One month with a MacBook Pro

I had been putting it off for ages, but finally gave in. Or perhaps “gave out” would be a better term. The five-year-old 800MHz PowerBook G4 that I graciously received from my last job—the one with the not-so-insignificantly cracked case; the one sporting a EFF sticker; the one with frequent bouts of epilepsy—has been retired. I could no longer cope with the imminent fear of hard drive crashes and data loss.

While I had been salivating over the Apple Store for months, admittedly I don't think now is a good time to buy, especially when you work in a design firm. Already in entering eyeball-depth debt, I figured I had to skimp on a few things … 7200 RPM discs … extra RAM. This was a bad idea.

Adobe and Rosetta are not friends

All I wanted to do was close a file. Albeit a big one, but still—⌘+tab, ⌘+w—no big deal, right? Wrong. It took seven minutes to switch from Flash to Illustrator and close a file. Seven minutes. Seven.

Seven, coincidentally, is the hour that evening when the tech at CompUSA installed the 2 gigabytes of RAM I should have bought in the first place.

I figured moving from a TiBook 800MHz to a 2.0GHz MacBook Pro would show some kind of performance boost. And it did… but not really. My impressions:

• Flash is genuinely snappy. I'm not sure how, but for all of my other gripes, Flash performs as well as can be expected.
• For general use, Photoshop and Illustrator have slightly better performance than my old machine. While working in one application, the menus are snappier and the rendering only suffers from a tiny bit of lag.
• When working with multiple applications, they wet themselves. Rebuilding panels when tabbing between applications takes an absurd amount of time, and having more than one Adobe application open with Rosetta is painful.
• Using any Rosetta application makes everything worse. Having Rosetta applications gobble upRAM very quickly, and can make the machine seize up even when they are not active.

All of these problems were magnified while running with only 512MB of RAM. Intel OS X seriously chugs on that little RAM even without Rosetta running—anyone planning on using their computer for more than e-mail, browsing, media and word processing should consider investing in more.

There is hope

I was surprised at just how many applications are already available as universal binaries. Almost everything I've needed (with Office and CS2 the notable exceptions) I've been able to get as a Universal Binary. Even odd stuff like Mac GPG and its Mail.app plugin.

Flirting with the dark side

It took a few weeks before I broke down and did it, but with CSS there is no other way. A few weeks after purchasing my MacBook, I went to the Student Union and purchased a license for Windows XP (boo! hiss!). Seriously—how does anyone using this operating system get anything done? (To be fair, the crappy user interfaces, spyware, spamware and viruses probably keep people from blogging, creating ringtones with GarageBand or cataloging all of their books in a library program). This brings me to my points:

• Microsoft! I'm not a criminal!
• I don't want to waste my cell phone minutes on you.

Seriously. These jerks have made it such that every time I have to re-install the OS (three times and counting, as I play with partition sizes and virtualization) Microsoft makes me call them to activate Windows. They also make me enter my entire address just to install the software. Who do they think they are? I paid for Windows, now leave me alone. I hope the Darwine guys get on their horses. If Microsoft never sees another dollar of my money, I will die a happy man.

That said, Parallels Desktop for Mac blows sliced bread out of the water. I was skeptical. It's really that good (until Leopard comes out, that is).