Regular K

First impression: surprised. I ordered my 12″ SuperDrive PowerBook from the online Apple Store on February 15 and was told that it would take 4-6 days to process my order, then a few days for shipping. I kept checking my order status to see when it would ship, but after a week, the status still did not change to “Shipped”. On February 22, I checked my status again and it was still “Open”. A few minutes after checking my order status, it arrived. Joy! Apple really needs to work on their order status system, since it’s obviously not that accurate.

Anyways, onto the system itself. First things first: the desktop. The dock is the Mac equivalent of the Windows start menu, taskbar and system tray - it resides at the bottom of your screen and is filled with different icons. Click on an icon to launch that application and a black triangle appears beneath it, letting you know that that program is open. By right-clicking on an icon, you can activate the “system tray”, providing a list of things you can do with the program. Overall, I prefer the Mac’s dock over the the Windows start menu, taskbar, system tray combo, since it’s just simpler. (Okay, I admit I’m a sucker for its prettiness, too.)

One of the nice things about the Mac is that you can drag and drop almost everything. For example, program installation is done by dragging the program into your Applications folder. It takes a few seconds to copy itself into that folder, then it’s done. If you don’t want a program anymore, just drag it into the trash and it’s gone. No need for uninstallers or anything - it’s easy. If you use a program lots, you can drag the program from your Applications folder into your dock for easy access any time.

I found it simple to get my PowerBook set up the way I wanted pretty easily. There are tons of programs available for the Mac, either Mac versions of Windows software, or Mac-specific programs. The first thing I did when I turned on my PowerBook was install Firefox, the world’s best Web browser. It works very well on the Mac, however I’d have to say that it’s quite not as good as the Windows or Linux versions. For example, scrolling through Web sites can be a little choppy. Also, sometimes, the top 5% of some lines of text don’t appear on page load, but appears as normal after I highlight it. Overall, they’re just cosmetic annoyances, but they can detract from the overall experience.

iLife is an excellent suite of digital media programs made by Apple, specifically for the Mac. My basic comment about it is that if you like iTunes, you’ll like iLife. For whatever reason, the best apps in the suite are the music ones - iTunes and GarageBand. iTunes is the best music management program I’ve ever used. It does everything that I’ve ever wanted a music player to do and does it elegantly. It’s not bloated either, so you won’t have to spend hours sifting through the preferences trying to tell it what you want it to do. It also integrates seamlessly with my iPod - another great plus. GarageBand is a music creation app, which lets you record both real and software instruments. Even if you have no microphone, it’s dead easy to select some software instruments, notate some music and begin creating your own songs. I’m currently working on a small GarageBand project, which should (hopefully) be done soon.

So far, my experience with my Mac has been very good. I haven’t had many problems yet and the ones I have had were pretty easily solved by asking Mac-savvy friends or by searching Google. However, OS X is not flawless and I have some suggestions.

First of all, the Mac should really come with a two-button mouse. I’m okay with just using one button and ctrl-clicking for right-click, but most Windows users will not be so forgiving. I could easily use an external two-button USB/Bluetooth mouse, but it still doesn’t change the fact that my laptop’s provided mouse has no second button. It’s been a standard in computing for years now and I really don’t buy the argument that one button is less confusing and more useable.

Second, it needs to improve window behaviour. I hate having to focus a window before I can do something to it. Also, minimizing windows should set the top menu bar to the next open window. For example, if minimizing iTunes reveals Finder behind it, the menu bar should have Finder’s menu, rather than still having the iTunes menu. Minimizing means I don’t want to work with it, so the menu bar should change accordingly.

In terms of hardware, I’m quite pleased. It’s a small, 12″ laptop which weighs just 4.6 pounds with the battery, so it’s much friendlier to my back than my previous 8-pound laptop. I’m a little surprised that the front-side bus is only 167MHz, considering that most new Windows laptops have a 533MHz FSB or higher. Regardless, performance is as good, if not better than my previous laptop, so it really is a non-issue. It’s got a good 1.5 GHz G4 processor, which is not a G5 (obviously), but it’s fine with me. I really don’t care if my laptop is a G4 or G5, since I’m not doing anything so intensive that would require a 64-bit processor. Also, my laptop came with 512MB RAM by default, but I upgraded it to 768MB for some performance increase.

The only issue that I have with the hardware is battery life. According to the Apple site, my PowerBook can run for “up to 5 hours”. However, in my own tests, with longest battery life settings, it runs for about 3.5-4 hours. With highest performance settings, I can use my laptop for under 3 hours. I could turn off wireless Internet and reduce my screen brightness to squeeze out some more battery life, but I’d rather work under normal conditions. On the plus side, the above quoted battery life measurements consider only the time spent actually using the machine. If I close the lid to let it sleep, it uses very little power, so sleep time doesn’t cut into my 3-4 hours of usage. The battery life is pretty good, considering that this is a powerful laptop, but Apple’s claim of 5 hours is a bit misleading.

The resolution on this laptop is 1024×768, which is the lowest I’ll consider for any computer. My last laptop was a widescreen 1280×800, so it’s a bit painful going back to a smaller resolution. However, with Exposé, I’ve been able to cope with it. It’s such a genius window management tool! Not only does it look amazing, it manages window clutter much better than taskbar grouping. If you haven’t seen Exposé in action before, take a look at this video preview.

Overall, this PowerBook has been a great introduction to Mac OS X. There haven’t been any showstoppers in my experience and it’s proven to be very stable and fast. However, I’ve got to say that the very best feature of my PowerBook is the cost. It was supposed to cost about $2200 after the RAM upgrade, tax and shipping; however, it’s been a month since I received it and they still haven’t billed me for it. Even though they’ve already, you know, sent it to me and everything. I know they’ll probably figure it out soon enough, but for now, I can go around telling everybody that I have a free PowerBook.