MacBook: first taste of Apples

As a blogger, I really owe everybody a review of my new MacBook. After half a year of procrastination, here it is. Since I have already used it for half a year, I think my views here would be more accurate then a "first thoughts" review.

First of all, here's the details of my machine:
-I got the first batch of MacBooks for Taiwan
-13.3 inch glossy screen
-Processor: Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz (Not the newer Core2Duo)
-Memory: 2 strips of 256 MB (I upgraded to one strip of 1 GB RAM)
-HDD: 60 GB
-Graphics: Intel integrated chip, shared RAM with main system
-CD drive: CD/RW read/writer & DVD reader combo (can't burn DVDs)
-Color: white
-USB ports: 2
-with built-in web cam
-built-in Bluetooth and WIFI (802.11b/g)
-Price: 38900 NTD + RAM upgrade to 1GB (about 2000 NT) + AppleCare (about 4000 NT) 3 year extended warranty

Included in the box is:
-The MacBook it self
-A remote for controlling music and movie playback
-Power block with 100~240V input (means you can plug it in in any country)
-A power extension cord
-Booklets, papers
-Mac OS DVD discs*2
-Apple logo stickers

Here's photos of the first time I opened that box at the Apple store:




When you buy this notebook, you should first be surprised by the beautiful welcome animations of MacOS X. Then it lets you set up your username, password, account photo (It actually takes a photo of you with the built-in webcam!!), and preferred language (Unlike Windows, where you buy different versions for different languages, there is only one universal release of Mac OS, which lets you choose the language you like).

Setting up

Then, within seconds, you are presented with your desktop and you and start using. Will, kind of. I don't like the default settings for many things, and so I dig into the preference panels for a long time. Most important of all, I have to setup the behavior of the touch pad: tapping the pad to emulate a mouse click is defaulted to "off"; the new features where you can scroll with 2 fingers on your touch pad, and use 2 fingers to tap to emulate a right click are all turned off. Moving the mouse cursor to corners of the screen can show you the desktop, or show you all running windows (wow!): this is also defaulted to "off". Anyways many of the fancy yet extremely useful features of a Mac are hidden in the preference panel, so you need to take your time setting up. In this since, I really don't agree with the Apple fans who say that Macs are easy and trouble free. Every thing is smooth after it's set up to your liking. In this sense, it's quite similar to Palm OS, yet the default settings in Palm OS is much better.

Ease of use
I feel that Mac OS X is much easier to learn then Windows for these reasons:

1. Most functions are logically placed in the places that you would expect it to be; unlike in Windows, where you know every thing is somewhere in the "Start menu", yet it's hidden in layer after layer of menus that you have to dig into.
2. It's simple in that it works the way you expect a machine would, the engineers at Apple gave a lot of thought to the little things that make up a good experience. For examples: When you shut the lid, it goes to "sleep", a power-saving standby mode; when you open it, it awakes. When you plug in headphones, the volume is automatically turned in half to protect your ears; when it detects a usable WIFI internet connection, it connects automatically, ready for your use; plugged in USB thumb drives, CDs and other disks automatically shows up on your desktop; and those drives are ejected when you throw them in the trash... etc.
   

Getting used to
Since I have been in the PC camp since 6 years old, going from DOS through Windows 3.0, 3.1 and each other consumer version to XP, there is much getting used to when switching to a Mac. One important concept that's different from Windows is how you use "drag and drop". You drag the icons around as if you would move around things on your real desk. You throw anything you don't like to the trash, you drag anything you want to move to anywhere you want. You can also do all this under Windows, yet most people rely on the "right click menu" to move things around, which isn't as fluid. Under Mac OS, drag and drop is the main way to move things around, and the "right click menu" isn't as functional.

Another difference is that closing a window doesn't quit the application. I find this quite annoying at first, because I have to quit from the context menus on the left top corner of the screen, way clunkier then the big "x" on the right top corner of windows in the other OS. Yet, after learning to quite applications with the key combination "cmd+Q", it gets much better. But I still think there must be a less geekier way of quitting apps.


Surprises
I once wanted to print something. I don't have a "Mac driver CD", despite the fact that HP claimed that the printer supports Macs. So I plugged it in, and clicked on the print button, and it did start printing!!! I even get a window showing the HP printer manager! I thought, "where did that software and driver come from?" Turns out that most printer drivers were built into the OS, wow!

Something else that was built-in the OS is a dictionary: the Oxford American dictionary, which gave really good definitions. And also, this dictionary is used for system wide spell checking, that's right, spell checking is usable everywhere.


Also, Apple provided a utility to let you install Windows on Macs. The utility helps you do a hard disk partition, and burn a driver CD. Well, after the familiar Windows setup, I put in the CD, and it started installing the drivers automatically, all at once. With most PCs, you get a CD with a menu of all the drivers, and you have to install them one by one, while rebooting after each install. With this Apple driver CD, you install all drivers once and for all, reboot once and you're done. What a surprise that the Windows experience on a Mac is also a little more pleasant.

Flaws
But there were also unpleasant surprises. Most of all, I got the first batch of MacBooks, and these were really hot. I don't mean hot as "popular" but as in "high temperatures". After 20 minutes of use, you feel more like holding a grill then a laptop, and when it over heats, it shuts down with a "click", without warning, vaporizing every unsaved file. And if you try rebooting before it cools down, the "click" and shutdown happens even before you get to enter the OS. Other then that, my palm rest (the piece of plastic around the touch pad) was all yellow and looks oily after only 2 months of use. Nothing that I tried could clean that off. Turns out that there were flaws of the first batch out of the factory. I sent it in for changing the heat sink on the main board, and changing that piece of plastic. After that free service and a system update, my MacBook is now much cooler, no longer shuts down randomly, and has a brand new plastic casing around the screen and keyboard :)

Stability
Other then the shutdowns, I seldom encounter a crash that looses my data. Lags and crashes are all seldom seen. Yet, unexpected crashes still happens. I have Microsoft Office and Firefox 2 on my Mac, which are the 2 main unstable apps. Yet I just fixed the instability of Firefox with a clean reinstall. All this seems vague, but let me put it this way: Apple fans say that Macs never crash, this is not true. Mac OS X is much stabler the Windows XP, yet not as stable as Palm OS. Yet, to be fair, Many Windows PCs are built with conflicting hardware: systems that aren't optimized for stability, so you see all the blue screen of deaths. If you get a truly optimized XP machine, I believe you could experience a stability close to a Mac. But what really sets Windows and Mac apart is the flaws and viruses. There are many flaws in Windows such as in efficient RAM(causing "insufficient memory" crashes) and HDD space management (requiring frequent HDD de-fragmentations); there are also the back doors and other holes that we all know are present in Windows. Sure Mac OS has it's flaws, but not as much, and as there are more Windows machines, they are more logical targets of virus writers.

Also, I sometimes experience some weird behaviors such as unresponding USB ports and a system stuck in sleep, unable to wake up. These occur with a frequency of about once per month. But rebooting always fixes them. I still don't know what is happening.

Overall feel
I like the eye candy of Macs, not just the modernized look and the animations, but better looking fonts. But in the end, you get used to all the eye candy, and it is the little things that improve the usability that counts. In most cases you can trust it to give you what you expect, as the system was designed logically and intuitively. And also, in Windows, you have to allocate have of your work time to problem solving. While you type your report, you have to also deal with viruses, crashes, frequent system patches that require reboots, and even absurd "authentic Windows validations". Switching to a Mac relives me of most of that time waist, and I can get things done efficiently. Now, as most things are so smooth, what I need to deal with is no longer error messages, but rather, the temptation to read more news, see what's on Youtube and procrastinate doing work.