Sam's World Of No

The launch of the MacBook Air this week re-opened a can of worms for me; should my new laptop be a Mac, and now that Air is here, should I choose it over the MacBook Pro which I have previously considered my best choice?

The Mac vs Windows issue is still not solved for me. Ever since my G3, which was found in the lobby of our building with “free to a good owner” taped to it, I have been very impressed with the OSX interface. It is easy to use, and it is progressive. And it does what it does so much better than Windows. The appeal for me was clear.

Of course, Apple’s attack is part cool, part beauty and part ease of use - the latter is what mainly attracts me; but people tend to think of you as gullible if you even suggest that coolness and beauty are something to be attracted to. Yet the fact is that people like me spend a lot of time at computers, and having them be a nice play to be is no bad thing; in fact it’s a great thing. And the fact that they’re ideally suited to web development just adds to the allure.

So what to get? Well, the “same [old] lovable MacBook” isn’t going to cut it, so I’m stuck between Air and Pro. A friend told me I should “go pro, fo’ sho’” (he like me, is so totally ghetto it’s unbelievable), but it’s not that simple. Here’s the comparison in brief:

MacBook Air

• Light and small.
• Base processor is a 1.6 Core 2 Duo.
• 2 gig mem
• 80 gig hard drive
• 5 hours batt
• No SuperDrive
• 13 inch screen
• £1,199

Macbook Pro

• Still pretty light and pretty small.
• Base processor is a meaty 2.2 Core 2 Duo
• Extensible 2 gig mem
• 120 gig hard drive
• 6 hours bat
• 15 inch screen
• SuperDrive
• £1,299

Until I realised today that the prices were so similar, I was sold on Air. It’s a good deal compared to the pretty (but not as usable) Vaio TX, but it’s clear from the £100 difference that you’re paying for the portability both in terms of cost and in terms of technical specifications. And let’s not forget, when talking of tech specs, that the equivalent Dell laptops are fat, expensive beasts. The bigger Vaio models are nice, but not as nice as Mac. Then again, they are quite a bit cheaper. But they’ll have Vista on them - and the advances that Vista represents over XP are few, especially after you’ve had to turn off all the fancy graphics affects because they overload your system.

So anybody considering buying an Air has to ask themselves “really, how important is the ultra-portability to me”. I think for most people used to lugging around a Windows laptop, the answer will be “not very”, especially considering the improvement in portability that a Pro represents over these clunky machines. If the Air was £800, I would consider it. As it is, it’s MacBook Pro all the way.

Of course, I’ll change my mind again tomorrow. Fo’ sho’. Ho’.

Bookmark:

Today, I have been fighting Firefox and Wordpress, partners in crime. Let’s be clear: I’m a lover, not a fighter. I just want things to get along.

I don’t think that my realisation, some years ago, that trying to only ask software to do things that it was designed to do was a reasonable way to conduct life, was a particularly important epiphany. After a youth spent tinkering I was done, and I stopped building computers, I stopped re-inventing programming wheels and I started sympathising with Mac users like Zeldman when they have problems just from trying to use software in the way it was designed to work.

Therein lies my frustration with Firefox. I’m a recent convert and yes, overall it is better than IE, but dear lord does it use memory. I don’t tend to shut down my pc, I hibernate it, so after three or four days I start noticing that stuff is lagging. Why? Because Facebook uses some ridiculous number of AJAX requests to load each page, a number that is multiplied if you or your friends have installed any of the applications that are now taking over the site (and the world). So I leave Facebook open in a tab, Gmail in another, and check in on them every now and then. A mere 3 or 4 hours later, Firefox will be using a manly 250mb of memory. The worst thing is that Firefox only runs one version of itself by default (I say this because I haven’t gone through the settings to see if a similar option to IE’s “run each version independently” exists), so I have to shut down every Firefox browser, every tab, to get my memory back. Hopefully, when the cookie scope bug is fixed, this will become less of a problem. That bug will also help with trying to develop over multiple sessions with Firefox, which at the moment is, frankly, a nightmare.

Wordpress is a different kettle of fish, it’s hard to break it but when you do, run for the hills. I’m a very competent user of this development platform, but I’m not kidding you when I tell you I had to re-install it twice over the course of trying to get this site working. If you get some bad data into that wp_posts table, you really do seem to be screwed. JavaScript errors (which Firefox/Firebug for some reason seem to ignore) appear. You can’t edit pages, you can’t save them. Clearing out the table doesn’t help. I ended up dropping the database and starting again.

The problem of course is that while I’m doing this, at the back of my mind is the thought that Firefox will soon need restarting again. This is because Wordpress does almost as many AJAX requests as Facebook, and it does seem to be these requests, constantly checking in for updates (Gmail is a major culprit as well) clog up the system. It’s not a big problem, but it is unnerving. Just as soon as I think that I’m getting somewhere, I immediately feel like I’m going to have to restart Firefox again. With IE, you can run it forever. Well, until it crashes. My version of IE on my home pc is so angry that I switched away that it now crashes on boot.

So this was my re-introduction to blogging. I’m back because I am jealous of all the people who never used to blog, and now do. I remember blogger being launched - I must have been amongst the very first batch of users. I remember when people used to call blogs ‘b-logs’ cos they didn’t know what the word meant. I’m back because, again, I feel like I have something to write about, and today I summoned the impetus to get this site and its 10-minute design online.

Bookmark: