Slim Chants

I’ve just begun a paradigm shift. I bought a MacBook Pro, a used one that our co-op QA tech at work had for sale. It needed an OS upgrade and a new battery, and it had some cosmetic damage so I got it for a good price.

Those who know me are shocked, to say the least. I’ve been a PC all my life. (Not entirely true because I’ve been a Penguin for the past five years.) I develop software on a PC for a living. But I started looking at NetBooks, and as an alternative I decided to consider an upgrade to something more powerful than the Acer Aspire 5720Z that I’ve been running Ubuntu on since it was purchased new three years ago. The Acer has a 1.6GHz Dual Core processor and shared video, but the real downfall is the poor FireWire firmware. I am a musician and FireWire is the preferred interface for getting high-quality audio into a laptop. The MacBook Pro has a 2.16GHz Dual Core processor and 256Mb dedicated video. It also has both FireWire 400 and 800 ports. Macs are preferred for multimedia of all sorts and along with music I am also a photographer, so Apple seems to be a logical choice.

I’m really impressed. I can see why non-computer types gravitate to Macs. Buying a computer that is supported top-to-bottom by the manufacturer has tremendous appeal. Case-in-point: The Mac informed me of a software update this week. During the update the Mac performed an upgrade of the keyboard firmware in the laptop. Did I say I was impressed? If there is an upgrade to the firmware of my Acer I have to check the website to find out about it, download it, run a special program in Windows to apply it (or boot from a floppy image) and restart my OS. There is absolutely no link between the hardware vendor and the software vendor. And here is where the PC business model falls apart. A Mac is an integrated unit, not hardware from one source and an Operating System from another.

So far I’m a happy camper. Not everything is perfect. OS X cannot natively recognise Linux disk partitions, for one. But the computer is powerful and fast, even with only a gig of memory. We’ll see what happens when I load it up with four. Stay tuned …