Taking Delivery of my New Apple Macbook

I joked the other day that I was so pleased that Arsenal lost the Champions League final to Barcelona, I was going to order one of the those new Macbooks - well I actually did it in the end (there's schadenfreude for you) and it arrived yesterday, just in time for the bank holiday weekend. Hats off to Apple actually; the original date I was given when I placed the order was June 5th, the day before I go on holiday, then it got brought forward to next Tuesday, and it actually got delivered last Friday. Considering it was one of the white ones with extra RAM and a bigger hard disk, i.e. a "build to order", that's not bad.

I've always harboured guilty desires towards getting a Mac, but could never justify the 50%+ price premium that they charged up until recently. The new Macbook range, however, comes in at around £1000 with 1GB of RAM and a 100GB hard disk, and given that it's pretty compact - a 13" widescreen display, much smaller than my work Dell laptop - the price is pretty good now and compares well with the ultra-compacy Vaios you see at the airport duty free shops. For me, the attraction with Macs is OS X - an excellent UI on top of a Unix kernel - which seemed to give me the best of both worlds; a familiar command line environment not too dissimilar to Linux, with all the "fit and finish" of an Apple product. The clincher though was the fact that it now runs on an x86 CPU - a 2Ghz Core Duo to be exact - which means I can dual-boot into Windows, or run Linux (and therefore Oracle) on a VM.

So far it's been an interesting transition. Up until now I've been using a mix of Windows XP (for admin stuff) and Centos 4.2 (for Oracle, development work etc) with Centos either being hosted in a VM or running native on my home PC. Certainly going from XP to Centos is a lot easier than going from XP to OS X; in OS X, there's no Start Menu listing out all the programs you can access, instead you either find them using the finder, or they register icons of themselves in the dock at the bottom of the page.

Although the dock is "prettier", it does have a scalability problem, as you can't just add more and more icons to it. Also, the lack of a right mouse button is a bit strange; I'm using an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (not the Mighty Mouse) and everything seems to take twice as long to do - first select an icon, then go up to the menu bar and select the action, as opposed to just right mouse clicking. I'm sure I'll find a faster way soon, but it's a bit strange first of all.

What is impressive though is the attention to detail, and the visual style. Part of the decision to buy a Mac was down to seeing the reviews of Vista that are coming out, with the Aero Glass effects looking particularly gaudy and User Account Protection making the system pretty much unusable if you want to run in anything other that Administrator mode. In contrast, OS X was here now, had the same sort of features (and better ones to boot) as Vista, and was also based on a solid Unix core. Now I've had a play around with it, the quality is certainly unmistakable, and I'm certainly impressed so far.

As a contrast, I also took the opportunity to get a new phone last week. I used to have an Orange SPV C600, a Windows Mobile 5.0-based phone that I was considering binning as it obviously wasn't going to sync with my new Mac. What was good about the phone was that it had a terrific 65K colour screen with a 240x320 screen, but it wouldn't sync with the Mac and I was due for a free upgrade. I had a look around and got a new Sony Ericsson W810i, with a 2 megapixel camera, MP3 player and an FM radio, plus of course it'll sync with a Mac (and with Evolution on Linux as well). Anyway, the phone arrived last week, and you know what - I've ended up sending it back and keeping the C600. Although the Sony Ericsson works with the Mac, the screen resolution, and software, was rubbish, and as I mainly use it for picking up emails (on Mobile Outlook) and reading RSS feeds (using NewsBreak) I was better off sticking with what I've got. I'll save my free upgrade for later, when I can get hold of a compatible phone that's actually useful for something other than games.

The only sticking point now with the Mac is that I can't use my Vodafone 3G card with it, as there's no PCMCIA slot in this new model. There are a couple of workarounds - you can get USB to PCMCIA adapters, but they're pricey ($200 or so) or not all that practical for me to take on the train, so I'll probably have to stick with WiFi if I'm on the move. Also, now I've got the Mac, I'll have to think about what I'll do with my PC; it's a dual core Athlon x64 with 2GB of RAM - if I don't end up using it for Windows XP much more, I'll convert it to a full-time Linux server and use it as an Oracle development and testbed.