Oh and on the OSX rant. I bloody had to buy the developer tools to compile stuff. I was pretty pissed it wouldn't let me register to become a developer to get the free one. After wasting ~2hrs trying to install a few "acquired" versions I gave up and forked out the $5 to get it from their store.

Only reason I don't run Ubuntu on it is because it happens to be the version I have has poor driver support. Given that I would prolly buy another macbook again (although I would spend more time researching linux drivers) as its a very nice design OSX is ok for when I don't feel like thinking about doing stuff. And the little bugger has helds its value pretty well. Paid 1200 2yrs old still worth $700 on ebay WTF! well at least you can take advantage of the yuppies with nfi.

Steve
_________________
Steven Martin
Twisted Constructions
http://www.botbitz.com

You've probably all seen this already, but hey, this is a good spot for it..



If you Mac guys cant figure it out, just pretend its a tic-tac-toe grid with wallpaper or something..
_________________
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

Well it's been roughly a month since I bought my 13.3" MacBook Pro, so I thought I'd throw up a post outlining my experience and my current position on lining Mr Job's pocket. This is my opinion, so it's most likely to vary with your own

Hardware:
I'm very happy with the hardware and build quality of the MBP. It's a visually pleasing, well laid out device and it's form/styling is very practical. It's not a pretty toy with useless or gimmicky features, like a few other laptops I have played with in the last few years (FingerPrint scanners anyone?). The Sandy Bridge processor coupled with 8GB of RAM just does everything I want and more. I quite often load up 2-3 virtual machines which consume 4-5GB of RAM between them and it doesn't affect the performance. I can quite happily have an Ubuntu virtual machine rendering a 720P video in OpenShot while I watch episodes of Mythbusters in 720P on fullscreen without a single frame glitch or sound artefact. Temperature wise, the MBP runs pretty cool 98% of the time, the only time I can get it noticeably warm is by turning Folding@Home on (SMP Client) or play a few games of Team Fortress 2. Battery life is great, I regularly go 5-6 hours between plugging into the charger (MagSafe charger is a bloody good thing too! Sick of the broken sockets and plugs on laptops at work because people trip over power leads!). If I run F@H which loads the thing up to the max, it still gets 1.5 - 2hrs of battery life, which isn't bad.

Software:
This is my first real time of using OSX since 2004 where I hated using iMac with a passion (Due to their shit hardware and endless pin wheel spinning). So, as quickly as I expected to ditch Snow Leopard and dive into a tweaked Ubuntu install, I'm actually still running OSX. It's been a bit of a habit changer as I had to learn how to find and use things in OSX. However, from my months worth of playing, working and fiddling, I'm yet to find any real problems, everything just works. The only issue that really stuck out was Microsofts 'Official' RDP Client I use for work regularly crashed and froze the MBP. I shortly kicked the M$ turdware to the kerb and installed CoRD and haven't had a problem since (And gained some decent features with it!). There are a few quirks here and there that OSX does that grinds against me, but nothing that has made me want to format the machine, a good example is the way Finder sorts everything. I like having my folders at the top of the directory lists with files below them, Finder throws them all in a heaped mess, even sorting them by type you still get documents above folders. This is annoy to me, but not exactly a show stopper, I can still find stuff relatively quick. I also have a dislike for the whole Command + C to copy instead of Control + C but this is just a case of breaking habits more then "it's a problem with the software", just a bit annoying when I got from a Win7 VM over to a Libre Office document in OSX and hit Control + C and nothing happens

I also upgraded to latest version of OSX (Lion) when it came out last week as I was in the 'Free' upgrade period when I purchased my MBP (Or I could have bought it for $39.99 which is cheap compared to Win7). I was expecting the worst to be honest, I've had a lot of bad experience (or luck?) with upgrades from my Windows days and the odd Ubuntu upgrade. After downloading and upgrading to Lion, expecting to find my files/programs missing and stuff just plain broken, I found everything still worked…. Not a glitch, not a setting out of place, not a crash! This was actually a really nice experience, and actually gives me a little faith in Apple for getting something like upgrades right. Now, one thing that I LOVE about the MBP is the big touch pad and the awesome touch gestures. Two finger touch scrolling is great, I now flick through forum posts just as fast as when I sit at my workstation with a scroll mouse. 2 finger touch clicking (for right clicking) is easy to do. 3 finger vertical swipes to tile all my open programs is sweet, it's faster then alt-tab'ing through 10 windows. 3 finger horizontal swipes lets me slide to and from the 'widgets' window, I've never been a fan of Widgets when I played with Vista or KDE, but I actually find these useful in OSX. I have a calculator, language translator, universal conversion and a simple calendar all loaded in the widget window and it's surprisingly useful.

An example is, I'm drawing a part in Solidworks 2010 (Which is run in my Win7 virtual machine), I need to convert 0.75oz into grams so I can apply an assigned weight to a part, a single 3 finger swipe to the left and I have my universal converter widget there. I can then quickly convert the oz to gram and 3 finger swipe back to the right and I'm back to my Solidworks window, ready to keep working. This is much quicker then googling a converter website, opening a converter program in Win7. I went back to use my old laptop the other day and was instantly annoyed because I couldn't just 2 finger scroll, but had to resort to clicking bloody scroll buttons! *rages*

Adapting my work flow to using OSX has been fairly smooth, 90% of my programs I use in Ubuntu and Windows have versions for OSX (Filezilla, GIMP, Skype, FireFox, VirtualBox, aMSN, TunerStudio, Dropbox, Steam etc etc) and install relatively easy (drag n drop install with .dmg files). The other 10% of programs I have found alternative programs that do the same thing or better (CoRD, Burn, NetBeans). With everything so universal over my desktop environments, it's really easy to just jump across OS's now with minimal fuss.

Gaming:
I'm not a big gamer these days, but it's nice to know the MBP can actually play a few games that are of a level higher then Minesweeper or Quake. I've been playing MineCraft, Team Fortress 2, Foreign Legions and a few others that I picked up off of Steam. The onboard GPU built into the processor is actually useful, considering all the Intel IGP's have sucked since the beginning of time. It's not a gamers machine, but it's at least nice to know I can join my mates for a game of TF2 when I drop in for a coffee or jump on a Minecraft server when stuck in a hotel room on a business trip.

Price:
Well, for $1400, you can honestly find some higher spec laptops. Some with bigger processors, more cores, bigger hard disks and bigger screen, but I've yet to have my hands on a laptop that is packaged together as well as the MBP. For my needs, I wanting decent battery life, good portability, enough screen space to be practical (my EEE 7" was frustrating after a week) and have enough processing power and ram to run all my VM's on the fly. For work, rest and play, the MBP was the best laptop for my situation, IMHO.

The best comparison I could think of is comparing a $50000 HSV Commodore to a $80000 Lotus Elise. The Commodore has more power and has 4 doors (peripherals) and a boot space big enough for several slabs of VB, but it's nothing in comparison to the quality of design, build and engineering of the lightweight Elise. And what good is 4 doors (Facial Recognition logon) when you don't have kids(The features are useless)!
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

Thats a detailed review there

To be contrary (not deliberately, but to see what you think of my con's )
Of course Im biased another way, and you probably already know why.. you'll see

I work with Macs (desktop and notebooks) for a couple of clients, so I have significant experience with them..

Hardware Quality on the MBP. I agree, they are (usually) better made than most consumer grade laptops... although there have been a few cockups along the way with cracking plastic and burning power mag-connectors..

I hate Shiny white Tech-gadgets though.. they just look so... "Appliance-ey".. I keep feeling that there should be a "Defrost button" or a "Toast Darkness knob" or something.. Black is my preferred flavour for Slabs of Circuitry..

The keyboards on them suck badly though in my opinion.. They look and feel about one step better than a mylar touchpad. Ive never figured out how Apple Fans go on about their superior hardware whilst tapping away on something that looks and feels like it belongs on a $10 calculator. Not that many laptops these days are much better. A client just bought a $2000 Asus I7 machine and the keyboard is very similair.

Touchpads are the stupidest mouse cursor interface element ever invented.. Its probably a VHS vs Beta thing, but Im a big fan of the Trackpoint. Takes a week or two to get the feel down pat, then its just nonstop awesome. Dont have to move your hand away from the keyboard, keep lifting your finger and putting it down again when you hit the edge of a pad, leaning on it by accident and all the other touchpad stupidness. The only thing that touchpads are good for is the multitouch gestures scrolling etc (in my opinion). Trackpoints are so good, that I *never* bother to plug a mouse in to my Laptop even when on a desk for long periods of time.. How many touchpad users do that ?

OSX is "ok" for end user simplicity, but feels constricting to a power user.. I hate the feeling of being in Romper Room with the cute fluff all over the place.. It reminds me a japanese vending machine.. Finder is little better than Windows Explorer, but I am a speedy keyboard controlled dual-panel-file-manager (commander style) user from way back, so the first thing I do on a mac is install MuCommander - http://www.mucommander.com/ - which makes it useable without all that painful touchpadding to move files around or simply open/edit/copy them.

The underlying filesystem is awful, dropping .ds-store turds all over the place and allowing use of invalid characters that confuse servers and backup programs. And while I havent had to do it myself, apparently, youre up the creek if you need to do data recovery on an HFS system.

Ive only ever done 1 OS upgrade on a Mac, and I agree that it seemed relatively painless.. but to be fair, given that Apple only has to deal with a very limited hardware variability (not 500 different combos of motherboards, gfx cards, drivers etc), it should be. If all the computers are the same, then the software guys job is a lot easier.

Power wise, they're OK. Nothing special or magical there, its just slightly overpriced standard Intel hardware in a white shiny box..

As you probably all already know, "The One True Laptop" in my opinion is the IBM Thinkpad.

Near Indestructible hardware - the toughest to damage machine that I know of (well, except the Panasonic Toughbook which looks like you could bash down a wall with it)

Trackpoint (*and* a touchpad if you want it for gestures etc) ,

The Best Keyboard that any laptop has ever had (google it if you dont believe me).

Inbuilt Splash-shield. Try *this* with your MacBook - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SWi6LlFGjk&feature=related - The number 2 killer of laptops is spill damage. (no1 is dropping IIRC).
A guy I know had his 2wk old Macbook killed by a spill of (seriously) Apple Juice on the kyboard.. - while youre there, check out all the other youtube videos showing how tough thinkpads are.

Flat Black for that *serious* work look... No Arty Farty "Im a "Creative Designer" wank here.. OK, Its a personal choice of Aesthetics, and everyones different.. Some hate the Thinkpads "Plain Black Box" look, but it appeals to me and doesnt look like it belongs in the Kitchen..

Full documented service manuals available giving detailed instructions on how to disassemble, repair, upgrade and reassemble practically every piece.

Build Quality that Apple can only dream about.. Once youve disassembled and reassembled a few laptops you'll see what I mean.. little stuff like "Nylon coated screws" that hold tight without loctite and the way they fit together is just elegance and strength combined.

Full hardware driver support for practically any operating system.

Unmatched reliability.. Thinkpads on average are about twice as reliable as any other machine hardware wise. Theres a reason they are the only machines NASA use on Spacecraft.

And if you dont need a brand-new machine, theyre Cheap 2nd hand. I upgraded my T43 to a T60p recently.. $450 for a T7600 Dual core machine with 3 Gig Ram and a 640g Drive with a Highres 1680x1024 screen. Normally I wouldnt touch a 2nd hand laptop, but Thinkpads just keep on going, which is why there is a great 2nd hand market.

Pop Mandriva Linux on it, a Virtual Machine of XP (and a VM of OSX for when I want to Stir Mac Fanboys and you have a killer machine for under $500..

Eat that MacBoys.
_________________
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

About a year ago I convinced the MD of a client to get an X200 laptop (lenovo, not IBM anymore but close) over a $200 cheaper dell.

She is still going on about how much better it is than any other laptop she has ever had.
_________________
Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

quote:

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Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:
Thats a detailed review there

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

The keyboards on them suck badly though in my opinion.. They look and feel about one step better than a mylar touchpad. Ive never figured out how Apple Fans go on about their superior hardware whilst tapping away on something that looks and feels like it belongs on a $10 calculator. Not that many laptops these days are much better. A client just bought a $2000 Asus I7 machine and the keyboard is very similair.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

Touchpads are the stupidest mouse cursor interface element ever invented.. Its probably a VHS vs Beta thing, but Im a big fan of the Trackpoint. Takes a week or two to get the feel down pat, then its just nonstop awesome. Dont have to move your hand away from the keyboard, keep lifting your finger and putting it down again when you hit the edge of a pad, leaning on it by accident and all the other touchpad stupidness. The only thing that touchpads are good for is the multitouch gestures scrolling etc (in my opinion). Trackpoints are so good, that I *never* bother to plug a mouse in to my Laptop even when on a desk for long periods of time.. How many touchpad users do that ?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

OSX is "ok" for end user simplicity, but feels constricting to a power user.. I hate the feeling of being in Romper Room with the cute fluff all over the place.. It reminds me a japanese vending machine.. Finder is little better than Windows Explorer, but I am a speedy keyboard controlled dual-panel-file-manager (commander style) user from way back, so the first thing I do on a mac is install MuCommander - http://www.mucommander.com/ - which makes it useable without all that painful touchpadding to move files around or simply open/edit/copy them.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

The underlying filesystem is awful, dropping .ds-store turds all over the place and allowing use of invalid characters that confuse servers and backup programs. And while I havent had to do it myself, apparently, youre up the creek if you need to do data recovery on an HFS system.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

Ive only ever done 1 OS upgrade on a Mac, and I agree that it seemed relatively painless.. but to be fair, given that Apple only has to deal with a very limited hardware variability (not 500 different combos of motherboards, gfx cards, drivers etc), it should be. If all the computers are the same, then the software guys job is a lot easier.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

As you probably all already know, "The One True Laptop" in my opinion is the IBM Thinkpad. Near Indestructible hardware - the toughest to damage machine that I know of (well, except the Panasonic Toughbook which looks like you could bash down a wall with it)

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

Full documented service manuals available giving detailed instructions on how to disassemble, repair, upgrade and reassemble practically every piece.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

Unmatched reliability.. Thinkpads on average are about twice as reliable as any other machine hardware wise. Theres a reason they are the only machines NASA use on Spacecraft.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

Eat that MacBoys.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

Maybe because I haven't used one of those fandangied M keyboard things people buy for insane money

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

Backlit keys are also great for typing in bed.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:
The track pad is huge (roughly 110mm x 80mm) compared to others I have suffered on. Couple that with the gestures that are impliments now,

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

A terminal window is only a stone throw away, and I thought you'd be all power user like and use command line to move and edit your files Maybe send your data to a new directory a bit at a time

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

quote:

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Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

but to be fair, given that Apple only has to deal with a very limited hardware variability (not 500 different combos of motherboards, gfx cards, drivers etc)

---

I'm starting to consider this a strong point of the Apple strong hold.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

This is why I believe Apple is doing so well in the smart phone and tablet market, the Android stuff is all over the shop, new hardware coming out with a 12mth old operating systems and the latest version has been out 3mths but no one is selling a device on it. What point is superior hardware (As the fAndroids exclaim) when it's operating system is fragmented like a smashed window and never gets explored to the potential.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

Sadly, the Lenovo ThinkPad is not a patch on it's brethren.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:
iFixit pulls apart every new Apple device and has a pretty good documented process of it all, so if your an Apple user, it's kinda the next best thing.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

quote:

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Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:

Unmatched reliability.. Thinkpads on average are about twice as reliable as any other machine hardware wise.

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2 HDD's, 3 Sticks of RAM, 1 DVD drive, 1 CPU fan and 1 screen over 24mths with the collection Lenovo ThinkPads here at work tell a different story.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Knightrous:

Rofl @ you fanbois

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Another thing to mention with the macs is they dont loose there value lika a pc...Aaron will probably get 50% money back when he sells his mac in 4 years time...no pc would give you that.

Also here is a pic taken on my new nokia n8 (well its not a new model) but im amazed with the camera features....12mp image carl ziess lens and 16gb storage as standard with 720 hd...i love it...I think Nokia are hit and miss with their phones but this one is a keeper. It even does time lapse ...could be good at the next event he he!


_________________
Miles Blow - Julie Pitts
www.mulesfilm.com.au
www.wombokforest.com.au

-Pickasso- Vivid Sportsman champion 2015

haha neat photo!

YES re: the trackpoint issue! TRACKPOINT IS KING. I disabled the touchpad completely on my T61, R60 and Dell E6400. Such pain. Ive never hit the trackpoint while typing with any of those three - at least not in a way that caused discomfort or a typo. Tho my Dell is now playing up a bit and the thing wanders around, and jumps when you right click, especially when its cold, but thats Dell

Interesting info here tho! Mel is about to take delivery of a Macbook Air - should be interesting too
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<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

oh another tick for mac osx is its harddrive partition doesn't chew as much room a ntfs. I formatted a 2tb external on xp and it left me 1.7tb and on the mac 1.9tb so quite a bit of extra gb there....

as someone working with video, final cut doesn't crash like premiere pro does on a pc....to build a mac actually costs less than a pc....a retail hackintosh i should say.

I'm pretty sure I wont ever buy another microsoft product again....but you never know..... have to keep an open mind with all this tech stuff.
_________________
Miles Blow - Julie Pitts
www.mulesfilm.com.au
www.wombokforest.com.au

-Pickasso- Vivid Sportsman champion 2015

Last edited by miles&Jules on Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:23 pm; edited 1 time in total

The 1.7 vs 1.9tb is probably just a function of how the file system reports available.
_________________
Steven Martin
Twisted Constructions
http://www.botbitz.com

mac will probably be using 1000byte kilobytes, windows like everybody except hard drive manufacturers will be using 1024 byte kilobytes.
_________________
Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

PC =\= Windows. There are other operating systems you know..

And after Apples current little dummy spit over the Galaxy Tab in Australia, I have even less respect for them than I already did (not that that was a lot).

Yay for the "Innovation" company. Copy others products, market the hell out of it, then run for the lawyers when someone does what youre doing, but better.

Apple has always been a litigation first, products second company.

What will they try next, a patent on white sharp cornered boxes that the gadgets come packed in ? (as opposed to the "black, round cornered" trade dress theyre currently whining about)

Wouldnt want anyone to imitate that "ooh, wanky !" I-widget unboxing experience now would they ?

No doubt the Apple faithful believe that they invented the tablet as well.. feh
_________________
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

Their screens are good!
_________________
Miles Blow - Julie Pitts
www.mulesfilm.com.au
www.wombokforest.com.au

-Pickasso- Vivid Sportsman champion 2015

_________________
<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls