful. It allows the laptop to be small, but you still get the full 1024x768 pixels at 24bit colour -- because the pixels are smaller than those on a 14" screen at the same 1024x768, text and graphics look much nicer -- I have to look very closely to see the pixels. The screen has a well-designed hinge that has the effect of taking the screen away from you when you open the computer -- not like PC laptops that just have a simple hinge. The ports are nicely arranged. The speakers are adequate. The machine has no fan to cool the processor (Apple select chips properly, instead of doing an intel and designing chips that they can write a big number next to and rely on people's stupidity to buy the 1GHz PC because it will be "faster" than the 700MHz Apple [I used to be a chip designer, so I know what the right thing to do is]).
The battery life is amazing (I keep using that word). I can work for 4 hours on a single charge, listening to music (though not spinning the CD). Sometimes for 5 hours.
When you close the lid, the machine sleeps. When you open it it wakes up, often before the lid is fully open. Because of this (and the excellent reliability of the OS), I have shut down/rebooted less than 10 times since getting the machine. uptime tells me that the machine has been up for 6 days (I have never had the whole OS crash on me). Show me a PC laptop that has been up for 6 days! When the iBook sleeps, a white light snoozes from inside the machine, gently pulsating -- this shows evidence of good design: PC laptops use horrid LEDs chopped into their sides without any thought. This excellent level of design is carried throughout the iBook.
But the real test is whether I can do all those things I wanted to.
1. To write papers and my thesis on, using LaTeX.
Yes. There is a free LaTeX distribution called TeXShop which is excellent.
2. To watch movies on if I'm travelling to/from meetings and conferences.
Obviously the DVD-equipped models allow movie-watching, but what about my CD only iBook? Well, there is a free movie player called VLC that will play MPEG files, DVDs and VCDs. I can easily rip a DVD to VCD, and then play that.
[Note: I am only ripping DVDs that I own a copy of -- I do not advocate breaking copyright laws. Those in the US may be limited by the DMCA (write to your representatives, people!).]
3. To surf the web and send/receive email.
Yep. The bundled IE5 is a bit crap, but Opera just released their beta of Opera6 for Mac OSX. I am currently using Mozilla for both web (with their mouse gestures plugin!) and mail. It's fine.
4. To edit code. I didn't want to actually run my code on the laptop, becasuse my experiments often take several days to complete on a high-end PC.
A little trickier. I have yet to find a really good text editor under OS X that I like. I use jEdit on the PC (an excellent Java-based text editor), but even though this is available for OS X (and even gets the OS X widgets), it is a little slow. I guess this is a JVM efficiency thing.
I have used Fink to download XEmacs and NEdit for X windows (OS X ships with an X server, and OroborosX is a Window manager that gives your X windows the look and feel of OS X), but I don't really like these. NEdit isn't as powerful as jEdit, and XEmacs is just weird, as a former PC user, but maybe I'll keep trying.
On the code front, OS X ships with Project Builder, an excellent IDE for application development on the Mac, which IMHO is better than MS Visual Studio. Since moving onto the Mac I've gotten back into C/C++ development. It should be easy to write UNIX apps that can then be compiled on Linux and other Unices.
Because OS X is UNIX, there are loads of apps and libraries out there just waiting to go.
5. To 'log in' to my work machine to check if code is running, channge settings, get a file etc. My work machine runs Windows (sigh), so the laptop has to talk to that remotely.
I used to use the Remote Desktop feature of MS's Netmeeting. Now I use VNC and the OS X VNCThing client to access my Windows desktop.
6. To use on the uni's network, and use my 'home' account (in this case a Windows account).
Yep. Easy. I can't print over the uni's network yet, but then I haven't really tried very hard. I understand printing in OS X 10.2 Jaguar is better. I could probably easily print from the command line, but this is a bit 1970's for me.
7. To drive projectors, for presentations at conferences.
Yep. Easy. Plug and go.
There's only the text editor that's the sticking point, but maybe someone will reply to this post with a suggestion.
Other nice things about OS X:
* Aqua. Lovely. It looks wonderful -- the anti-aliasing is much better than in WinXP. Although KDE and GNOME are fine projects, Aqua is much better IMHO.
* Being able to use one spell-checker in every OS X app.
* Built-in speech synthesis -- I can get the iBook to read me stuff on the web as I work on something else.
* Speech recognition -- I can tell the Chess game where I want to move my pieces!
* More than the one button mouse. I sometimes use an optical MS Wheelmouse, and it works fine without needing to install drivers. Left-mouse, right-mouse, and the wheel all work fine (even in many X-windows apps).
* "It just works". It's one of apple's mottos, and they're right. It does just work.
In conclusion, the iBook is the best computer I ever used (and I've used most major computers from the days of 8-bit processors and most major OSs). If Apple keep up their good work, I will never go back to a PC again.
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
You'd think you didn't have $12 left after buying that damn computer...
I'm using a two button mouse on my Mac right now and it works just fine, out of the box. Hell, it's set up to a KVM switch.
I didn't have to install any software, it just worked.
The instant-on feature of the Powerbook makes it worth something like eight times the money, considering you can get an easy days use out of one battery by only opening the laptop when taking notes. Great for conferences...
I've seen too many people wandering around the office with laptops open because they don't want to wait through the wakeup cycle... if it even wakes!! And of course they are trailing cords because they have to have the thing plugged in most of the time to last a day.
Then you have the great network switching ability, moving between various wireless and wired networks can be done without thought.
Oh, and obligatory reference about the hardware being better quality as others have noted.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I also don't work for Sun, I don't work for RedHat either, but do work for Debian. My choice of helping out with linux works for everybody though.