{"id":55,"date":"2008-06-30T02:23:17","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T09:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/ok-so-i-bought-a-macbook\/2008\/06\/30\/"},"modified":"2008-06-30T02:23:17","modified_gmt":"2008-06-30T09:23:17","slug":"ok-so-i-bought-a-macbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/ok-so-i-bought-a-macbook\/2008\/06\/30\/","title":{"rendered":"OK, so I bought a macbook"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, I caved in and bought a macbook. Sure I have a mac mini, but my primary machine is my Thinkpad T42, so switching to a macbook is a big change.\u00a0 I still think Macs are too expensive, so I ended up going to the online Apple store and ordering a refurbished one. It&#8217;s the same spec as the current models, and I ended up getting the higher spec &#8216;white&#8217; one (ie. 2.4GHz CPU, 2GB ram, 160GB HDD).<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve been temporarily in Australia for the last month, I don&#8217;t have a proper desk to work on, so an external mouse and keyboard haven&#8217;t been options for my T42. And on occasions I&#8217;ve had to use battery power due to location of power points. Using the T42 in this way, a few things have irritated me ; 1. The 100GB Seagate 5400.2 IDE drive I have gets too hot and consequently makes the right palm rest very warm and ; 2. Trying to get consistently low power use while running on batteries is difficult. Many a time I could not get the T42 to spend most of its time in the C4 state, regardless of what I was doing. A few days later it would go to C4 though it didn&#8217;t seem that I had changed anything (this is 2.6.24 or 2.6.25 with acpi-cpufreq).<\/p>\n<p>The T42 is a great machine though. It is quite tough. The keyboard is excellent. I am a huge fan of the trackpoint and having three buttons for the mouse (which is so useful if you copy and paste with the mouse).\u00a0 But it&#8217;s about 4 yrs old now and I need to try something different. This does mean my great experiment of trying to use linux everywhere at home is coming to an end. Oh well.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;ve been setting the macbook up today. Initial thoughts are;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This refurbished machine looks brand new except for some minor scuff marks<\/li>\n<li>The keyboard is bad. Maybe &#8216;different&#8217; is the correct word. I can type quite fast on the T42 keyboard. I have to slow down a lot on the macbook in order to avoid making typos. My hands also feel sore after typing for some time. Its like a whole bunch of muscles I never use are being punished. I guess I&#8217;ll see how it goes.<\/li>\n<li>I do have to do everything a bit slower in general. The one button mouse slows me down in addition to the keyboard<\/li>\n<li>The 1280&#215;800 screen res is not too bad. OS X does smaller fonts much better than linux.<\/li>\n<li>The right palm rest does get warm, but I did read somewhere that this is due to all the indexing that takes place to set up spotlight on a new machine. I&#8217;ll keep an eye on it over the next few days.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0My thunderbird mailboxes loaded straight into thunderbird on the Mac. I thought I&#8217; try using Apple&#8217;s Mail app but it was going to be a pain, so I just copied across my linux thunderbird mailboxes.<\/li>\n<li>All the function keys are different to my Mac Mini<\/li>\n<li>Where are the pageup\/pagedown keys?<\/li>\n<li>The speakers sound good.<\/li>\n<li>The 2.4GHz CPU is very quick. I&#8217;ve been running an old Windows 2000 vmware machine under vmware fusion and it is amazingly fast. The macbook is my fastest machine at the moment.<\/li>\n<li>With power unplugged it reckons I have over 6hrs left. Yeah right.<\/li>\n<li>The screen is a bit odd. Sometimes you need to keep adjusting the angle to make it look right.<\/li>\n<li>The camera above the screen is quite decent quality<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So far the keyboard is annoying me, but I&#8217;m keen to see if I&#8217;ll just get used to it. The problem I see is a bit like key rollover not working &#8230; or Thinkpad keyboards are so much better than anything else out there. We shall see.<\/p>\n<p>This is also my first go at Leopard. The Mac Mini here has Tiger. I like the multiple workspaces thing (it&#8217;s about time such an obvious feature was included), and the terminal has &#8216;tabs&#8217; &#8230; which I don&#8217;t think the Tiger version had. However, I am missing the ability to drag inside the terminal and have it automatically go into the Copy buffer. Maybe I need iterm or I&#8217;m missing something.<\/p>\n<p>So, early days. I&#8217;m keen to make this &#8216;all work&#8217;, as linux has its own headaches to contend with on a laptop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, I caved in and bought a macbook. Sure I have a mac mini, but my primary machine is my Thinkpad T42, so switching to a macbook is a big change.\u00a0 I still think Macs are too expensive, so I ended up going to the online Apple store and ordering a refurbished one. It&#8217;s the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-mac"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kernelcrash.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}