I had the opportunity to use a loaner MacBook Pro over the Thanksgiving holiday.  I enjoyed working with the machine enough that I eventually purchased one to replace my aging Dell Inspiron 9300.  Since it’s been three months, I thought I’d reflect on the differences.

First, the technical specs:

• Dell Inspiron 9300 (purchased in late 2005): WXGA screen (1920×1200), 1.8GHz Pentium Celery processor, 2Gb memory, 40Gb disk (later upgraded to 160Gb), NVIDIA graphics, Wireless b/g, and a 1200 baud modem.

• MacBook Pro: WXGA screen, 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 4Gb memory (expandable to 8Gb), 500Gb disk, dual graphics cards, wireless b/g/n.

The Dell was a nice machine for 2005.  Although still functional, there were no further options for expanding the Dell and… I need more computational power.

The Mac is half as thick as the Inspiron.

Likes:

• System updates don’t inhibit system use.   Here’s a comparison of experiences on three operating systems:
  
  Exhibit 1:: [after reinstalling the operating system in preparation for donating it] power on, apply 77 updates (ignoring 64 optional – e.g. Minoan language support), reboot.  Apply 6 more updates, reboot.  Apply another update, no reboot.  Another update, curse, reboot.  Lather, rinse, reboot.  Another effing update, reboot.  Yay, now we’re up to Service Pack 3… and lo, there are more updates.  Elapsed time, 2 hours 35 minutes.  Profanity uttered: do you need to ask? (Were the update mechanism smart, it would see Service Pack 3 exists and apply that in one fell swoop.  Instead, it tortures the user.)

  Exhibit 2: [my laptop at work] A batch of 5-6 updates land each week, usually Tuesday night.  There’s an 80% chance a reboot will be required.  At least Vista gives me the option of not being bugged for four hours.  Security policy is such that the machine needs a human to type in a password on the console; otherwise, the machine powers off.  If I do this before I leave, my computer is inaccessible until I come in and boot it.  It takes about eight minutes to fully boot (1 1/2 at BIOS, 6-7 to apply updates, start everything, and finally get a prompt.

  
  Exhibit 3: power on, apply 6 updates, reboot, done. Elapsed time: 5 minutes. There have been a seven application updates in the last three months. None have required me to reboot.  N-O-N-E. Okay, just had my first reboot in 3 months.

  Did you guess the first was Windows XP, the second Windows Vista Ultimate, and the third was Mac OSX 10.6?

  Conclusion: I can’t believe the level of maintenance bullshit I’ve put up with when using Windows XP and Vista. Then I saw this story by Secunia quantifying it. While I can understand software is not perfect, it seems especially (bad word) that there are still critical security updates each week and these always force me to stop what I’m doing.  The security model is a bit wacky.

• I don’t need a virus checker, (additional) firewall, disk defragmenter, malware filter, registry checker or any other fine system maintenance utility.
• Power management works! It wakes up from sleep mode (and is able to get online) in less than five seconds.  XP’s hibernate mode never worked.  Sleep did, but it was a 50% chance that I’d need to reset the wireless card.
• No balloons! Windows XP and Vista both had annoying balloons notify/nag me every freaking time it connected/disconnected to a wireless access point whose signal wasn’t set to eleven.  Or Microsoft CRM/Exchange is having issues, as it is wont to do at 9:30 each morning.
• Virtualization works well.  There are two applications I still need Windows for: GSAK (a geocaching application) and the Windows VPN client (because our office doesn’t support Mac and Outlook Web Access is broken).
• It’s *nix underneath. On the Windows systems, I always had cygwin utilities.

Dislikes:

• Keyboard accelerators.  On Windows, nearly every application will reveal its keyboard accelerators when you hold the ALT key down.  For example, accessing the file menu is nearly always Alt-F.  I use this all the time to zip through tasks without having to pick up the mouse.  On Mac, this feature is missing.  Keyboard shortcuts are also different.  When opening an URL, you can use alt-D on Windows.  On Mac, it’s Command-L.
• The fn, control, option and command keys are too close together. Considering how often I need to use right-click, I wish they’d swapped Control with Fn to make it easier to press.
• Office 2008. I’m glad this was only $10 through the “Home Use Program,” because Office 2008 is a steaming pile of disappointment. Among the biggest surprises is a lack of VB macro support.  Well, technically that’s incorrect: you can run Excel macros if you’re willing to completely rewrite them from scratch in Apple Script.  Oh, and there’s also no way to record macros. There are no dockable toolbars or a ribbon.  Instead, one has floating windows with tools.  It’s annoying.
• Battery charge indicator shows <100% when plugged in.  I get that Li-ion batteries lose capacity over time, but if the electronics think it doesn’t need charging, the software should just round up.
• Application bar at the top of the screen.  While I “get” that there’s nice consistency among applications, the lack of accelerators and having to move across a hefty screen size to access menu options is a pain in the ass.  I finally capitulated and connected a separate mouse.
• Only 3 USB ports.  I must choose three devices among my camera, external hard disks, wireless mouse, GPS, other GPS, and iPod Touch.  The Inspiron had *six* of these, and that seemed barely adequate.
• X windows sucks. Certain really important third-party software (*cough cough*) relies on X windows running, and Apple’s implementation is lacking.  The 3ps GUI (*cough*) needs to be rewritten (*cough*).  Soon.  (*cough cough cough*)