Dylan Schiemann

I bought a new 15 inch Mac PowerBook G4 this week, eight years after having the worst computer buying experience of my life. The early results are encouraging enough for me to write some quick notes about the experience so far.

First, a brief background story. Eight years ago in 1994, as a college student, I bought my second Apple Mac, a PowerBook 520c, which turned out to be a lemon. The machine spent about 50% of its first year in the repair shop, and never cam close to living up to my expectations. Apple did nothing to make up for the $3,800 paper weight I had purchased.

In 1996, I grudgingly started using Windows PCs and Unix workstations. Around 2000, I started to migrate to Linux where I have been mostly happy but somewhat frustrated ever since. I mean, Linux is great for anything that is established, but usually is a generation or two behind on nonstandard additions, and on its graphical interface. So after much frustration with sending in my IBM ThinkPad for repair five times in the past two and a half years, and the second time in the past two years, I took the plunge and decided to give Apple a second chance.

My initial impressions are very positive. The appearance of their GUI is phenomenal, and the command line integration and availability of Unix apps is excellent. It seems to be the best of both worlds. So far I have run into a few minor annoyances:

• I do not seem to be able to remap an extra button on my Logitech MX 510 mouse to control-click for easy opening of links in background tabs, though I admittedly have not looked at tweaking out any configuration files analogout to an Xmodmap tweak.
• The default inconsistency between control, command, and alt across apps and environments is a bit annoying, though I haven’t yet figured out which direction I would prefer to remap keys besides caps lock.
• The energy settings do not seem to persist, meaning that my screen saver always comes on after five minutes of inactivity.
• The computer does occasionally crash (once or twice already)
• When using a multiple desktop extension to the system, command-tab still shows all of the apps in the list, but does not move to them if they are not on the current desktop
• Finder does not seem to have a way to set a preference to keep a detail view as the default view

Some of the things that are impressive include Quicksilver, the 3-d transitions between desktops, uControl, the dock, adium, the gui of firefox and thunderbird, OmniGraffle, and the overall attention to detail in the hardware design, down the the battery strength indicator on the battery itself, and the power supply design

So at this point I remain optimistic that my third Apple machine will not be a lemon, and will allow me to be a more efficient and productive developer.