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A Macs Tale Part 1 - Entering the Mac WorldSince I did the deed and went for a Apple Powerbook as the long overdue replacement for my old faithful Sony Vaio, I have been getting emails asking why, some even called me insane for even considering it, let alone actually doing it. A friend suggested that I write "The Tale of Moving to a Mac", to try and prove my sanity is still more or less intact. Here it is, enjoy. After several years of heavy use, various new parts, and much bad language, I finally realized that its really time to do something radical and upgrade to something better, faster, more reliable than the Vaio, not that I really had any choice, as I now needed to work with gigabit Ethernet, which is something the poor thing was not capable of even being upgraded to support. So before even looking at whats out there in the world, the first challenge had to be overcome, which was to carefully spec out exactly what I needed from the new machine. Now this may sound easy, and indeed for those who are OS crippled by using that nasty Windoze thing it would be, but in my case, being a non-Windoze user, its something of a nightmare. The main problem being that more and more laptops are being designed for Windoze and nothing else, which can make installing Linux interesting at times. Anyway, after spending far too much time researching, I finally ended up with a list that looked like something that may actually exist out in the marketplace. And here it is
Armed with this list, and a overworked credit card, I started looking around to see whats available from my preferred laptop suppliers, IBM and Sony, and was more than a little disappointed to find nothing that was even a fair match existed. The IBM T40 was the closest but did not have the Firewire port I needed, whereas the Sony could offer the Firewire but not the Gigabit Ethernet. Sure I could have just used a PCMCIA Firewire card with the T40, but that meant yet more expense, plus added something else to carry around, and based on my terrible track record lose. At this point I was giving some real thought to giving up and waiting for new offerings to appear, when a friend suggested that I look at the Apple offerings. 
Looking at Apple, was not something I had even considered doing until my friend suggested it, as based on past bad experience with apple hardware, it was a case of once burned, now scared. Well thats not exactly quite true, I did an evaluation of the original Ti-Book when it was released, for a client, the results only served to confirm my very low opinion of Apple hardware, as being over priced and under powered. After my past experience, it was hard to keep a fully open mind, but I decided to take my life in my hands and at least look at the specs on the apple site. Boy was I in for a surprise, the first look at the specs showed that most of the Powerbooks where a good match for my needs, and some models even offered a DVD burner which while not on the list, is something that just could not be turned down. While the Powerbooks where a good match, they where still not perfect, as all used a trackpad as the pointing device, which I hate with a passion. That plus the lack of legacy ports and the total madness of the single mouse button counted against the Powerbooks, which raised the question, could I live with them? The only hope of answering this one without having to spend huge amounts of money, was as you can expect, try one and see how it was. Which is just what I did, but the usual short test at my local Apple center was just not going to be enough, so I made a few calls and managed to burrow one from a friendly tech at one of my clients for a weekend. Rather than bore you with the details of the weekend, all that needs to be said is that while the trackpad and single mouse button are annoying, they are not what I would call killer, nor was the lack of legacy ports. Thats the first question answered, now for the next, which is what Powerbook do I go for? This I thought was going to be a real hard choice, given that most of the available models where suitable. Wrong again, as believe it or not this ended up being a no briner, with the winner being chosen mainly on screen size, which is not surprising as of the three sizes available the 12" was too small, and the 17" too big, which left the 15" as the best match for my needs. 
Well thats the hardware questions answered, which left only one to be answered, could I live with OSX which comes with the Powerbooks? My experience with this OS is very limited, and even the machine I burrowed for that weekend test had Linux on it, so OSX was very much a real unknown, and as such a little concerning. Anyway this one is not really as bad as it could be, firstly OSX is based on UNIX, so in theory I should just be able to recompile the same apps I use under Linux, and run them under OSX. Note I said "In theory", well there are no guarantees, but I could be lucky. If all else fails I can just dump OSX and load PPC Linux. The current plan is to try OSX for a while, and see how things go, only going Linux if OSX has problems with my apps, or drives me nuts in some other way. Expect updates on this one... Thats it the end, the deed is done, the order placed, the money spent, with delivery imminent. So to close, and summarize why I went down this path, the Powerbook met all that I needed, and even added a DVD burner to the specs.
Closing wordsSince first writing this, some 5 months have passed, I am still using the Powerbook, its still running OSX, the trackpad has not driven me nuts, and the lack of legacy ports is not something I actually noticed once the machine arrived. Thats not to say all has been trouble free, with the worse problem being nothing to do with the hardware, but a case of sloppy quality control with the new OSX (10.3 aka Panther), which shipped with a bug that caused data loss on Firewire hard disks. In my case I lost 212GB, plus several commercial projects. Even after this, and the poor response from Apple over that mess, I still like the Powerbook, and yes even OSX. If you are considering switching from the Wintel world, DO NOT LET THIS STOP YOU, do the deed, just be extra careful with OSX updates, and remember that Apple has a real long way to fall to the standards of M$. Related Pages and Links
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| Updated: October 1, 2006 | Top |