Back and Forth Forever

It has been almost a full week since I’ve had my MacBook Pro, and made the switch from Windows/Linux to OSX.  Some things are fantastic, others are quite mindboggling.  All in all it’s been a smooth transition, but not without bumps in the road.

Keyboard
The unibody MacBook Pro keyboard itself is wonderful.  They keys are quiet, responsive, and well spaced for a laptop keyboard.  Positioning of the keys is very nice and for most functions there’s very little learning curve from a traditional Windows keyboard.  The ambient light detector does a great job of lighting up the keyboard in low light conditions and doesn’t seem to impact battery life too much.

The downside of the keyboard isn’t the keyboard itself, it’s figuring out when to use fn, Control, Option/Alt, and Command/Clover.  Some extremely common keys like pageup, pagedown, home, and end aren’t anywhere to be found on the keyboard.  After a little Googling it turns out that command+arrow key fills these roles, but it isn’t very intuitive and I could see computer novices struggling to find this information and probably end up not using this function altogether.  There’s no backspace key, unless you use command+delete.  The function keys don’t actually do what you’d expect.  I’d expect function keys to be function keys first and Expose, volume up/down, brightness up/down second.

It took me a good few days to get the hang of when to use which key modifier, and I still trip up regurarly, even while writing this post.  I think once I get the hang of it I’ll be satisified though it still seems a bit more cumbersome then what I was used to.

Keyboard: 9/10
OSX Keyboard Nuances: 3/10

Touchpad
The touchpad is one area that the Pro really shines.  I never thought I’d rather use a touchpad then a mouse, until this laptop.  Historically I hated touchpads and would usually turn them off, in favor of the eraser thing on IBM laptops.  The biggest problem with touchpads was when you were typing and you’d wrest your palm on the pad you’d inadvertently click somewhere outside where you were typing.  There, apparently, is a sensor somewhere that knows whether your plam is wresting on the touchpad or you’re attempting to use it as intended.

Additionally, the mulit-touch functionality is fantastic.  Two fingers to scroll, three fingers to… do something I haven’t had to use yet, and four fingers down for Expose, up for Show desktop, left or right to switch between applications.  All in all, it’s amazingly useful and hasn’t made me want to use the Mighty Mouse I picked up along with my purchase.

Touchpad: 9.5/10

Display
I opted to pick up the 17″ glossy MacBook Pro for the extra screen real estate, higher resolution, and improved battery life which I’ll get to later.  The default resolution of 1920×1200 might be a little tight for some people but it looks very nice on the big display.  The auto lighting feature, same as the keyboard’s, works very well.  All in all, it’s a very nice display.  I can’t compare it to higher end Windows laptops but it is most definitely one of the better displays I’ve seen.

Display: 9/10

Battery Life
I was a bit skeptical at first when I read that Apple claims the 17″ MacBook Pro has 8 hours of battery life.  After putting it to the test, I can see why they’re able to make this claim.  On a full charge I’ve gotten about 5-1/2 hours out before the warning that my battery was about to expire.  During that time I downloaded a Windows 7 RC1 beta .iso, downloaded and installed VMWare Fusion, installed Windows 7 under Fusion, did a good deal of internet browsing and installing other applications.  Under “regular” use I can easily see getting 6-7 hours out of a single charge.  Very impressive indeed.  With judicious use of display brightness and light WiFi usage, I think 8 hours might be obtainable.  Will I ever see it?  Probably not.

The truly impressive thing about the battery life is how they can fit that much battery in the relatively thin form factor of the MBP.  There’s no extra battery pack hanging off the back of the device which is necessary to obtain 8 hours on most Dell laptops.  The battery indicator lights on the front-left side of the laptop do a good job of indicating charge when the lid is closed, and the applet next to the clock gives a good estimated time before you’ll be out of juice.

Also, the magnet power cable is pretty cool.  My dog pulled it lose once and instead of jerking my whole laptop across my desk, the power cable popped out without doing any damage.  There is a lawsuit in progress over the MagSafe power cord, but so far I haven’t seen any reason to sue over it.

Battery: 9/10

OSX
Where to begin?  I feel equally comfortable in Linux or Windows, and consider myself a power user on both operating systems to some degree but for this section I’ll try to highlight where novices and experts alike will struggle and strive with the switch.  Depending on how you use your computer currently, the switch to OSX could be extremely easy, or a serious pain in the butt for power users.  There’s a lot of unlearning what you’ve learned, and generally thinking about the operating system in a completely different fashion.  For Linux folks familiar with Gnome or to a lesser extend, KDE, the switch well be much less painful.  For Windows folks, I can’t say that OSX will be a breath of fresh air but depending on how deeply you use Windows the transition could vary widly.

From my initial impression OSX seems to be a big black box of sorts.  It works, but I can’t quite figure out how or why certain things work the way they do.  There’s some great features, and the default set of applications is extremely robust, but if it wasn’t for a bit of prior knowledge of the operating system, some things would surely drive me crazy in a hurry.

OSX “Free Apps”
First off, OSX comes with an interesting and not entirely useful set of applications out of the box.  Everything you expect to be there is included with the default installation of OSX 10.5.x: E-mail application, calendars, contacts, music player, notepad, web browser, etc.  Apple also thought it’d be fun to include some gimicky applications to help their “We have this application and you have to buy it for Windows” mantra.  iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand are the three that really stick out as gimicky applications.  Not only can you find free, and in some cases better, versions for Windows, Linux, and OSX but they don’t necessarily bring any benefit to in my estimation 90% of regular computer users.

iPhoto is the best of the three, but isn’t groundbreakingly better then Picasa, a free application from Google.  For a very solid photo management application I’d recommend Adobe’s Lightroom over both anyways.  iMovie seems like a decent piece of movie editing software, but free and OpenSource VirtualDub does a decent job at filling the gap.  I’m sure there’s a good number of other free video editing software out there as well.  GarageBand is an interesting free addition to OSX.  GarageBand is one part audio recording software, and one part instrument video lessons.  My girlfriend, Laurane, and I spent a few hours playing with it — and it is pretty cool — but aside from that I can’t say that including GarageBand is a killer app by any means.  In summation I’d prefer that Apple left these out and reduced the overall cost of the operating system by a few $100.  They’re nice to have, but I can’t see any other reason for their inclusion but to offer things Window’s doesn’t.

Bells and Whistles
Some features like Expose and Spaces you don’t think you need until you have them available to you.  For those of you that aren’t familiar with either Expose is a key (F3) or touchpad gesture that will show you all windows currently open spaced out on the screen, and Spaces is a virtual window manager that allows you to move applications to different virtual monitors.  I use Spaces for work/email, web browsing, and Twitter / IM applications.  It might seem cumbersome at first but it really is handy after you’re familiar with it.  For Linux folks one cool thing about Spaces over other VWMs is the ability to see all VWMs and to drag windows from one to another.  It’s hard to explain if you haven’t used it.  Another cool feature is “hot corners”.  By moving your mouse to any of the four corners of the screen you can set specific actions.  I use one for Expose, one for Spaces, and one to activate the screensaver.

This may be considered a “power user” feature by some, but in Windows by hitting the start menu and typing the first few characters of an application you’ll be taken directly to that application within the Start Menu, and not have to browse through until you find your application.  In OSX, unless you drag the application to the dock bar You have to click on the hard drive -> Applications -> Application name.  This issue can be resolved by installing Quicksilver, otherwise loading applications can be a bit combersome out of the box.

Everything Else
OSX is pretty.  Everything has a smooth feeling to it, and for the most part — it just works.  I’m sure after a few months of getting the hang of the shortcuts and nuances I’ll feel more at home.  With VMWare Fusion installed I’ll still have access to all my Windows applications, and I may throw Ubuntu on Boot Camp, but for now I’m going to give OSX a shot and see if I can make the most of this altogether expensive experiment.

OSX Overall – 7/10

In Conclusion…
I’m not sold yet.  The things that work well, work very well.  My biggest gripe this far is the keyboard layout and having to relearn everything I became so used to with windows and Linux.  Small things like the Terminal.app not behaving how I’m used to with gnome-terminal, or keyboard shortcuts not working the way they’re “supposed to”.  I’d expect the average person switching from Windows to be very happy on OSX.  I can’t see anything, so far, that I’m truly missing from Windows.  I gave up on Windows gaming quite a while ago, and even then apparently VMWare Fusion works quite well for gaming (but can it play Crysis???).  I’d recommend people that are looking to buy a laptop to give a MacBook a serious look.  While it may not be the most affordable solution the build quality sets the bar and the ease of use will be a welcome change for most people.  Also, Apple products tend to hold their value quite well.  When it comes time to trade up to the next big Apple product rollout you’ll probably get top dollar on your used laptop.

Drop me a comment if I missed something, or am totally wrong about something above.  Again, this is my first dive in to OSX territory.  So far the water is warm.