I've just got back from four months living in Shanghai for work. I got to the point where I installed a proxy on a machine in California and used it over the VPN. I'd be sitting at home using Facebook, and after 15 minutes it would get slower and slower, and then start timing out. I'd clear the DNS cache on my Mac, take Firefox off and online, and then it would start working again, for a while. Or maybe not. Websites that were fast at home, could't be accessed from the office in Shanghai, but could be from our office in Hangzhou, and websites I couldn't access at home, I could at work. Sometimes I couldn't access MSDN from work, and contemplated going home to work (until I setup the proxy). I visited Australia and found the internet blazingly fast, even though it was even further away. The internet was totally random and unreliable. It's so good to be back somewhere where the internet works.
Can't say it's ever been a problem. My Dell (doesn't behave like that) is problematic with the trackpad seemingly registering movement when my hands are hovering nearby typing. Can't say I've ever seen an application that used both buttons simultaneously.
BTW, I still think you're wrong about two-buttonedness off the Mac. You're definitely splitting hairs with the Mighty Mouse. You're also blindly ignoring the fact that that's just personal preference and you're more than welcome to plug-in any two button mouse you like and it will work.
Ooooh, touchy touchy! I'm hardly a Mac fanboy, but if you want to sink below my level and start on the ad hominems, go ahead.
I find OS X is more unstable and unreliable than Windows. I don't have anything that prevents Windows shutting, yet VMWare Fusion does it nearly every time on my MBP. Apple's Bluetooth drivers also screw it up and cause random hangs, as did their Express34 card accessing an external NTFS drive. I use a Dell 8-14 hours a day, so the Mac is my way of having a computer that doesn't remind me of work. I reboot the Dell a couple of times per month max, hibernating the rest of the time. OS X doesn't even even come close on the reboot count. When I say Windows XP and Vista are more reliable than OS X, I'm pretty confident in that. Fanboy enough?
You don't use Mac's do you? One finger tap on the touchpad does left mouse button. Two fingered tap does right mouse button. Or you can chord the actual trackpad button with the Ctrl key. No problem. The Bluetooth Mighty Mouse that I sometimes use has distinct buttons.
Skype with webcam seems to use 100% of one of the CPU cores on my Mac Book Pro (bought in Feb). Trust me, after a while it gets way too hot to have sitting directly on your lap - that's a pain for hour long or longer conversations.
Ugh - laptop screens are dreadful. I spent four years using a Dell M60 with the screen set to a dreadfully low resolution because I found it unusable at its native settings (eye strain and headaches). My current Dell M6300 has a 17" screen and thus is usable with the display settings set for large 125dpi fonts, which breaks a lot of applications (or at least causes problems with their text display as people don't test this kind of thing properly). The screen resolutions on the Macs work well for their screen sizes, although the higher res. HD option on the 17" MBP I found left text too small. Yeah, I guess I prematurely have old man eyes;)
HDMI is essentially DVI with audio. The author doesn't seem to realise that. More interesting is whether the DVI outputs of the other laptops support HDCP. I'd bet the Sony does as it can be equipped with a BD drive.
I live in Canada and I saved $500 before tax buying a MBP in the US (I had it shipped to one of our offices there and picked it up when I was on a business trip). I still had to pay California's 8.25% sales tax, which is considerably less than Ontario's 14% at the time.
The only time I use my firewire port on my MBP is to network it with other computers (a few times a year). The only time I use firewire on the PC is because I got a firewire enclosure for my IDE/ATAPI Blu-ray drive and I had been given advice (two years ago) that I would have more luck finding a reliable firewire rather than USB enclosure for it. It seems to work fine with USB, and the laptop I got in Feb has a built-in BD drive anyway. Firewire hardly seems necessary these days for most people. I rarely see external drives that require firewire. USB is ubiquitous, and eSATA more suitable where performance is critical, and is becoming more common. I think an eSATA connector on the MBP would have been better than FW800... it's annoying having to use an Express34 card for it.
It's easy to take several hundred photos in a week or two, which is going to be more than half a gig. That's not practical to upload. It me took an hour to upload 15 pictures from an internet cafe in Santiago, Chile. Even in the US, upload speeds can be variable. For example at hotels the internet can be unbearably slow in mornings and evenings.
Personally I think taking a laptop on vacation is dumb. It's extra weight, and a constant worry. It's a pain in the arse. Take a book or some magazines, or sleep on the plane (I found melatonin and two bottles of wine great for whiling away the nearly 14 hour flight back from Shanghai yesterday!)
How is that any different to saying that I don't have time to do this any more, or I've lost interest, and I'm going to walk away and stop contributing? Sounds like splitting hairs to me.
Yeah, I was wondering about the memory. I did upgrade it at one point, using the exact modules recommend by Apple (although not bought from them). I wondered enough that I ran memtest, leaving it running for a very long time. I imagine it would turn up any. Can you suggest any other clues I could look for?
Bluetooth is definitely a problem. It'll often by red in the Activity Monitor and can't kill it. At that point the system is screwed, and the System UI process tends to freeze. It does seem to the system a lot using Skype via the BT headset. It looks like there have been similar complaints going back a couple of years. I think Apple's BT implementation is crap. Another common problem I encounter is I can't use the microphone on the BT headset with Skype due to white noise that starts after a while (another common problem). I installed Airfoil so I could listen to music from other sources (e.g. streamed from the BBC's website in Firefox) via AirTunes, and to remove it due to increased crashing. It's frustrating.
Maybe I should pay head to the other person's comment about VMWare Fusion. I rely heavily on it though.
I'm still happy with the machine. It has everything I want in a small and light form factor. I could grumble about the lack of USB ports, but then it would be a monster like work Dell M6300. It also runs hot... especially after an hour of Skype with the web cam on.
It wasn't funny at all. In fact it's bigotry more often than not when used like that.
I've been to France several times and that stereotype doesn't apply. In fact the worst BO I've ever had to put up with was when I used to commute to work on the public buses in Denver.
Got mine in Feb. No dodgy smells. This story smacks of sensationalism - how about knocking the MBP for real reasons? The mains problems I had with it have been that it locks up frequently (especially when/after using Bluetooth, which is irritating as I use Skype for hours each day) or hangs trying to restart. Had to stop using the Express34 card I got from the Apple Store as that would cause it to lock up reading an external harddrive, and the Ext2 drivers from SourceForge also made it unstable. Only thing left on it that I can pinpoint for problems besides the Bluetooth is VMWare Fusion - whenever one of the VMs locks up (75% of uses), I have to hit the power button to make the machine restart. *sigh*. Bad as NT4. Anyway, I'm sure the benzene levels coming off it are far less risk to me than say sitting in a new car for 30 minutes.
I do. I've found several problematic drivers over the years and removed them, which has resulted in stopping BSODs. On one machine analysis of a handful of mini-dumps made me realise that I might have bad memory. Swapped it for decent ECC memory and random crashes went away. The question is: why don't more people know about this technique? It only takes a few minutes to check it out, and for me that quite often includes Googling for "windbg minidump" to refresh my memory on what to do (Windows is so stable these days that I don't have to do this very often), and probably downloading WinDBG itself.
Is that OpenBSD on a 12W device that sits silently on a shelf?
Personally I prefer to use a decent modem. I have a SpeedTouch DSL modem that seems to be more functional than most consumer routers, as well as being one of the more stable modems I've used on a marginal line. I connect my wireless devices to my network just on the switch side (use them as wireless access points and not routers). Very stable set up.
Of course, Air Port Express routers don't support UPnP. Ridiculous - it's been eight or nine years since I last had a router with this feature missing. It also seems to let me create multiple profiles, but they don't work. I have reconfig the bloody thing where ever I go.
Have you been to Europe? The bus from my parent's town in UK to Oxford runs once an hour and takes 90 minutes to go 20 miles. That's pretty good service, but hardly ideal. The roads are approaching grid lock in parts of England because so many people are getting cars just because life isn't that convenient without them. What the UK has been designed for is walking to the pub. At least that way though people can drink and forget about the cost of petrol (and cars, and houses, and public transport, and just about everything else in life that costs a bomb, except for the beer).
I do that thanks, and if I don't care about reading the text, I crank up the JPEG compression. It's not the connection speed/bandwidth that's the problem, it's the latency. After using RDP, even 120ms for VNC is painful (like when I'm at home in Toronto on a 6mbs connection working on computers in California connected via DS3). But just try it over a 400ms link (like when I'm visiting our office in China and working on machines in California). Unusable (as opposed to sluggish RDP that keeps going, and feels like VNC on a 125ms link). Then there are the bugs in VNC. It's been plagued over the years where on some machines the screen doesn't refresh. That means after every click or typing, requesting a screen refresh. VNC's crap, but I guess you get what you pay for, and it's the only choice if you're not connecting to Windows machines (although NX mentioned elsewhere sounds interesting).
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I've just got back from four months living in Shanghai for work. I got to the point where I installed a proxy on a machine in California and used it over the VPN. I'd be sitting at home using Facebook, and after 15 minutes it would get slower and slower, and then start timing out. I'd clear the DNS cache on my Mac, take Firefox off and online, and then it would start working again, for a while. Or maybe not. Websites that were fast at home, could't be accessed from the office in Shanghai, but could be from our office in Hangzhou, and websites I couldn't access at home, I could at work. Sometimes I couldn't access MSDN from work, and contemplated going home to work (until I setup the proxy). I visited Australia and found the internet blazingly fast, even though it was even further away. The internet was totally random and unreliable. It's so good to be back somewhere where the internet works.
If you're using UTC, then you open your store at 2pm in New York, and 5pm in LA. Don't you know that London is the centre of the world?
Can't say it's ever been a problem. My Dell (doesn't behave like that) is problematic with the trackpad seemingly registering movement when my hands are hovering nearby typing. Can't say I've ever seen an application that used both buttons simultaneously.
BTW, I still think you're wrong about two-buttonedness off the Mac. You're definitely splitting hairs with the Mighty Mouse. You're also blindly ignoring the fact that that's just personal preference and you're more than welcome to plug-in any two button mouse you like and it will work.
Ooooh, touchy touchy! I'm hardly a Mac fanboy, but if you want to sink below my level and start on the ad hominems, go ahead.
I find OS X is more unstable and unreliable than Windows. I don't have anything that prevents Windows shutting, yet VMWare Fusion does it nearly every time on my MBP. Apple's Bluetooth drivers also screw it up and cause random hangs, as did their Express34 card accessing an external NTFS drive. I use a Dell 8-14 hours a day, so the Mac is my way of having a computer that doesn't remind me of work. I reboot the Dell a couple of times per month max, hibernating the rest of the time. OS X doesn't even even come close on the reboot count. When I say Windows XP and Vista are more reliable than OS X, I'm pretty confident in that. Fanboy enough?
You don't use Mac's do you? One finger tap on the touchpad does left mouse button. Two fingered tap does right mouse button. Or you can chord the actual trackpad button with the Ctrl key. No problem. The Bluetooth Mighty Mouse that I sometimes use has distinct buttons.
Who else does backlit keyboards?
Skype with webcam seems to use 100% of one of the CPU cores on my Mac Book Pro (bought in Feb). Trust me, after a while it gets way too hot to have sitting directly on your lap - that's a pain for hour long or longer conversations.
Ugh - laptop screens are dreadful. I spent four years using a Dell M60 with the screen set to a dreadfully low resolution because I found it unusable at its native settings (eye strain and headaches). My current Dell M6300 has a 17" screen and thus is usable with the display settings set for large 125dpi fonts, which breaks a lot of applications (or at least causes problems with their text display as people don't test this kind of thing properly). The screen resolutions on the Macs work well for their screen sizes, although the higher res. HD option on the 17" MBP I found left text too small. Yeah, I guess I prematurely have old man eyes ;)
HDMI is essentially DVI with audio. The author doesn't seem to realise that. More interesting is whether the DVI outputs of the other laptops support HDCP. I'd bet the Sony does as it can be equipped with a BD drive.
I live in Canada and I saved $500 before tax buying a MBP in the US (I had it shipped to one of our offices there and picked it up when I was on a business trip). I still had to pay California's 8.25% sales tax, which is considerably less than Ontario's 14% at the time.
The best thing about the keyboards is the back-lighting
The only time I use my firewire port on my MBP is to network it with other computers (a few times a year). The only time I use firewire on the PC is because I got a firewire enclosure for my IDE/ATAPI Blu-ray drive and I had been given advice (two years ago) that I would have more luck finding a reliable firewire rather than USB enclosure for it. It seems to work fine with USB, and the laptop I got in Feb has a built-in BD drive anyway. Firewire hardly seems necessary these days for most people. I rarely see external drives that require firewire. USB is ubiquitous, and eSATA more suitable where performance is critical, and is becoming more common. I think an eSATA connector on the MBP would have been better than FW800... it's annoying having to use an Express34 card for it.
Want to deal with reclaiming taxes and brokerage fees if they decide to ding you for that?
It's easy to take several hundred photos in a week or two, which is going to be more than half a gig. That's not practical to upload. It me took an hour to upload 15 pictures from an internet cafe in Santiago, Chile. Even in the US, upload speeds can be variable. For example at hotels the internet can be unbearably slow in mornings and evenings.
Personally I think taking a laptop on vacation is dumb. It's extra weight, and a constant worry. It's a pain in the arse. Take a book or some magazines, or sleep on the plane (I found melatonin and two bottles of wine great for whiling away the nearly 14 hour flight back from Shanghai yesterday!)
How is that any different to saying that I don't have time to do this any more, or I've lost interest, and I'm going to walk away and stop contributing? Sounds like splitting hairs to me.
Yeah, I was wondering about the memory. I did upgrade it at one point, using the exact modules recommend by Apple (although not bought from them). I wondered enough that I ran memtest, leaving it running for a very long time. I imagine it would turn up any. Can you suggest any other clues I could look for?
Bluetooth is definitely a problem. It'll often by red in the Activity Monitor and can't kill it. At that point the system is screwed, and the System UI process tends to freeze. It does seem to the system a lot using Skype via the BT headset. It looks like there have been similar complaints going back a couple of years. I think Apple's BT implementation is crap. Another common problem I encounter is I can't use the microphone on the BT headset with Skype due to white noise that starts after a while (another common problem). I installed Airfoil so I could listen to music from other sources (e.g. streamed from the BBC's website in Firefox) via AirTunes, and to remove it due to increased crashing. It's frustrating.
Maybe I should pay head to the other person's comment about VMWare Fusion. I rely heavily on it though.
I'm still happy with the machine. It has everything I want in a small and light form factor. I could grumble about the lack of USB ports, but then it would be a monster like work Dell M6300. It also runs hot... especially after an hour of Skype with the web cam on.
It wasn't funny at all. In fact it's bigotry more often than not when used like that.
I've been to France several times and that stereotype doesn't apply. In fact the worst BO I've ever had to put up with was when I used to commute to work on the public buses in Denver.
What's the nationality of the person involved got to do with it?
Got mine in Feb. No dodgy smells. This story smacks of sensationalism - how about knocking the MBP for real reasons? The mains problems I had with it have been that it locks up frequently (especially when/after using Bluetooth, which is irritating as I use Skype for hours each day) or hangs trying to restart. Had to stop using the Express34 card I got from the Apple Store as that would cause it to lock up reading an external harddrive, and the Ext2 drivers from SourceForge also made it unstable. Only thing left on it that I can pinpoint for problems besides the Bluetooth is VMWare Fusion - whenever one of the VMs locks up (75% of uses), I have to hit the power button to make the machine restart. *sigh*. Bad as NT4. Anyway, I'm sure the benzene levels coming off it are far less risk to me than say sitting in a new car for 30 minutes.
I do. I've found several problematic drivers over the years and removed them, which has resulted in stopping BSODs. On one machine analysis of a handful of mini-dumps made me realise that I might have bad memory. Swapped it for decent ECC memory and random crashes went away. The question is: why don't more people know about this technique? It only takes a few minutes to check it out, and for me that quite often includes Googling for "windbg minidump" to refresh my memory on what to do (Windows is so stable these days that I don't have to do this very often), and probably downloading WinDBG itself.
Is that OpenBSD on a 12W device that sits silently on a shelf?
Personally I prefer to use a decent modem. I have a SpeedTouch DSL modem that seems to be more functional than most consumer routers, as well as being one of the more stable modems I've used on a marginal line. I connect my wireless devices to my network just on the switch side (use them as wireless access points and not routers). Very stable set up.
Of course, Air Port Express routers don't support UPnP. Ridiculous - it's been eight or nine years since I last had a router with this feature missing. It also seems to let me create multiple profiles, but they don't work. I have reconfig the bloody thing where ever I go.
Have you been to Europe? The bus from my parent's town in UK to Oxford runs once an hour and takes 90 minutes to go 20 miles. That's pretty good service, but hardly ideal. The roads are approaching grid lock in parts of England because so many people are getting cars just because life isn't that convenient without them. What the UK has been designed for is walking to the pub. At least that way though people can drink and forget about the cost of petrol (and cars, and houses, and public transport, and just about everything else in life that costs a bomb, except for the beer).
Indeed, and memory us a bad example. It's a user-servicable component that takes just few minutes to change. One is free to buy memory elsewhere.
I do that thanks, and if I don't care about reading the text, I crank up the JPEG compression. It's not the connection speed/bandwidth that's the problem, it's the latency. After using RDP, even 120ms for VNC is painful (like when I'm at home in Toronto on a 6mbs connection working on computers in California connected via DS3). But just try it over a 400ms link (like when I'm visiting our office in China and working on machines in California). Unusable (as opposed to sluggish RDP that keeps going, and feels like VNC on a 125ms link). Then there are the bugs in VNC. It's been plagued over the years where on some machines the screen doesn't refresh. That means after every click or typing, requesting a screen refresh. VNC's crap, but I guess you get what you pay for, and it's the only choice if you're not connecting to Windows machines (although NX mentioned elsewhere sounds interesting).