Two years down the line I still have the same laptop and I still miss Linux a lot. When I got the opportunity to buy another laptop, it was not surprising that I was thinking about this all over again. Did I really want to spend more time to figure out if my laptop will work with linux ? Or should I pay premium and buy a pre-installed Linux laptop with some small no-name company ?
I have been using iPod for 6 months now, and have also been following interesting news about Apple’s OS X, its Unix Internals, PowerBooks, 64Bit G5s and iPhoto. Its then that I realized that its not the Linux Operating system I’m seeking for, but the utilities provided by a Unix operating system to keep a Unix admin feel at home. I needed the drag and drop of windows and the power of kill -9 without having to install multiple 3rd party tools.
When I tried out Mac at the local Apple stores the only thing I could say was WOW. It seemed responsive, flexible, sexy and had very good driver support from 3rd party vendors. But coming from a Dell camp, the price was a concern. A 15inch laptop with just 512mb ram and 80GB drive costs significantly higher than a cheap laptop from Dell. The final decision to buy 12inch Powerbook however was made when I thought about all the troubles I had gone through in carrying around a 15inch 8 pound Dell Inspiron laptop. Trust me when I say that a 15inch laptop is the last thing you want to carry on an airplane.
First impressions
The powerbook which I bought “just to check it out”, has changed my perception of Apple and OS X enough to say that “gosh, why I didn’t do this before ?”. Some of the impressions below were biased because I’d been stuck with a clunky 15 inch heavy dell laptop for 2 years. But again, these are just my personal impressions and you have the right to think otherwise.
Light
My PowerBook 12inch G4 with 512MB Ram and a SuperDrive (DVD/RW) came within 10 days of placing the order. After working with heavy 15inch laptops for more than 2 years, I had gained a lot of respect for thin, light laptops.
Low Screen Resolution or 12inch
But I wasn’t prepared for the 1024×768 resolution 12inch offered me. Programming or doing multi tasking is very difficult with a small screen. And after being spoit by using a Dual-Head 19inch monitors at work, a tiny 1024×768 can take some time to get used to. I wish they had something with higher resolution.
Asthetics
I don’t own a red car, and I don’t wear Red Flashy cloths. But there is something different about a PowerBook with a fruity laptop lid which lights up when you are working on it, showing everyone around you that you own a mac. Apple has a reputation of designing excellent functional yet beautiful hardware.
Compact
This 12inch laptop came with everything I needed for my work/home (except iPod) including DVDrw Drive and 802.11g built in which meant I don’t have to carry my heavy external 2 year old DVDrw drive anymore.
Drivers
The Powerbook came with Panther installed, for which I found all the drivers I wanted, including Checkpoint SecureClient for Mac which was important for me if I planned to use PowerBook as my only laptop at home. As luck would have it, though, Tiger broke the driver and I’m still waiting for Checkpoint to release the new one.
I also found drivers for my Printer, but I couldn’t get it to work with my Canon Scanner. The Help page on Powerbook suggests that I should buy hardware which they recommend on their website to maintain compability. Had I known that 3 years ago, I probably would have bought a different scanner, but for now I’ll have to use my other laptop to scan photographs.
Unix Back-end
I’ll jump into this in detail a little later. But I had to mention that I was impressed with the suite of tools which a Mac OS X comes with by default. Based on my first impressions OS X had all the important tools which I take for granted in all Unix servers, including utilities like “top” which doesn’t even come with Solaris. The SSH client, rsync client, apache server (with perl/php), nfs support and a pretty good Terminal window blows away Window+Cygwin from miles away.
Office Productivity Tools
The powerbook came with a 30 day trial edition of Microsoft Office which did everything which I could on a regular Microsoft Office 2003 on Wintel hardware. I know there are some OpenOffice ports to Mac, but I haven’t got to the point of testing that yet. PGP and MSIE were other tools which I needed to use in my line of work to keep in touch with others in organization.. and both of them worked just fine.
Plethora of features
Inspite of extremely strong unix foundation, Mac OS X continues to be designed with the end user in mind. Features like “Expose” which allows users to select an active window to switch to using thumbnails of current open windows helps solve a problem which I always have on a system which has been running for a while. Doing multi-tasking is important for some of us, and Expose goes a long way in helping me speedup application switching.
Open APIs
Last but not the least, I have to mention that iTunes is rock solid on OS X. Which was no surprise. But iTunes is not where iLife ends. iLife is a suite of products which helps you create and manage your collection of digital memories. The stability of iTunes had helped me make up my mind to try out iPhoto. With a collection of neatly cataloged 7000 photographs (using perl scripts and mysql database) I was looking for a newer tool to manage the collection. iPhoto, though a little slow and bloated, looked stable enough to trust my photographs to. With a little bit of hacking using Mac::Glue and Applescript, importing metadata was simpler than what I originally expected. As long as apple keeps its APIs open, I have have no problem trusting it with my gems. I’ll talk a little more about Apples APIs later in this article
One button mouse
As windows users switch to more and more buttons on their mouse, somehow Apple thinks that “one” is still the golden number. This probably does give a consistent user experience across all Mac OS deployments, but to me it was just annoying. The convoluted way of pressing “Ctrl” while pressing “mouse-click” required me to use two hands which is doesn’t need to be as complicated. [ BTW, I've heard u can connect 2 button mouse... but seriously, who buys a 12" laptop and then uses a 5" mouse along with it ? ]
Keyboard shortcuts
For users who haven’t used Mac, this has got to be one of the nastiest things to get used to. the Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts took me a couple of days to get used to, and it took me another few days before I discovered a few more things. This however is pretty much the complete list of documented Mac shortcuts.
Long lasting batteries
I haven’t done any empirical tests, but overall I found the batteries to last much more than my 15″ Dell Inspiron. Without wireless, it seems like it can last for upto 4 to 5 hours. I’ll update this section when I find this out for sure.
No hibernation : Just Instant on
Powering off an Apple Powerbook is not as common as you would think. Unlike Windows OS, Powerbooks don’t hibernate, they go into extremely deep standby sleep mode and wake up instantly at the press of a key. This gives an “Instant On” feel which is definitely better than waiting for ever for all your heavy applications to start up.
Application Binaries are actually Application Package Directories
Another interesting observation was the fact that unlike most Windows applications, the Mac OS X applications didn’t have all the resource files embedded within the application binary itself. The application which is listed as “Mail.app” or “iCal.app” is not actually an application binary, but a directory on the file system. Finder application which launches applications hides the fact that its a directory which can be browsed. There are two ways you can see the actual contents of which one is click on “Show Package Contents” in the Finder menu. The other way to browse is to use the terminal to cd into the directory. Do a “find /Application/Main.app” on your Mac OS X to see the files inside.
Royans-Tharakans-Computer:/Applications/Mail.app/Contents rkt$ ls -la
total 32
drwxrwxr-x 8 root admin 272 May 16 20:20 .
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 May 16 20:20 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 5014 May 3 20:16 Info.plist
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 May 16 20:20 MacOS
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 8 Mar 22 02:22 PkgInfo
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Mar 22 02:26 PlugIns
drwxrwxr-x 343 root admin 11662 May 9 21:11 Resources
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 460 May 3 20:19 version.plist
2. file system performance
3. packaging adding removing packages by hand
Spotlight
If you know google desktop search then you probably know what I’m talking about already. Tiger was perhaps the first OS ever released which has such a good indexing and search capability built into the OS itself. I found the feature very helpful, but it could have been better if it support “Microsoft Entourage” as well… but hey, nothing is perfect.
“The research report looks at significant OS X threats including local, remote and kernel vulnerabilities and discusses overall system design weaknesses that contribute to insecurities on the Mac platform. The document also reviews the current state of malicious code, discussing the presence of several viruses and worms and the existence of three known rootkits for OS X.”
