{"id":217,"date":"2010-06-08T19:13:38","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T07:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chillingsilence.wordpress.com\/?p=217"},"modified":"2010-06-08T21:26:40","modified_gmt":"2010-06-08T09:26:40","slug":"why-after-years-of-windows-linux-i-bought-a-macbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/why-after-years-of-windows-linux-i-bought-a-macbook\/","title":{"rendered":"Why after years of Windows \/ Linux, I bought a Macbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"f017841d9cf6ca47c03c911bc3197fe6\" data-index=\"3\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-6411751809866006\";\r\n\/* BlogHorizontalSlim *\/\r\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"6442664612\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 468;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 60;\r\n\/\/-->\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p>So after being a Microsoft user since back in the days of MSDOS &amp; Windows 3.1, and I&#8217;ve been using Linux on and off for the last decade now. I&#8217;m still not a fan of Mac Zealots in any way, shape or form. They piss me off no end, and I don&#8217;t have time for their nonsense and superiority.<\/p>\n<p>What I can appreciate is the quality of the Mac hardware. From the iPhone to the Magic Mouse to the Macbook, the hardware is *nice*. Sure you can compare it to similar models from the likes of Dell, Toshiba, HP or Asus and it generally works out marginally more expensive, but what I&#8217;m getting at, is that there are some very valid reasons why you would want to (Or why I wanted to) get one over a traditional windows-based machine.<\/p>\n<p>This isn&#8217;t about to become a windows-bashing exercise, but my thoughts on some of the good and the bad around my new Macbook.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Note:<\/strong> I&#8217;ve already noticed that a newer model is out in April, I&#8217;ve only had mine 2 months, it must have just come out after I purchased mine. That said I bought mine from PBTech instead of from Apple or Magnum Mac, and got mine for just under $1500 Incl GST. The improved graphics card would have been a nice bonus, but I&#8217;m not complaining.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<h2>I&#8217;ll look at the Hardware first.<\/h2>\n<p>The single-sheet glass touchpad is so nice, for me it was essentially like having an iPhone as a touchpad, and the two-finger scroll, pinch to zoom, things like that. It&#8217;s a nice quality touchpad, that you very quickly adjust to. Somehow, I&#8217;ve not once had an accidental mis-click from resting the palms of my hands on it, though I&#8217;m certain it happens semi-regularly as I have that issue with almost every other laptop.<\/p>\n<p>The screen is very nicely balanced compared to the rest of the laptop, when you open it you don&#8217;t have to hold down the base as you do with so many other laptops. How this is accomplished, I&#8217;m unsure, but it lifts so well and it holds its position no matter where you stick it, half closed, standing upright, wherever.<\/p>\n<p>The Magic Mouse is an absolutely awesome mouse, being able to scroll up, down, left, right, and it&#8217;s just such a nice mouse. Being bluetooth is great because it means that I don&#8217;t have to worry about having a dongle, even though you can get the Micro receiver mice.<\/p>\n<p>One of my favorite features is the mag-lock AC Power adapter. Having it magnetized is awesome, the number of times I&#8217;ve had it get pulled out, rather than place strain on it, I can see it saving both the laptop motherboard AND the power adapter, it&#8217;s something that *all* laptops should have! Seriously an incredibly useful feature. A few times it&#8217;s even saved the laptop from flying off the couch.<br \/>\nMy family goes through a fair few laptops, and the most common reason for them failing is the power adapter, where it plugs in to the laptop. It&#8217;s happened now on a couple of Acers, an HP, an Asus, so none are immune to it.<\/p>\n<p>The battery life on it is freaking awesome, I&#8217;ve done over 4 hours of solid 3D gaming on battery, using WiFi and Bluetooth, and it still had some juice left in it. That&#8217;s crazy! I rarely shut the device down because it resumes from standby instantly, and can stay in standby for a day or two and the battery barely takes a hit.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know what it is about that Keyboard either, but it&#8217;s just plain nice to use!<\/p>\n<p>The LED screen is absolutely stunning. It&#8217;s very bright, looks great in all light, and I&#8217;ve never seen such a nice screen on any laptop as this.<\/p>\n<p>Hardware = 10 \/ 10<\/p>\n<h2>Then we get to the software<\/h2>\n<p>To be honest the Mac OS is nothing super special. One thing I find is that more and more I&#8217;m doing less and less in the OS and more and more in the browser itself.<\/p>\n<p>It starts up nice and quick, shuts down fast, it behaves well with respect to asking for Administrative\u00c2\u00a0privileges\u00c2\u00a0unlike Windows. It&#8217;s basically on par with how well Linux does it, only asking for the password when it needs it, when you could potentially be hosing the whole system.<\/p>\n<p>I use Chrome on Windows, Linux &amp; now MacOS, so I don&#8217;t really care for Safari, though it shares a lot of similarities with Chrome, it&#8217;s certainly a better browser than IE.<\/p>\n<p>Quicktime is nothing short of a PITA which I can&#8217;t stand, but installing some random add-in that I found allowed me to play back some non-default-supported codecs and formats such as MKV video. VideoLAN Client also does the same job.<\/p>\n<p>It works nicely with networking too, potentially better with Windows shares than Windows itself. Most of the time when I access my Win7 Desktop, 3\/4 the shares are open, but theres 1\/4 that need a password. If I&#8217;m accessing it from any other windows device they usually just fail. From MacOS I was able to easily hit a button and authenticate with the correct Username and Password details.<\/p>\n<p>Installation of applications is nice, mostly it&#8217;s just &#8220;drag and drop&#8221; to the Applications folder. Same for uninstallation, just drag it to the trash.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also nice not to have to worry about the likes of Anti-Virus or Spyware. While I&#8217;m not saying Macs are vulnerability free, it&#8217;s still nice.<\/p>\n<p>The way things tie in is also quite nice, like the ability to drag an image from the browser to the desktop just saves it.<\/p>\n<p>Parallels is also pretty cool, albeit a bit slow. The system really needs a little more than 2GB RAM to be fully happy running Parallels without taking a decent performance hit. Lucky for me I don&#8217;t need to use Parallels, as everything I do there are Mac-native apps for, or it can be done from the browser.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not an issue opening the likes of windows stuff such as MS Word, Excel or Powerpoint files, and I must admit that iWork is pretty nice. Using Keynote was relatively simple, fast, and the output options are great such as to a Video File, or PDF. +1 to the score there!<\/p>\n<h3>Then there&#8217;s the stupid things.<\/h3>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve got multiple monitors, and you thought it was bad in Windows having the Start menu on the wrong window, you should try a Mac. Having the top application menu on the wrong window is even worse! It was simply not well thought-out.<\/p>\n<p>Tried taking a screenshot? Who opens the &#8220;Preview&#8221; application to do that? Honestly?<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a few other stupid things like that, but lets just say that with all it&#8217;s nice features, there&#8217;s just as many dumb things too.<\/p>\n<p>I would liken it to a Linux distro with some more spit n polish, but after using the latest Ubuntu 10.04, I don&#8217;t even quite think it&#8217;s on-par with that.<\/p>\n<p>So, while it&#8217;s nice in some places and rough in others, all I care about is the ability to load a Browser, so I have to admit I&#8217;d rather have the likes of Ubuntu Linux 10.04.<\/p>\n<h2>Overall<\/h2>\n<p>Things work quite well. The package as a whole is great, and things generally tie in quite well.<\/p>\n<p>To be frank I&#8217;d probably only buy Macbooks for laptops, though I like the ability to upgrade Desktops too much to buy a Mac desktop machine. The quality of the hardware is the big thing for me, and it&#8217;s a real big thing! It truly is top-notch.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not so sure about the rest, but thankfully for me it doesn&#8217;t matter terribly much. It&#8217;s not that much of a learning curve compared to what most people think, and to be honest you could sit down most semi-literate people and they&#8217;d have no worries. Of course if you were to take your grandma or those people who for some reason can&#8217;t deal with change, they&#8217;d naturally throw a wobbly about the minor differences. However, they&#8217;re just that, minor differences.<\/p>\n<p>Should you buy a Macbook? Yeah, definitely. Don&#8217;t expect it to be identical to Windows, but if you can get over that you&#8217;ll really enjoy them. I&#8217;m yet to find somebody else who&#8217;s used my Macbook who hasn&#8217;t liked it, when most of them come from a windows background. Should you stick with MacOS on the hardware? To be honest you could install Windows 7 or Linux on to it and probably just as happy either way, if there was no way you could live without Windows. Seems a bit silly because it&#8217;ll cost you a fair bit, and if you were going to go with a Mac you might as well use Mac software and make it work for you, but again, it&#8217;s realistically a small detail.<\/p>\n<p>I would however be interested in running a small business from Macs, with a Mac server, however for me I&#8217;m happy with Google Apps for email etc, it works well enough for me.<\/p>\n<p>As always the usual disclaimer applies, and the last thing I&#8217;m looking to do is to get into a debate with Mac \/ Windows \/ Linux fanboys in any way, shape or form. That said if you have a genuine question I&#8217;d be more than happy to answer it.<\/p>\n<p>Cheers<\/p>\n<p>Chill.<\/p>\n\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So after being a Microsoft user since back in the days of MSDOS &amp; Windows 3.1, and I&#8217;ve been using Linux on and off for the last decade now. I&#8217;m still not a fan of Mac Zealots in any way, shape or form. They piss me off no end, and I don&#8217;t have time for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[105,109,110,131,133,196],"class_list":["post-217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-rantings","category-product-reviews","tag-linux","tag-mac","tag-macbook","tag-operating-system","tag-osx","tag-windows-7"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWi3e-3v","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":293,"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217\/revisions\/293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}