Subscribe Feed (RSS)Mac OS X - Disappointing for this switcher
July 19th, 2007 by eyal | Filed under Techie. |
Print This Post
So, I bought a Macbook Pro, the new Santa Rosa one with 2.4GHz, 160Gb 7200RPM and a matte screen. Delivery was slow, about 3 weeks so I’m guessing there’s high demand (or production issues). Anyways, I needed wanted a new machine because my one year old Acer was starting to show signs of fatigue in terms of excess heat and reduced screen brightness. I am a very heavy user and spend a lot of time on the PC so I wanted a good replacement. After some research and initially wanting a Dell I settled for the (overpriced) Macbook Pro because of the nice spec config and good display. I was not disappointed with the hardware, it’s got a stunning screen and it’s wickedly fast.
But, the Mac OS X has been a letdown. OK, so I’ve been using MS products (DOS, Win) for almost 20 years so I “may” be biased but I was open to trying a new system. I think there are probably quite a few people out there like me who are considering switching to a Mac. Maybe it’s the hype around it or the fanboy clubs all going gaga but for me I cannot for the life of me see why people are so excited. It’s just like a Linux with a polished desktop look. Which means it’s as useful as a Linux (i.e. forget gaming and specialized software), it does quirky things without telling you about it, it’s got a clunky “PnP” and a host of other things like an inferior Explorer (Finder) and weird applications installation process. It’s also supposed to be really advanced but there’s no settings for disabling the boot-up sound?? I had to download a small free utility someone wrote just to do that. One of the quirky things it just did and which prompted this post is delete some of my settings all of a sudden:
Dock settings were reset
Dashboard and widgets were reset
Firefox Profile reset - and this one is a major pain
and god knows what else that I haven’t discovered yet.
It’s also slower than Win XP, yes that’s right slower. It feels like everything is in slow motion, probably because of all the eye candy. The Windows XP I installed on it though is super responsive and very snappy. There are some nice things about it, I like the expose and the fonts but a whole OS just for that? :-)
Do I regret buying it? Not at all, I really like the hardware. The only regret I have is making the Win XP partition only 60Gb large as I’m going to spend more time on the XP, and not only for those trading apps which I have to.
it takes some getting used to. I had run 100% linux and solaris for a few years before I started buying macs, so it was like a lateral step, for the most part, for me. The finder is kind of an embarrassment… it hasn’t significantly changed in decades (I’m told). Old old mac users probably appreciate that, but it sucks for the rest of us. I primarily use spotlight to find stuff, which is a habit that took a while to form. There are also apps like quicksilver that try to pick up where the dock/finder left off.
The way apps are mostly self-contained really is nice… they don’t spew files all over the place or make registry keys. Most personal settings will be in ~/Library/Application Support. It’s hard to imagine what would cause those to disappear unless you did some reorganizing of your home directory. Never happened to me anyway. Good luck!
Hey Richard, the mystery around the settings reset has been resolved. I tried Apple Tech support but they were clueless and so eventually after 2 hours on google it turns out there are serious issues with the FileVault which messes up things. There are a few dozen threads on this on Apple bulletin boards. I managed to finally disable it and regain space it took up. The settings are gone but the rest works fine now. I’d recommend that people not use FileVault based on the number of people I saw which had issues with it.
I have never used filevault or similar. I have been concerned that it could make a small HD error into a big data loss. Encryption has a way of making each bit count more.. kinda like compression does. That might also have been slowing things down, too.
Yeah I think some of the slowdown was due to that. Mainly in terms of boot up and shut down.
Yes it’s going to take some time getting used. Especially in areas such as sharing things between Win and Mac. Like my external USB HDD which I can’t seem to be able to access from the Mac.
You mentioned you’re not on Intel Mac? I’m trialing Parallel which allows you to run Win as VM or in “Coherence” mode. It’s really nice, running Win XP natively through bootcamp in a window inside Mac. Quite amazing.