originally posted november 23, 2004

Six Months of Thinking Different

So a lot has happened since my last update on October 23. The Red Sox swept the World Series, leading to an immediate celebration more muted than when they beat the Yankees to win the ALCS in unprecedented fashion. George W. Bush legitimately won re-election as President; the blue states now have four more years to rely on political satirists for levity in the form of "fake news." But I'm not going to comment on either of those topics any further. I'm going to spend the next several hundred words talking about my laptop.

A Change In Lifestyle

So about six months ago, on May 11, I made the decision to replace my aging and fault-prone Compaq laptop with a 12-inch PowerBook G4. I will readily admit that I was out drinking in the hours before I placed the order. After rebates, the total damage came out to about $2000. It's the most expensive computer I've ever bought and it's also the first Mac I've ever owned.

My decision was motivated to try something different. Windows had been very trouble-prone, but don't count me among the switchers. I didn't even own a Windows computer until 1998; up until then, I relied on OS/2 as my primary operating system. I still have a four-year-old Linux workstation that I use as an all-purpose server at home.

So I was motivated to try Mac OS X based on the relatively trouble-free hardware, good technical support from Apple, and UNIX-like underpinnings that would come in handy at work. I was mostly right.

The Good

Centralized Address Book

So Windows has included an "Address Book" application since Windows 95. If you're running Windows XP, you can still access this program by going to Start > Run... > wab. Unfortunately, not even Microsoft thought to use their Address Book application for anything. Since then, Outlook has become the standard program in the corporate Windows-using world for organizing addresses and e-mail alike.

Apple, on the other hand, included a simple but very useful Address Book and Mail program with Mac OS X. These programs, descended not from Mac OS 9 but rather from NeXTStep, are actually used by many first- and third-party software. Safari silently adds URLs to its bookmarks from my friends' address book entries. iChat and Adium can cross-reference the Address Book to create aliases for my IM buddies.

It's nice to have a decent PIM solution without the cruft and insecurity associated with Outlook. I've tried Entourage, Microsoft's Mac equivalent to Outlook, and found it just as slow and annoying as its Windows cousin.

UNIX You Can Use

Mac OS X is the most user-friendly operating system out there that's based on a UNIX-like kernel. For those times when Finder doesn't cut it as a file navigation tool, I can pop open a terminal window and use most of the same commands that I can use on Solaris or Linux. Most well-designed open source programs can even be compiled from the command line. That's very handy. I was used to Cygwin in Windows for UNIX-like functionality; while it's free, it doesn't feel integrated with the operating system at all.

The other thing that's really spiffy: unlike most UNIX workstations, I can use such decadent luxuries as FireWire, USB, sound, and DVD playback without having to wade through obsolete hardware HOWTOs and political diatribes. Everything works well out of the box.

Text-to-Speech That Really Works

I have been impressed with the Mac's text-to-speech capabilities ever since I first heard them used back in the System 7 days. The voices sound great. Any application can easily integrate text-to-speech through published APIs. There's even a command-line tool for speech (say) that I can use with shell scripts.

The closest thing I've heard for free has been the Festival project on UNIX platforms, but the user experience integration just isn't there. Microsoft's SAPI sounds awful and has virtually no mainstream vendor support.

Developer Tools Included

Xcode is a very well-written development environment on the level of, say Microsoft Visual Studio. Apple also includes a whole bunch of scripting languages including AppleScript and Perl that are available either right out of the box or by installing off the software DVD. Everything works and everything is free.

Security By Obscurity Works

The Mac still enjoys a very small market share, so virus and worm authors stay away. There are very few scripts, worms, trojans, and other programs that specifically target Mac OS X. By contrast, I had to install Sophos Anti-Virus when I used my Windows laptop at work; the result was like putting a giant clamp over a car's wheel. Everything just ground to a halt.

Humans Answering the Phones

I've only had to call Apple once for tech support so far. HP subjects users to a robotic process where customers get bounced from rep to rep before finding someone that can help out. I only needed one level of tech support when I called Apple, but I was so surprised that the very first person I talked to:

Spoke clear, understandable American English;
Took down my information without sounding like she was reading from a mainframe terminal screen;
and resolved my problem with a very helpful attitude, even if she did read from a script to do so.

It's quite jarring to go from one of the worst companies for tech support to one of the best. Apple and IBM, as far as I'm concerned, are the only two companies that make computers with passable tech support. If only Apple charged less than $349 for a decent service plan (three years' support on hardware and software) for the PowerBook.

The Bad

Meanwhile, I can't say the whole experience has been positive so far.

Bend and Flex

Everyone rejoiced a few years ago when Apple introduced the Titanium PowerBook. Finally, Apple was using NASA-grade titanium in a consumer-grade notebook. Unfortunately what they didn't say was that they used about two millimeters of Titanium and a coating of cheap paint. The Titanium PowerBook's paint quickly flecked off and the general consensus was that Apple really cheaped out on building such a high-end notebook.

Now the PowerBook is made of about two millimeters of aluminum instead. When I unpacked my notebook from its carrying case a couple of months ago, my ten-minute walk to work had delivered such a shock that the body had been distorted. I couldn't even plug in the power adapter until I took the blunt end of a pen and smoothed the body out for about ten minutes. To this day, the power adapter plug won't always stay plugged in.

The hinges and connectors are made out of cheap plastic on this case; when I close the screen I hear a loud and disconcerting "click" sound. The keyboard makes little squeaking noises when I hit the space bar. Overall, this doesn't feel like a machine that costs as much as it did.

The Megahertz Myth Is True

Apple's computers typically use G4 and G5 processors that clock in at far fewer megahertz than their Intel and AMD competitors. Apple explains this away as the "Megahertz Myth." In my experience, the myth has been true but in reverse: this machine is slow.

With a 1.33 GHz processor and 768 MB of memory, Mac OS X should be fine. Indeed it was for a little while, but now it chugs along with delays at the most irritating of times. Background processes, especially Flash elements in web pages, run at an extremely low priority. Trying to do anything in Safari or iPhoto usually results in the "spinning beach ball" wait cursor. Microsoft preloads a few pieces of Office on Mac just as it does on Windows; however, Word and Excel take much more time to start up on the Mac than on a supposedly-comparable Windows machine.

Games simply don't run on this machine. Even emulators occasionally skip when they performed admirably on my older Pentium III 1.0 GHz. Unreal Tournament 2004 can squeeze about 10 frames per second out of the built-in GeForce FX 5200 Go GPU. I watched my co-worker play the World of Warcraft demo on his new 15-inch PowerBook without a problem, but I don't even consider it worth the effort to try on my 12-inch PowerBook. The graphics are simply disappointing. Running Exposé on two monitors would be a lot more impressive if the zooming effect wasn't so jerky.

Crash, Spin, Crash

I've heard that 256 MB of memory is the bare minimum you need to run Mac OS X with an acceptable level of performance. I have triple that much memory, and I can blow away half of it with just two applications.

Safari never cleans up after itself. After a full day of web browsing, its process consumes between 100 and 200 MB of real memory. The browser just becomes slower and slower as it goes. Eventually it crashes for some reason or another, taking all the browser windows and not saving any record of what it was doing beforehand. (Opera, which is also very crash-prone, at least gives you the option to resume where you were working before it crashed.)

iPhoto, which I now use to manage about 2000 pictures, takes about 10 seconds to load to a usable state. Right off the bat it uses only 22 MB, but I've managed to balloon its process up to 190 MB by simply importing and viewing pictures.

Finder, Safari, and iCal are three bundled programs that are very simple yet featureful, yet they all crash very often. I'd put Finder on par with Windows Explorer for reliability, especially when accessing network drives. Safari crashes much more than Internet Explorer or even Firefox, and leaks even more memory than the latter; it crashes about as much as KDE's Konqueror (on which it is based). I have created situations where iCal spins for a while or just crashes outright, but Outlook handles multiple calendars without as much difficulty.

Cruft Galore

I ordered my PowerBook with a 60 GB hard drive. When it arrived, 13 GB were already in use. That includes:

GarageBand (2 GB)
iDVD (1.3 GB), which will not run anyway because I don't have a built-in DVD burner
Various assorted demos and trialware
Four web browsers: Safari, Internet Explorer for Mac OS X, Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9, and Netscape 4 for Mac OS 9.

Now to its credit, Apple doesn't take away any memory for its own special applications. Take a look at the cruft that is in the Startup group on any IBM or Dell laptop out of the box, and you'll appreciate why so many people just reformat and do a clean install right away. At least I was able to delete these applications without too much difficulty -- although most of GarageBand's files were stored in /lib instead of the application bundle itself.

Some of the programs that I got for free, like OmniGraffle, easily replace more expensive Windows software packages. Meanwhile, many of the programs that I came to love for their utilitarian simplicity in Windows -- Notepad, Paint, and Solitaire, to name three -- are completely ignored on the Mac. Apple includes no GUI plain-text editor; you can use the rich-text TextEdit or the plain-text vi or emacs. Apple includes no simple bitmap editor, but rather the PhotoShop-styled "Graphic Converter" that feels like a slightly-more-polished version of The Gimp. Lastly, not even "that puzzle game with the Apple logo" is installed. After downloading three freeware Solitaire games on VersionTracker, I still hadn't found one that came close to the Windows 3.1 Solitaire game that Microsoft still bundles with Windows XP. How disappointing.

The Verdict

If given the choice to do it again, I wouldn't buy or recommend the 12-inch PowerBook. The graphics chip is terrible, the performance has been lousy, and the hardware itself feels a lot cheaper than it should. The only small laptop I would recommend nowadays would be a ThinkPad. As many people in the business world know, IBM actually has great support (including up to five years' warranty coverage) and makes solid computers.

That's not to say I'm completely lost on the Mac platform. There is a small but immensely supportive community that has produced applications such as LaunchBar and Adium, both of which I use daily. Community sites such as Mac OS X Hints and MacFixIt offer lots of advice and an always-upbeat spirit. I hesitate to think of a computer as a "lifestyle choice," but I don't mind living such a fashionable life in at least one sense.

Back to November 2004, or to the year 2004.