Re: Early (non-euphoric) impressions of MacBook Pro

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:50:52 UTC, "Percival P. Cassidy"
<nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've had an opportunity to play with our son's 2.2GHz MacBook Pro for a
few days now -- and to read a little more about Macs -- and thought I
would write a brief report here as a "counterbalance" to TM's pro-Mac
euphoria.
...

I haven't managed to crash it yet -- not that I was trying -- if by
"crash" one means BSODs or trap screens. I have, however, managed to
hang it completely a couple of times:... Time to hit the Power Switch.

Right, when I first started using a Powerbook a couple of years ago, after
not touching a Mac tfor 20 years -- really -- I managed to hang it in the
first couple of hours of playing. Didn't know about *holding down* the
switch, either, so I did the remove-battery let-it-run-down trick, and was
pleased that nothing died. (I still don't know -- having studied two
editions of The Missing Manual -- where you find out about holding down
the power button, other than newsgroup gossip. *Of course* Apple ceased
having a brain-poke button to do a reset, a while before I bought in. Too
plebeian.)

But on 10.4 I don't think I've managed to hang the Finder yet, which
happened a few times on 10.3.

Actually, though, I liked and like it. Graphical zowiness is to be taken
for granted, but sometimes it's used inventively and constructively.

...

In the meantime I had been reading up about backup software for the Mac,
only to find that most of it was judged (even by Mac fans) to be pretty
hopeless -- partly, perhaps, because Apple keeps tampering with the OS
and adding new "features" with which the backup software authors are not
keeping up. Symlinks, ACLs, and file ownership attributes all may fall
victim to these defects, as may file creation dates.

Backup is freaking pathetic. One company made some pretty professional
stuff, it seems, which had lots of flaws that annoyed people; but it has
changed hands a couple of times, and its commitments are flaky, nobody
would commit anything important to it. (I could look up the name if
anybody cared.) I actually tried getting an evaluation version, but it was
very clear that the company had no interest in having people try it: to
get the file, you fill out the usual marketing questionnaire (fair enough)
*and* then when you get it, you find you need a activation code! *And I
never got mine, not any response to the message or messages I sent to the
support operation. Companies that don't really care whether you buy are
not good to do business with. And the competition isn't much. Would you
believe that you can't take support for QFA for granted if you try to use
tapes backups?

The only program
that received an unqualified approval was Super Duper, a $30 shareware
program. I downloaded a copy and started the backup again. This time it
stopped after about 45 minutes...

Sorry to hear about this. SD really is a nice, capable, usable, usually
reliable, system, done by a guy who knows what he's doing and responds to
users. Worthy of OS/2, in fact.

And disk maintenance? Ha ha. There are a couple of expensive programs
(DIsk Warrior is one) that some kind of checking and repair of errors, but
much less than you get for 30 bucks in DFSEE. I know it's unfair to
compare anybody to Jan van Wijk, but there you are. Inquiries in
newsgroups lead to the conclusion that there is NO program that will
simply to read-the-sectors operation on a selected piece of disk. Learned
about this when one of those godawful flaky 2.5-inch disks flaked on me.

Apple philosophy seems to be opposed to filesystem fixup. A well-informed
person at one maker of maintenance software explained that you don't try
to recover whatever you can from a messed-up volume and warn the user that
stuff may be lost, because then your system might fail unpredictably!
Gosh, that's so much worse than having a disk from which I can recover
whatever files are still recoverable.

...

Oh, and though it has many genuinely fine GUI features, it has some really
incredible failings compared to the WPS implemented a dozen years earlier,
but I'm getting tired of typing.

Positives: Mainly, it's not an Early Adopter machine, and I retired from
EA status a while after I retired from business. There are whole piles of
post-1994 features that I don't run on OS/2 because of the effort to find
and install and make-work-right; used to like doing that, but now I play
Plain Old User, and in the Mac I have a machine that simply has the
feechers, end of story. And no worries about finding hardware that will be
supported on my favorite OS next year.

Pity it's not good enough to *replace* OS/2, but I've looked hard at that,
and it's not close.


--
Dan Drake
dd@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.dandrake.com/
porlockjr.blogspot.com
.

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