I'm into my second week using the 2 GHz Unibody MacBook for
production work and things are going reasonably well.
It's Fast
The machine has so far proved very stable and seems comfortable
running my suite of production applications with the standard 2 GB
of RAM. I still plan to max it out to eventually, but it definitely
feels like it's breathing easier than the 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook with
1.5 GB of memory has for the past year or so. I expect that the faster
processor and video accelerator contribute to that impression.
With the PowerBook, I would perceive things slowing down as the
virtual memory swap files accumulated and hard drive accessing
increased after two or three days of uptime. There are six swap files
in the var/vm folder after nine days of uptime on the MacBook as well,
but slowdowns from accessing them are not notably perceptible. I expect
that the 5400 RPM hard drive (as opposed to the 4200 RPM unit in the
PowerBook) helps with that.
Adjustments
There have been some adjustments and annoyances - getting used to
being without Eudora Classic
being the biggest. I'm getting used to Thunderbird,
but not liking it a whole lot more with familiarity. It works, but many
routine tasks that were so easy and slick with Eudora take more steps
and are more tedious. It does, however, do a much nicer job of
rendering HTML email.
Actually, I still have access to my email files in Eudora Classic -
the program starts up and runs; it just refuses to send messages over
my dialup connection through the Apple USB modem.
Slow Dialup
Speaking of which, the USB modem has proved reliable so far, but I
do notice that throughput with this setup (I'm not sure the modem
itself is to blame) isn't as lively (so to speak - I get 26,400 bps
connections) as it is with the PowerBook G4 or even the old Pismo PowerBooks.
The Slipstream Dial-Up
Accelerator software I've been renting from my ISP for five bucks a
month for the past 18 months or so refuses to work on the Intel
machine. I phoned tech support and got a dismissive and terse "not
compatible, sorry" response from the agent I spoke with, so I canceled
the service, which was only marginally satisfactory anyway. The
operative theory behind the software is that it compresses - and
therefore degrades - the quality of webpage images to varying degrees,
depending upon how much speed (i.e.: compression) you specify using a
slider on the interface window. To get substantial improvement, you
really have to nuke the image resolution.
Opera Turbo Preview
Happily, Opera released a public preview of their Opera Turbo browser last week.
Turbo uses a server-side optimization and compression technology that,
like the Slipstream Dialup Accelerator, speeds up data transfer by
reducing the amount of data that needs to be downloaded in order to
view pages by up to 80%, thereby providing significant improvement in
browsing speeds over limited-bandwidth connections like mine, although
it is mainly targeted to smartphone users on slow connections.
No matter - it works really well, a lot better than the Slipstream
accelerator software, and it degrades images less in the bargain. Since
Opera is already my favorite browser, it's no hardship using it. The
software is alpha-quality at this point and has some compatibility
problems on a few sites, but the increase in speed is nothing short of
dramatic, especially if I turn the images off altogether. A timely
introduction, and it's free.
Opera says Turbo will be part of future desktop versions of their
browser, and I can't wait for a fully debugged final version to be
released.
You can watch turbo in action in a video linked from the Turbo blog site.
Another Casualty
Another tool that broke was the little Notepad Deluxe mini-database application that
I've used for years as a temporary parking space and organizer for
work-in-progress research material. The program starts and runs and
accepts the registration serial number, but the registration won't
"stick" through a quit and restart. Notepad Deluxe hasn't been updated
for some time, and evidently development has been terminated, so I
guess it's a casualty.
As a replacement, I've found that the freeware text editor Smultron works quite well. What
commends Smultron for this task is that it displays all open documents
in a list with Quick Look icons to your left, similarly to the iTunes
interface, so you can easily switch between documents.
Closing Thoughts
I'm getting along reasonably happily with the smaller display,
although it is an adjustment after the 17" screen in the PowerBook -
more scrolling on webpages and so forth. The LED backlit display is
wonderfully bright, which helps, and I find its glossiness pretty much
a non-issue for me. One odd idiosyncrasy, though, is that the
brightness setting doesn't stay set and has to be reset from time to
time.
On the provisional to-do list for this week are getting an initial
Time Machine backup done and installing more software, particularly
MacSpeech
Dictate.
In general, I'm finding this MacBook a pleasant work tool so far.
