| 2007-12-31 My first Mactel | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 The game is over. Intel got it all. After nearly four years of loyal service, I replaced my beloved iBook with a MacBook.My iBook was the first of the 12" G4 line, clocked at 800 MHz. When I got it, it was already underclocked compared to the more common PC laptops. Even the Compaq I had before it was running at 1.3 GHz. But since Windows XP, once tuned properly, runs fine enough on an 800 MHz machine, why shouldn't Mac OS X? Everybody says that it is better than Windows, it uses the 3D accelerator to be even faster, and the PowerPC processors are better than Intel's. Some (some?) Mac zealots are going to hate me, but I have to say that those statements were quite bold. This computer was the first one that I felt slow in a long time. Don't get me wrong. After four years, I learned to love Mac OS X. It is technologically superior, it’s stable as a rock, it’s very safe, it has those sexy UNIX foundations combined with a great look, comes packed with a lot of stuff that Windows misses, and it is damn easy to use for most things - but all this goodness comes with a price, and the 800 MHz G4 is not quite able to pay it. I admit that I had better expectations. Opening a couple of web pages with Flash applets is enough to knock it down (and nearly every relevant page comes with Flash advertising nowadays), everything takes some seconds to open, and those ubiquitous SDL games are choppy; they are the kind of games I used to play with my 286 at 12 MHz! Of course, native games are much better - Warcraft III plays just fine - but there are very few of them, and they ask you a premium price even when you can find the Windows version at budget. Why I bought it at first? I was not a Mac aficionado - it was my very first Mac. The coolness factor played a big role, but that baby was also the only no-nonsense small notebook on the market with a reasonable price tag. It can be used almost everywhere, and with two batteries it runs for nearly ten hours. If you want even more, the power supply is small and well designed, easy to carry. Moreover, it is almost completely silent, because its little fan spins only under heavy use or when the ambient temperature rises too high. This little machine is just lovely. My iBook originally had little memory, a small hard drive, and missed a wireless card - all limitations I had to fight with until I fixed them the hard way by upgrading the offending parts. Apple also artificially limited the external monitor functionality, but a kind German hacker released a program (ScreenSpanningDoctor) that removed this limitation. The only thing I couldn't fix was the optical drive that couldn't burn DVDs; it's not vital, but sometimes it comes handy and I find ridiculous that Apple still sells € 1000+ laptops with combo drives when every € 400 computer out there now comes with a DVD burner. But if I like my tweaked iBook so much, why did I replace it? There are two main reasons. The first is speed: a lot of games and programs, including the latest Mac OS X, refuses to run on a 800 MHz processor (hey, zealots! Weren't Macs supposed to last longer than PCs? How does Apple itself stopped supporting a machine that is only 3 years old?). I tried a MacBook and let me say that OS X looks like another operating system on that! The second reason, similarly important, is Windows: I just need it for many things, and I find very useful that in a Mactel you can run any other OS with vmware (someone said Haiku?). After some searching, I found a second hand MacBook that I liked at a price I was willing to pay from a kind person close enough to avoid shipping. It is the black edition of the first version that comes with a 2 GHz Intel Core Duo; it's dual core, so it's five times faster than my iBook (it doesn't work really this way, but it sounds better). Actually, it is so faster that even PowerPC apps running under Rosetta are noticeably faster. So far I’ve only maxed out its memory, the price of RAM modules nowadays is outrageously low. Here are the relevant differences:
A good jump, if you don’t look at the video card and battery duration. The autonomy can be fixed by buying a second battery, but there isn’t anything to do for that Intel video card (don’t be fooled by the double memory). But as long as it can play World of Warcraft with minimum details, I am happy. I was worried by the glare display; I never really liked them, but I've to admit that the MacBook display is better than most other similar displays; colors are brilliant and gradients are smooth. The reflection is a problem under strong light, but strong light is a problem for normal displays as well. The iBook compares very poorly. The keyboard was another unknown; it looks strange, but once I got used, I found it very comfortable. In portability terms, the MacBook is a bit larger than the iBook, but it's thinner. In conclusion, I'm really happy with it. The only thing that worries me is that the Core is a 32 bit processor; later Core 2 is 64 bit. I hope that Mac OS X 10.6 is not going to require a 64 bit processor... |
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