Adventures in the OS/X world
I was in the market for a new laptop. My girlfriend needed a computer of her own (it was a bit of a hassle sharing my notebook all the time) and because i’m doing a lot of photography in my free time, i always looked to Mac & OS X as a possibility to work with photos more efficiently. Professionaly i need Windows, so a complete conversion to OS/X was not an option. But because Apple moved to the Intel platform, people have now the possibility to run both, even at the same time.
So, after 15 years of using Windows on Intel or AMD hardware, I ordered a Macbook Pro 17″.
And why exactly did you want to buy a Macbook Pro 17″?
Well, one of the things I was looking for, was a quality machine to edit photos and one of the things you then need is a very good screen in high resolution. After looking around, Macbook Pro 17″ was the only machine offering a LED-backlit screen with a resolution of 1920-by-1200. The high resolution is great for photos or having lots of information on the desktop and the LED-backlit screen is good for your battery life. As most photographers know, running Photoshop and Lightroom at the same time while viewing and editing RAW files imported from your dSLR camera is pretty resource intensive, so i needed a (very) fast machine having lots of RAM (os/x can use the full 4GB unlike the 32bit version of XP or Vista).
Also, i was looking for a fast machine -but- without the fan noise and apparantly, this is hard to find! A silent notebook with top performance sounded like a dream (the fans of the Asus were driving me crazy sometimes, especially when playing movies when i’m trying to focus on the film). Another spec that pointed me towards Macbook was the fact that the main competitors (Dell m1530 and the Sony Vaio series) didn’t have a GB Lan port, only a 100mbit port. I have a NAS device at home with a GB lan port so it was obvious i was looking for a notebook supporting gigabit ethernet connections. Another thing that i wanted was a 17-inch screen notebook without the heavy weight usually accompanied with a screen of that size. My current Asus 17″ is so heavy i cannot lift it with one hand. And yes, the Macbook Pro (MBP) 17″ is one of the only 17-inch notebooks which is light and easy to carry even with one hand.
But i’m also a geek -i work as a system engineer mainly in Microsoft environments- so i really needed Windows XP or Vista. I didn’t want to miss out any of the technical tools running under Windows…. but, as i already mentioned…. Macbook runs both! Best of the two worlds on one machine? That must be Utopia! :)
Any concerns?
Sure, what concerned me though, is the fact that when i spent a lot of time in Vista, that the Apple keyboard would be limiting to work fast and comfortable in Windows (the layout is different from a standard pc keyboard). There were also some reports about a lot of heat coming from the machine and because it’s a bit more expensive than the competition, i would never be totally at ease until i would actually see, feel and use the machine.
So, bottomline: my ideal situation would be using a MBP with OS/X for the design and multimedia stuff (lightroom, photoshop, Aperture, webdesign, etc) and switching (fast) to Vista for the professional stuff (tech tools and other software not available for os/x). I wasn’t sure what to do with the office stuff in between (administrative things and especially e-mail and calendar in Outlook for example): convert to OS/X or keep doing that in Vista?
Besides a few concens, the good stuff sounded really very tempting, but maybe i was just dreaming and the reality would be a little less utopic? I would soon find out…
Yesterday, the guy from the Apple shop called me to say my Macbook had arrived!… I stopped early at work, drove to the shop and picked up my very first Mac.
So, what happened next?
Well, I unpacked the machine and it looked absolutely great. The adapter is very small and light and booting was fast as lightning. A wizard (or is that Windows terminology?) guided me through an easy and short setup and i was up and running in 10 minutes! Wow! The machine is definitely top quality. The high resolution screen looked absolutely amazing and the keyboard leds turn on automatically when you enter a darker environment… i just love that. Further more, it’s definitely a quiet notebook (i just couldn’t hear any fan noise) and indeed, despite the large 17″ screen, the machine is light and easy to carry. So far so good.
And what about OS/X Leopard?
First, i’d like to point out that i’m a pretty broadminded guy and that i’m not a typical Windows or OS/X ‘fanboy’. I just want a cool, fast machine that works great without too much hassle and enables me to do the stuff i want it to do. Sounds pretty logical, doesn’t it?
Leopard (the lastest version of OS/X) looks and behaves really well. Without any configuring or installing drivers i was opening my favorite websites and browsing through my personal files on my NAS device in no time! The only thing i had to do was on the NAS itself: i had to enable the Mac file sharing protocol, that’s all.Everything went fast and smooth, just like we all expect from a Mac, until I encountered my first problem… with gmail. I was composing a new message and it appeared I couldn’t type any numbers or characters in CAPS. When i pressed the shift button, instead of going in CAPS mode, the cursor changed focus to another field. So after only 15 minutes, i was browsing the Mac forums looking for a solution to a Safari bug. (Safari is the standard OS/X web browser). It appeared that the problem wasn’t caused by my lack of OS/X knowledge, but indeed, that a lot of people were reporting this bug. An easy workaround was changing the gmail interface to the new (beta) version of gmail solved the problem. Not a big problem, but then again, not something you would expect after using OS/X Leopard for only 15 minutes.
The second thing i wanted to try was editing a little movie i made with my Canon Ixus camera. I looked up the avi file, double-clicked and Quicktime opened it without any problem or need to install video codecs. Nice. Now i wanted to import the file in iMovie. It should be more than dragging the file to the iMovie window, but it didn’t work. I dragged again but nothing happened. Back to the forums and again, i wasn’t the only one having this problem. It looks like iMovie isn’t supporting the Ixus avi files natively and you should convert it first using third party tools. What the hell? I’m not planning on converting gigs and gigs of movies just to be able to edit them in iMovie? Windows Movie Maker didn’t have any problem importing those files, so..
Conclusion
So far -and i’m just starting to use the Macbook Pro- it looks like the perfect operating system does not exist. Both Windows and OS/X have their strenghts and weaknesses and both systems have bugs and flaws. Still, i’m exited to step further and further in the Macbook world.
Okay, that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more Mac adventures later on…
