September 23, 2003
To switch or not to switch...
So we're looking to shuffle around the company hardware a little, as David's Vaio is somewhat long in the tooth and my laptop (pictured top right) is just too damned heavy to travel far with.
I got the chance to play with the new Sony (pictured bottom right), and it's really small and really light, but I'm just not sure 900mhz is fast enough. Still, up to 5.5 hours of battery life - that's enough for the train to London and back again! I'm not sure how well linux would run on it, though.
Of course, there's always the powerbooks. There's finally a 15 inch one, and the thing I really like about the powerbooks is that suspend and resume just works. Let's leave to one side the fact that buying two powerbooks would cost £1500 more than two roughly equivalent Intel machines. Tim seems to think it's the right choice:
...if you're a person who spends a lot of time doing server-side work on boxes where the OS's name ends in "x", well it's a no-brainer, you'd be nuts not to get a Mac.
Thom reassures me that Debian runs just fine on the powerbooks, and because the suspend/resume is done by the hardware, it still just works.
I've always been worried that a Mac would get in my way, but so many people I know have switched - Thom, Paul, Stefano, Steven, Matthew, the list goes on. Maybe it's worth a try. I think I need to borrow David's iBook for a week or two, and see if I can get along without a sane number of mouse buttons.
Posted by savs at September 23, 2003 11:12 PMWhy do people always make comments like "sane" or "too few" when talking about mouse buttons on Mac. The only relevant test is "can I use the OS I have with the number of buttons present". To which the answer, of course, is "yes, I can". :-)
(FWIW, while debian can install perfectly, and uses all the hardware fine, I almost never boot it. My use of linux on the desktop has always been fairly pragmatic - whilst I would never use Windows, the choice between linux, freebsd etc was down to what works.
OS X works.
A fair comment about relevant tests. However, my computing habits are fairly well-formed around two or even three buttons, so I think I'd find having only one a big limitation. Guess I need to try for a prolonged period of time.
As for debian - yeah, I mention it only as a fallback - ie if I really hate OS X, at least there's an alternative :-)
Posted by: Andrew at September 25, 2003 6:23 PMYeah, I thought the same thing when I was thinking about buying a mac. now I've been using my two for a while i don't even think about needing more than one button.
Posted by: Thom at September 25, 2003 6:37 PMWell, I love my mac, but I hate the one-button concept... and, even more, the lack of mousewheel. Admittedly, macos doesn't require that much right-click and wheel scrolling as windows, but still, things like Eclipse (which are not based on the mac user interface guidelines [unfortunately!] feel *really* bad without a two button mouse). But hey, I bought a USB optical mouse with wheel and I have best of both worlds (yes, macosx supports right-click menus *and* scrollwheel, if you have them).
Ah, there are rumors around that apple patented a new mice with a ipod-like scroller on the top.
Bottom line: the mouse should not be a switching concern.
As for price: try to estimate how much "it just works" would save you in time (and frustration!) and you find out that mac are just cheap.
The OS should be written by the hardware producer. Period. Any other combination doesn't work as well and the price you pay is nothing compared to the solidity, polishness and focus you get.
Posted by: Stefano Mazzocchi at September 26, 2003 11:46 AM