I was spurred to write this rant post, after randomly reading a post from Elizabeth’s Little Blog. So sorry Elizabeth lol, this is in no way really intended to put you off getting your Mac, I’m sure it works very well for some people and I hope you’re one of those, just had to get it off my chest!
I was obsessed with Macs since the first iMacs and finally got a brand new Macbook about a year ago. Shiny and white, it’s got a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo and 1Gb of RAM.
The Mac OS is so impressive for the first few days, the windows zoom about ready for selection, the dock looks amazing, and everything looks so clean and modern. However, after the novelty wore off, I was less impressed. It might just be me, but programs such as Photoshop run cripplingly slow, and I’ve always considered those to be the homeground of Apple. Applications continually need some alt+cmd+esc treatment, (buttons your fingers soon become shaped to!), and its forever running out of HD, I think because of the way it uses it for memory.
Added to this, and almost as a bigger suprise to me, after owning several iPods whose build quality was faultless, was the flimsiness of the hardware itself. The way the keyboard layer slightly overlaps the edge of the main case means that there is about 2mm of plastic prone to snapping off as your palms brush past them while retracting from the keyboard. This is a problem that a few people have faced, so I’m glad to say its not just down to my heavy-handidness.
Disappointingly the Macbook has put me off of Apple computers for life, and my replacement which should be with us soon fingers crossed, will be an Alienware m15x, which I’ll be dual booting with XP and Ubuntu, because the 5 minutes that I’ve spent with Vista has shown me that there is a lot more memory hogging, plasticy, and mothering OSes than OS X.
Sorry Mac Fanboys’n'Girls!
6 responses so far ↓
Elizabeth // 21 September 2008 at 12:02 am |
Sigh. I know I know, perhaps my enthusiasm is overly hopeful. I could live with XP, but it is just the fear of someday having to switch to Vista…… I hope I will be a lucky, happy one with my mac. Otherwise, maybe I will be writing in a few years time, “Why I am switching back to PCs.” Maybe they will have fixed vista by that time…………
rambleicious // 22 September 2008 at 5:27 pm |
Alienware….that’s fantastic. I’m having some drool issues just thinking about it.
I also now have computer envy. You’ll have to post about your new Alienware when you have it all set up.
macguy // 22 September 2008 at 6:02 pm |
sorry, you said you’ve used macs, loved them and now won’t use them again!? What kind of nut are you!!?? Macs are hte only computer sane people use – if oyu had a bad experience with one, it’s down to who you bought it from, not apple. I’ve used macs since 1984 and now have 4 I use all day – the oldest being a 4 year old macbook – I would not use a pc if my career depended upon it – I just couldn’t. PCs are frustrating, illogical, ugly and their OS is even worse. I don’t know anyone who “loves” their pc, but almost every mac user “loves” their mac. sorry to say it (cos I’m a nice guy), but you’re an idiot for leaving apple, and you will come to see that very shortly.
Watch out for virii, spyware, and all that PC crap!
powerstone // 22 September 2008 at 6:09 pm |
Anyway as you say I’ll let you know all about it when its set up!
Chris Black // 23 September 2008 at 12:57 am |
I enjoyed your post but was on the brink of saying “Well, since OS X didn’t work for you why not try a Linux distro.” When low and behold my eyes were blessed by your dual-booting. I congratulate you. I myself would like a MacBook and an iPhone to compliment it, they are just that sexy looking.
powerstone // 23 September 2008 at 9:16 am |
@macguy
Thanks for your comment, always good to see a bit of enthusiasm!
I do actually like the mac interface, the shiny overlay is what I think apple excel at, but just from a performance point of view it was disappointing. I fully admit I don’t know much about how apple uses virtual memory etc (perhaps you can educate me), but I expect a fairly recent dual-core machine to be able to run a few applications at the same time without too much slowdown. This the mac failed to do thisfor some reason, and often with just Photoshop, Firefox and Adium open it was slowed to a crawl after about an hour.
Added to this the build-quality, which my local Apple store admits is a problem (and just googling “cracked Macbook” confirms), it just didn’t live up to my expectations..
And as for the old Virii and Spyware argument, come on, anyone with an ounce of computer savvy and a freeware AV can avoid falling prey to these!