Which will arrive first: My iBook's recalled battery replacement (4-6 weeks from today) or my Mac Pro (expected to ship Sept 12th).

Tags: mac

The Cinema Display has arrived. nugget and I had a joyus time setting it up, seeing what Windows and my 9800 Pro would do with it, and seeing if I could actually manage to use it until the Mac Pro arrives. Given that my desktop is only used for WoW, we've decided it's possible.

I will now be playing WoW at 1280x800, 30 inches across. Maybe I'll sleep tonight.

Tags: mac, wow

My desktop has been working on failing for a bit. It's been crashing in at least three different ways while playing World of Warcraft. The graphics card has also managed to fry a molex connector. I'm aggravated by Windows, as well, and absolutely love OS X on my iBook.

As nugget would say, "Clearly, there's only one rational solution."

( I bought a Mac. )

The new Mac Pros were released today. Each has two Woodcrest processors, the new fancy Xeons. We've had a few of these in the lab, and though I haven't been the one working with them, those who have have been very exited (one went wandering around the building quoting his benchmark numbers to anyone who didn't run away fast enough). There's no doubt that these will be very nice machines, and though they're not cheap, they're certainly not expensive for the hardware.

The thing that's bugging me about the purchase is that 30" Cinema Display. I don't need it. With that machine, I really should get a new display of some variety (my old, 1280x1024 LCD really won't do that machine justice), but do I really need a $2,000 display? Is it worth $2,000 to me? Nugget assures me that the display is absolutely wonderful to have, and that he feels the display is a better value (for years used) than the system itself. I still feel ridiculous spending that much on a display, but I can afford it, it's fitting with the system, and given my experiences with OS X on the iBook, I suspect I will appreciate every pixel of space I can get. Maybe the blow to my pocketbook will lessen once the items actually get here... In a month or so. The graphics card delayed shipping by "three to five weeks."

This is only going to make me hate my Windows laptop at work all the more.

Tags: mac

I don't know who's fault it was, but three years ago, someone convinced nugget to buy a Mac. It was a 15" Titanium Powerbook, the first one to have a superdrive. He's been extolling the virtues of Macs ever since.

I've always built my own desktops, so they've always been x86. No OS X. I've always scrounged parts for my servers, so yet again, those have always been x86. But a laptop... I didn't own a laptop... Sure, I had one from work I could use, but, well... It was large and clunky, and hot, and only had 2 hours battery life, and that's with the screen light down to nearly nothing, and me not doing anything! Realistically, it was an hour to an hour and a half. And it was heavy. And it was big. It didn't really fit next to my desktop at home, and I really wanted a laptop that could be a secondary machine while I gamed.

So gave in. For a few years (even before Nugget bought his Mac), I've said if I ever paid for a laptop, it would be a Mac. Well, it finally happened. I learned the next updates to iBooks was coming "soon," and decided I'd wait. For a base RAM of 512M, it's worth the wait. And it came, on Tuesday, July 26. That evening, we went to Fry's to play with the different models. I was worried a 12" machine would be too small for me - that it would feel like a toy in my hands. So I stood, with a 12" and 14" iBook (the older models) in front of me, messing around, getting iChat on Bonjour, as Nugget did the same on a 17" PowerBook and an iMac or two. While at first, the 12" iBook did feel like a toy in my hands, I quickly lost that feeling, as I settled down and worked. It did what I needed. It didn't give me any more space than the 14" (both have a 1024x768 native resolution). So it was determined: A 12" iBook is not too small for me. We went home, and I ordered the base model, 1.33 GHz processor, 512M RAM, 40G hard drive, Combo drive, Radeon 9550 32M, and I ordered AppleCare. I also ordered a 1G stick of RAM for it from Newegg.

Friday, the iBook arrived. I showed my mother through the setup, just because I could, and she didn't get to see it on her Mac Mini. Monday, the RAM arrived (Hah! Apple shipped faster than Newegg!). I installed it (after sending Nugget searching for a screwdriver of the appropriate size, and giving up and using an exacto-knife), and then installed World of Warcraft. I was expecting absolutely miserable play. With only 32M video RAM, loading textures was going to be hard on the machine, and it wasn't exactly going to be easy on the processor, either. But I completed the install, patched the machine, and started to play. I had to turn the graphics settings down pretty low, and eventually took them to the lowest, but the game played passably. I switched back to playing on the desktop (on the absolute highest settings) and started using the iBook as the IRC/Mutt/web box I bought it to be. All worked well enough.

I kept taking the iBook to work... Even there, it's advantages outstripped the Compaq. The Compaq has a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, and 512M RAM. I have both Windows XP Pro and Gentoo Linux installed. Neither OS matched the usability of OS X. I kept turning back to the iBook for everything that didn't require IE 6, just because, well, it just worked. The Compaq now sits, mostly neglected, in the middle of my desk, separating me from my server under test (and the rest of the world - hiding behind two laptops and a CRT monitor, weee!). While I still enjoy playing with Gentoo on the Compaq, that seems to be about all I do with it - play. While with the iBook, I can play, and work, and play WoW, all at once, with ease. Switching between applications is a breeze. Launching new apps with Quicksilver takes only a few short key presses. Everything just works.

Then, these past few days, we developed an ntp problem at work. ntpd just would not sync properly on many of our servers. As part of our isolation, I checked ntpd on my Mac. Low and behold, it could act as an ntpd server. It's running straight ntp, and communicates well with (properly working) machines. It helped me determine that the ntp problem was not on our network. While I still haven't managed to fully isolate the problem on the servers, I found it rewarding to be able to use this machine, running this beautiful, clean, easy OS, like I would my not-so-pretty, pain-in-the-rear Linux box.

This is the least powerful Mac laptop I can currently buy, new. I spent about $130 over the base price to add a gig RAM to it, giving it 1.5G. It plays World of Warcraft. It handles everything I need open for work, plus World of Warcraft, without slowdown. Terminals, Safari, iChat, Mail, iCal, Activity Monitor, NeoOffice, and whatever else happens to be open, without troubles and without swapping. The battery lasts a solid 4 hours under my normal load, and would make three, maybe longer, playing WoW. It's lightweight. It's small. It's portable. It's everything a laptop (ok, Apple, portable) should be.

My Mac isn't perfect, though. It has some issues with the wireless network at work, sometimes requiring a reboot (never happens at home or at my parents, so I blame work, but rebooting the Mac temporarily fixes it). Firefox runs very, very poorly, and the Adblock mimic for Safari loses a bit of functionality. iCal won't let me add calendars/appointments if I'm not on the attendees list (at least if there are attendees), and I can't change the default calendar app to Sunbird. But, the only one that's any real fuss is the wireless problem, and it only needs a reboot about once a week, maybe less. All-in-all, it's an extremely usable OS, with the power and functionality of a unix-based system right at my fingertips. It's everything Linux on the desktop wants to be (well, except Free and GPL'd).

If the Intel Macs become piece-wise upgradable (as my current AMD desktop is), I just might end up with a Mac for my desktop machine, as well. I may end up dropping even thatrequirement, if this iBook keeps impressing me.

Tags: mac