MacBook: A Week and a Half of Impressions

Overall, it’s a mixed bag. I really like the hardware on this. It’s far faster than any other Mac I’ve used, and almost as snappy as my windows desktop is. It also has some nice little touches like MagSafe and two-finger scrolling/two-finger right click.

On the other hand, using OS X frequently again has reminded me of all the things I don’t like about it. I hate the mouse-centric interface, since I’m a heavy alt-key-to-application-menu user. None of the web browsers particularly impress me—I don’t like the way Safari handles tabs—nor do I like the KHTML engine that much, Camino committed the unforgivable sin of crashing while I was trying to submit my taxes to Taxcut Online, and Firefox just… doesn’t fit well. I use Firefox, though, since I can at least configure it to do what I want.

There’s also a glaring lack of a decent personal finance manager for the Mac. Quicken for Mac is a steaming pile of crap, and Intuit deliberately screws Mac users by charging a separate fee to banks to support Quicken/Mac specifically—despite the fact there’s no technical reason to do so. There’s also Moneydance, but I don’t like the transaction input interface, not to mention that it’s painful to get automatic downloads working.

There’s actually been a few times I’ve pulled my Lifebook back out and used that for a while instead, just for a respite from the things that annoyed me.

I’m currently investigating my options for running Windows on this. There’s Parallels, which is a pretty nice piece of software—but it still requires you to run OS X, and the thing is that I’m rapidly getting to the point where I don’t want to do that. That leaves Boot Camp, which seems to work fairly well, except that the touchpad drivers seem to be somewhat less than functional. Which is to say, they currently don’t support tap-clicking. As someone who compulsively tap-clicks, including setting up tap zones for right and middle clicks, this would quickly drive me insane; I hate using the actual buttons on laptop trackpads.

The moral of the story: slightly impulsive purchases (even though I’d been looking for a new laptop) are BAD, m’kay? That said, I’m going to try to be fair and stick to my original plan: try the MacBook for a month or two and see how I like it. If I still don’t like it after I’ve had it for another month or so, I can always throw it up on the Agora Classifieds on Ars Technica, then replace it with something else. We’ll see what happens, but I figure I can get most of my money back if I end up doing that. Either way, I don’t regret taking that HP back and getting this in its place. The HP was definitely not the right machine for me; it’s too soon yet to say whether or not this one is.

The one downside: I have a feeling that my experience on the Mac would probably improve if I dropped a little cash on various applets. The problem is that if I’m not certain I’m committed to the platform yet, I don’t really want to spend any additional money on it… funny how that Catch-22 works out.

I should note that none of this is really meant to flame OS X or to say that it’s a steaming pile of dog crap. It’s not, and obviously a lot of people really like it—I’m just not sure yet that it’s the right choice for me. And I will note that yes, I’m very demanding when it comes to my laptop. Given how much time I spend using it, I don’t think that’s at all unreasonable.

Edit: Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. QuickTime. Words cannot describe just how much I despise QuickTime. I don’t have anything against the codec itself, but I’m pretty sure that if you looked up “utter crap” in the dictionary, there’d be a screenshot of the QuickTime client next to it. VLC is a bit of an improvement, but I find Windows Media Player far less annoying overall.