Ad Terras Per Aspera

Like I said in my open letter to Steve Jobs and my previous posting, I finally went out and bought a Mac: an Apple Aluminum G4 Powerbook to be specific.

A screaming fast 1.25ghz G4, combined with 1GB of memory, a 60GB drive, a 15″ 1280×854 screen, and OSX 10.4.

For $550.

Compared to a Dell Latitude, a Lenovo Thinkpad T61, a just born Apple Macbook Pro, or any of the other numerios options out there, this Powerbook won. Of all the things it doesn’t meet on my requirement list, such as the screen resolution, or the speed, or the maximum memory (2GB, by the way), it makes up for the fact it cost roughly 1/6th of the laptops it was competing against.

Now, I’m not saying a brand new laptop that only cost $550 would be viable, because it isn’t. No company’s cheapest configured laptop is worth the money in any way, but for this Powerbook it managed to beat every other laptop I configured to meet specifications because it cost so little.

I always thought the whole “Macs have an extremely high resell value” rumor wasn’t true, but now I really do think its true: take any other 3 year old laptop and try to, say, eBay it, and you’ll lucky if you get $500 for it. Similarly configured Powerbooks I’ve seen go on eBay for $1000, in fact, I got a really good deal on this.

Hey Steve Jobs, if you’re reading, you can pat yourself on the back now: I bought a Mac. It might not be a new one, but it’s a Mac.

My first experience with owning a Mac

This is more of an assorted list of thoughts than anything else.

• The dock goes on the left, since I have horizontal space to spare due to the wide screen.
• Quicksilver is needed so you don’t have to click three times (Finder in the dock, Applications, the chosen application) to start an app that isn’t in the dock already.
• Safari doesn’t support tabs yet; I installed Firefox. Update: Okay, so I have to turn them on. Safari still doesn’t support the Foxmarks, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and 4chan extensions.
• Safari is very very fast.
• Having a built in VNC server so I can remote control it to act as a dual monitor environment in conjunction with my workstation (via x2vnc) is nice.
• x2vnc crashes said VNC server.
• Having a power plug that lights up is very nifty.
• Being able to sleep (which uses virtually no power) and return from sleep within 2 seconds is nifty.
• Having a light on the front of the Powerbook that says it is sleeping instead of off is nifty.
• Easy to setup WiFi, even though I use WPA2, is nifty.
• Democracy is nifty.
• Not having to startup a Windows VMware machine to run iTunes, Adobe Photoshop, or Starcraft is nifty.
• Not having the blasted window list taking up room at the bottom of the screen in addition of no way to not lose minimized windows; minimized windows hit the dock as icons, and apps themselves don’t even need windows to stay open.
• Having a *nix other than Linux is nifty.
• Having a functioning Objective-C/NextStep environment other than GNUstep is nifty.
• Not wasting room on redundant window menus; the Mac way of putting it at the top of the screen works better.
• Not needing a third party app to do Expose like I do with a Beryl function on Linux.
• Not needing Beryl.
• Extremely fast startups in the few cases I actually have to reboot.
• Battery charge lights that shine through holes on the bottom of the case are nifty.
• For a three year old laptop, the LCD screen is bright, reproduces colors reasonably well, has good contrast, and has dark blacks.
• It can almost play back 720p H.264 content without frame-dropping I suspect the 1.67ghz G4 can get away with it better, or at least drop a lot less frames.
• No damned disc tray for the DVD drive, and the disc goes in the front.
• No rear ports, all are on the sides.
• A DVI port instead of a VGA one, nifty.
• A Firewire port, nifty.
• A terminal that uses a sane shell is nifty.
• Apps are installed by dragging an icon to the Application folder from a mounted virtual image is nifty, though it took me a few seconds to realize thats what I was supposed to do.
• To delete an app, I just delete the app out of the Application folder instead of doing whatever it is I’m supposed to do on Windows.
• I’m going to have to buy a new Wacom pad because mine is so old it uses serial, and OSX doesn’t support serial ones even if you have a USB->serial interface.

Since I’ve only had this Powerbook for two days, thats all the stuff I’ve noticed so far, though finding a bug in the VNC server is a little disconcerting. In the mean time, I’m using Synergy2 to remote control the Powerbook, so shit hasn’t gone totally wrong. So yeah, I’m very happy with my Mac, but before anyone asks, that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using Linux as my primary desktop.