I recently ordered an Apple Mac Book.  I don’t generally like Mac’s, but a lot of people seem to think highly of them, so I wanted to get a decent machine and give it a fair shake.  I also wanted an opportunity to check out the new Leopard OS.

I got the black Mac Book.  Yes, the same one I complained about before.  My original beef still stands..  they charge $200 for the black one and the only thing different about it is the color and that you get a 160GB drive instead of a 120GB drive.  In that sense it is a rip off.  Still, $1499 isn’t that unreasonable for a what is supposed to be a kick ass laptop.

The Sony SZ series that I got cost a bit more than that, but it is pretty kick ass itself.  Both of those systems are pretty much the perfect form factor for a laptop in my opinion.  They both have 13” widescreens, and weigh 5lbs or less, and are pretty thin (about an inch).  Now, you can certainly buy a decent Windows based laptop for a lot less than even the cheapest Mac laptop, but in order to get one that is thin and light you have to start opening your wallet a bit more.

All things considered, the Mac and the Sony SZ are fairly comparable from a hardware perspective.  For slightly more money the Sony comes with a few extra features such as a built in Cellular modem, finger print reader, dual graphic adapters (there is a switch to select the Integrated Intel graphics for better battery life, or a high speed dedicated NVidia adapter for greater performance), more RAM, and it weighs more than a pound less.

At first glance the screen on the MacBook seems pretty good.  I remember taking it out of the box and saying “gee, the screen looks pretty nice.”  However, after using it for a while it doesn’t take long to notice that the screen isn’t nearly as good as the screen on the Sony.  It isn’t as bright, the colors seem more washed out, and if you aren’t viewing it at the exact right angle it looks crappy.  Still, if you look at it straight on it looks decent, especially if you don’t have anything else to compare it to.

Here are some things I really like about the Mac:
•    Power Management – I have never seen any other OS work this well.  I close the lid on the laptop and it goes to sleep.  I open the lid and hit any key on the keyboard and it wakes up almost instantly (just a couple of seconds).  It is the one computer that I own that I feel comfortable with just closing the lid whenever I want, knowing that even if I leave it sitting there for a few days I can open the lid, hit a key on the keyboard, and it will wake up (damn near instantly) and still have a reasonable amount of battery power available.
•    Battery Life – the battery life is really very good.  When fully charged the system claims it will get 5 hours or more.  Obviously that changes depending on what you are doing, but if you are just doing some browsing or email it seems to last a long, long time.  However, once you kick the CPU into gear (e.g. converting a movie file to a different file) the battery sure dies quick enough.
•    Two finger scrolling on mouse pad.  This totally kicks ass.  Place to fingers on the mouse pad and move up and down and it acts just like a scroll wheel on a mouse. Many modern PC’s (including my Sony SZ) have a dedicated scroll area on the mouse pad, but frequently I end up putting my finger there by accident and scrolling unintentionally.
•    Screen Zoom.  If you hold down CTRL and do a two finger scroll you can zoom way in on the screen.  This kicks ass.  However, you can also do this under Linux which is what I run on my Sony SZ.
•    Spotlight (Leopard search function).  In some respects this is almost as good as my beloved CTRL-ESC, R in Windows (run command), and in some respects it is better.  You can access it by pressing command-space, and I really like the fact that it also acts as a dictionary for quick look ups.  Kick ass.

Things I don’t like:
•    The translucent menu bar at the top.  Depending on what color desktop background/picture you have this can be really annoying.  Somebody came up with a hack to get around this shortly after Leopard came out, but it was a bunch of extra steps.  It is my understanding that Apple just released an update that allows you to disable this, but I haven’t installed it yet.
•    Only one mouse button.  While you can get around this in Mac OS X by putting two fingers on the mouse pad and then clicking the button, that won’t do you any good if you dual boot into Windows or Linux.
•    Only 1GB of RAM.  The system seems a little pokey, but is fine for general Web browsing, email, and general word processing tasks.  However, the system is slower than molasses if you try to run Parallels with Windows XP (which is one of the things I wanted to do – let’s face it – there are some programs that people sometimes need to run that only work on Windows).  And come on… for the $200 extra I paid for the Black MacBook they could have thrown in an extra gig of RAM.  One of these days I’ll get around to buying and installing the extra RAM myself, but for $1499 I really don’t think it should be necessary.  Incidentally, my Sony SZ came with 2GB of RAM and I can run Windows XP under VMWare just fine under Linux.

I know the Mac heads out there don’t want to hear this, because when Steve Jobs farts it doesn’t smell, but I’ve had a couple of problems with the system too.  When we first took it out of the box, we started clicking on some of the various programs that came with it (just playing around) and got two programs to crash within the first 10 minutes.  We clicked on garage band and instead of the program starting up it crashed right away.  When we tried iMovie to convert a movie file it locked up and wouldn’t respond, and we had to end the task.  To be fair, a few minutes later the Mac popped an alert notifying us to download some various updates, and after we installed them those programs ran fine.

Also, a few years back I turned all of my CD’s into MP3’s.  I browsed over the network to a folder on my Windows PC and started going through my files.  Basically, when I double click on one of those MP3 files what I want to happen is a program to pop up immediately and start playing it.  What I don’t want to happen is for a big bloated program to slowly load up, and then pester me about updates, and the iTunes music store, etc. 

One of the first things I do on a new PC is to go to the Internet and download and install WinAmp, which is a great MP3 player.  I normally install the compact version so there is no bloat, and when I double click on a file WinAmp pops up IMMEDIATELY and starts playing it.  Ahhhh… that’s the way it should work.

I don’t think they make WinAmp for Mac, and I didn’t want to use iTunes, so I used my friend Google to help me.  I searched for “mp3 player mac” and something called “Audition” appeared at the top of the list.  (Incidentally, if you search for “windows mp3 player” WinAmp appears at the top.)  I download and install it only to find that there is no easy way to tell the Mac to use it to play all MP3 files.  Crap… after using google again I found some program you can download in order to get around that issue.  So what do I get when I start double clicking my MP3’s?  I get a big fat program crash.  Repeatedly.  Nice. 

Basically there are some good things about the Mac, but there are also some problems, just as there are with other systems (Windows/Linux).  Lately I’ve been pretty happy using Linux on my Sony.  The reason being is that even though I’ve been trying to use the Mac a lot, I can still get around far more quickly on Linux and Windows. 

Usually you run into all sorts of problems getting devices to work on Linux, but while on vacation in Hawaii I plugged my new iPod into my Linux machine for the first time (I had originally loaded it up off of my Mac).  My intention was to simply use the USB cable to charge the battery, and I didn’t really have any high hopes of Linux recognizing and being able to use the iPod.  However, immediately after I plugged it in Linux pops right up with a program that detected the iPod and everything on it, even though it was formatted on a Mac.  Kick ass. 

I’ll continue to play with the Mac and let you know if I find out anything else interesting, but so far I’m not convinced.