I’ve been rabidly anti-Windows lately, and with reason. But this time, I will gripe on my Macbook, Sayuri. I had gotten her from my aunt just this March. Its price on Apple was at $1099. Its specs are: 60GB hard drive, 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and 512MB RAM, combo drive. Today, Apple’s $1099 has an 80GB hard drive, 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB of RAM, and still a combo drive. Whoa, look at the difference.
I guess I’m just incensed that it was just two months after I got Sayuri that they upgraded the specs. Made me think that the price plummet seemed exactly the way a cellular phone’s price would go. My friend, who got hers direct from Apple, got the Intel Core Duo version. Not even two weeks later, Apple put out the Intel Core 2 Duo version.
Prior to Core 2, there were so many complaints of random restarts, Macbooks burning up, and other horror stories. In my dummified analysis, this was due to the move from the PPC processor to Intel.
The good part was that Apple replaced the defective units. The bad part was that some users went through hell just to get their replacements. But no matter, things went smoother after the Core 2 versions came out.
But personally, here are my gripes.
The eject button rarely works. I dunno if I have to cajole the thing to work, but it just doesn’t, 97% of the time. If it does, I’d think it was a lucky day. So I just eject my CD’s through the Finder button.
When I turned on the Macbook, it only had 35GB of hard drive space left, due to the pre-loaded software. Ugh. I’m a space hog, so I really detested that.
I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out how to network Sayuri with Phoenix, my ancient PC desktop that runs Ubuntu Linux, Edgy Eft release. So I had to run for help to my geekier classmates who work in a state university running Linux to help me figure out how to network the two.
The need to really comb and sift through applications to find ones I could use is also a taxing exercise. These are the moments when I really love Ubuntu Linux instead. Heck, these are the moments I really miss Windows too.
Opera looks awful on Mac, despite its having a Pink theme. On the same note, the Aqua interface could bore me out of my skull sometimes. Still on the same note, the Dock is visually irritating sometimes. Though I would love to zap it to oblivion, it’s been very useful, so I keep it there anyway.
I couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, how to disable the Frostwire script that launches iTunes! it’s so annoying and such a RAM hog that when I download from Frostwire, I close all other apps, save for iTunes, TextEdit, just so I could get some work done, and Frostwire. I keep iTunes on, because it’s really irritating when it pops up and bounces on the dock like a kid on 3lbs of candy.
NeoOffice, though visually appealing to me because of my magenta background, is such a RAM hog that I have opted to work on TextEdit since two weeks ago. Boo-hoo.
AbiWord on the Intel Mac looks horrible and has major distortions when you edit what you type on it. The saved product is fine, but while you edit it, it’s visual hell. The reason may be that the AbiWord version on AbiSource is still on PPC binaries, i think. 🙁
And my biggest pet peeve: before the latest update, Firefox crashed frequently. It still does, when I’ve gone overboard with my RAM usage, but it’s a little better now. I just have to prepare for cold fire flashing through me sometimes when I write my blog posts on bloghosts that do not have autosave.
But the bottom line is, I still love OS X Tiger, and ultimately, Sayuri itself. I’m really wondering how different Leopard is, though, and how Apple laptops will be in the future. As it is, I’m currently happy with OS X and Sayuri.
Visually, I like OS X better than Ubuntu. As for security, the only time things went strange here was when I unwittingly copied a worm, of the Brontok kind, when I copied a friend’s music files from her mp4 player. When I deleted the .exe file containing the Brontok, things went back to normal.
Well, I may be one of the most hated “tech” bloggers on cyberspace, for my aversion (nay, hatred) of Windows, but I have a couple of things I like about Windows too.. Or Microsoft in general. But that, is for another day. Hope my whining at lease elicited a chuckle or two. :p