Tom Morris

MacBook review: a significant improvement

On Wednesday, I purchased a new MacBook. My MacBook Pro (one of the 2.0Ghz ones that when they first switched from PowerPC to Intel) has almost given up the ghost, and it seemed like the perfect time to switch to the new machine. There are a lot of reviews that ooh and aah over the design changes on the new one. I haven’t got the time or inclination for that sort of thing. I expect Jonathan Ive gets so much smoke blown up his arse by admirers that it probably needs carbon offsetting. What matters to me is whether the design changes actually affect me.

I’m very impressed. The machine just feels a lot more solid. All of the engineering and design magic that they pioneered on the Air machine has worked on these machines. The screen on my MBP sort of ‘wobbles’ when you open it - it doesn’t feel like it’s properly attached to the rest of the machine. On the new machine, you have to exert quite a lot of force before that baby will bend. The build quality will make road warriors very happy, and hopefully will mean that you won’t have to follow Tantek’s example and keep a spare ‘house’ machine.

Another thing which looks like it may be a much smaller problem as a result of these changes is the CD/DVD burner. After a few months, the DVD burner would get sort of bent inside the case. The case design looks like it may prevent this problem. That said, I’ve burned a few DVD-R volumes on the new machine. The drive isn’t that quick - 8x - and it does make some very strange noises while burning. Burner speeds are important on laptops - if you are a bit of a road warrior, the amount of time you have access to ‘flat time’ (that is, time when you are using the machine in a stable, flat place like a desk) can be pretty limited. I burn a lot of volumes and the speed is such as to be quite annoying. I just use Disk Utility, Finder and iTunes for burning. I haven’t found anything as simple as the Finder for burning data discs on Windows or Linux (K3B comes fairly close - but I’m not at all sure why, with Disk Utility, Finder and iTunes, people pay for Toast and Disco). I did have a weird problem burning from iTunes the other day, and solved it by basically creating a disk image in Disk Utility and burning that.

As a touch-typist, the keyboard is very nice to type on, even though the shape and spacing of the keys made a lot of people think that it might not be particularly optimal. It looks like it will be significantly easier to keep clean than the old one. I rather miss the small enter key, and am considering remapping the right-hand alt to serve that function. I’ve had that wired into my brain for a long time (this year will be the tenth of Mac use). As one of the other reviews pointed out (I can’t remember which), the underlighting for the keyboard leaks a lot of light if viewed from any angle than above. If I’m working in a darker environment, I tend to turn them down to one block, which provides me enough light to see the keys, but not so much that it spills out under the keys too much. That said, I don’t really need to have lit-up keys as I know where the keys are already.

The change of the defaults on the function keys has actually been mostly for the better. I very much like the fact that F8 is wired up to play/pause media applications, as it means I don’t have to scramble to switch to iTunes and hit the space bar when someone interrupts me. I’m guessing, but I haven’t verified, that the F7, F8 and F9 commands are wired to the same system calls as the Apple Remote is. I’ve noticed one other thing about this: if you spend even a minimal amount of time transcribing text, this is a superb addition.

The case itself feels a lot easier to keep clean - I’m not one of these neat freak people who perform some kind of ritual cleansing before they dare touch their precious computer. On the MacBook Pro, the wrist rest would get covered in some kind of gluey brown muck. Whatever it was, I’m no longer afflicted by it. If there can be any complaint about the wrist rest, it’s that the solid aluminium bezel edge can be quite uncomfortable when ones’s wrists are laying on it. It sort of feels like they are cutting in slightly. I’m not sure if there is going to be similar problems at the larger Pro form factors.

I think one of the other things the unibody might prevent is water damage. I’m not up for trying it, but it certainly looks like you could probably subject this machine to more water damage than the old PowerBook/MacBookPro casing and not end up with it costing you a fortune.

One of the nice things I like about the replaceable hard drives: I’ve had hard drives die and be replaced by AppleCare. They won’t upgrade them. I’m guessing that when (and, yes, it’s a hard drive and is subject to the laws of physics, meaning it will be a ‘when’ not an ‘if’ - even if I get bloody fucking irritated when it does happen) I have to replace it, I’ll be able to put in a drive significantly larger than the current sizeable 250Gb drive. Last time I bought an external backup drive, I paid just over a hundred quid for a 320Gb drive. You can now get 1TB externals for about that, which looks ideal for Time Machine (though I do think Time Capsule is a bloody rip off that only exists because Apple haven’t made Time Machine flexible enough - I wonder if someone has made something like Time Machine but a lot more flexible and using rsync).

As for the switch from fifteen to thirteen inches of screen? Well, for the last four months, I’ve been using an Acer AspireOne, which has a nine inch screen and a resolution of 1024x600. The 1280x800 now feels like plenty of room comparatively. The glossy screen actually doesn’t annoy me very much at all. I thought it would, but it doesn’t. If I were a designer, it might, but white text on a black background gives me enough contrast. Around the screen, there is a small band of black before the metal case rim, which is quite nice, and doesn’t stick out in the same way that the silver metal of the MacBook Pro did or the white plastic of the older iMac does (I’m root on a shared white iMac).

The battery life is great. It’ll last you just under three hours if you are pushing the machine hard and you’ve got the brightness on high. My typical usage is a MacVim window with iTunes in the background, with the screen brightness at three blocks, and I could easily get four hours usage like that.

I haven’t tested whether or not the long-standing issue with the Intel Macs where the start-up sound is not routed through headphones has been resolved. This was a constant irritation for me, and made the machine a lot less usable in areas where quiet is expected: on trains, and especially in classrooms and libraries. The in-built speakers are pretty good - not as good as plugging in some headphones or speakers, mind, but unlike a lot of laptop speakers, they are good enough that you can play some music and enjoy it, or listen to some speech and understand it.

The setup time for new Macs can be quite time-consuming. It took me most of a day to get setup. That’s basically installing the DevTools, installing all the apps I use, putting in serial numbers, setting up Keychains, setting up SSH keys, moving my iTunes library over, getting bloody frustrated at the fact that the MacPorts installer hangs for so long and requires me to faff around so much to install a few utilities (I’m still waiting for Apple to, I dunno, just set up a damn apt-get repository and put apt-get on all new Macs). MacPorts also takes hours to do very simple things. I just wanted to install wget and git last night. It took almost half an hour to download dependencies for wget. I had previously installed git using MacPorts and had to wait five hours for it to download, so decided to give it a miss and just compile the latest release from source. Plus, for some reason, when I ssh into Linux boxes from OS X, the backspace and delete keys are reversed, so I spent some time sorting that out (GNU Screen’s bell message - “Woof woof!” - leaves a little something to be desired).

The main problems I have had with Mac hardware look like they may have been resolved. As I’ve said numerous times before, I want to be a satisfied Apple customer. I’m hoping that I won’t have to call AppleCare about this machine, just like I’ve never had to call AppleCare about any desktop Macs. Only time will tell whether or not it’ll happen. My initial reaction is very good.

I want my front door hooked up to the Internet

One thing I’ve been thinking about is how I could get my front door to be a lot more useful. I’ve missed countless deliveries, visits and signed-for posted items because I’m not sitting within a ten foot radius of my front door. Generally, get a fair distance away from the front door, put some headphones on and play some music, and it’d take an earthquake (or an electricity cut) to pull me away. A delivery man knocking on the door does not count. I’m not the first person to discuss this. And it looks like Roo Reynolds may have actually done it.

Ideally, what I’d like is to have a variety of notifications delivered to me when someone is at the door. If I’m logged into my Mac, a Growl notification would do the job (on Windows, Growl for Windows or Snarl; on Linux, libnotify and PyNotify). Maybe trigger a message via XMPP to my Google Talk account. If nobody is about, perhaps fire off an e-mail. Log files, maybe Twitter Direct Messages or a text message. If CCP were to make an API available, perhaps an in-game mail in EVE (for certain highly addicted players who reside in my home). Fill in the rest yourself.

How would we implement this? I’ve thought of two ways so far.

The first is to have a doorbell that can transmit on to the IP network. We’ve got two boxes that are turned on 24x7 and a wi-fi network. That’d certainly be one way of doing it. How to implement this though? Well, there are a couple of ways I can think of. First would be something that uses Bluetooth. This is okay, but it might need to be fairly long range. Bluetooth is limited in range, and the closest server is quite some distance away. So, wifi is the other alternative. I’d love to hear from the Arduino geeks some idea of how much work would go into rigging something like this up. Another way I thought of doing it would be to build a really small, cheap computer that could be attached near the front door and have a switch wired in. Something like a home-built Mac mini-sized box that could run Linux and do all that stuff.

The other way I’ve been thinking of is to actually take the doorbell we already have - a cheap radio wireless thing. I could basically modify the actual ringer box and have it so that when the bell is triggered, it also triggers a device that would connect to the IP network and send a packet to a server. Again, this could be done with Bluetooth - the ringer box would be a few foot closer to the server - or wifi. The other way I was thinking about was to have one of the servers monitor the radio spectrum that is used by the doorbell and then trigger the doorbell event when it ‘hears’ the doorbell signal. I have looked at GNU Radio and it’s cool but the ‘USRP’, the bit of hardware used with the application is $700, which is beyond my price range.

I’m surprised that nobody has made a wifi doorbell. This kind of thing would be so useful, it’s ridiculous. Similarly, I have a loathing for light switches. I don’t understand why we can’t have light switches and the lights they control hooked into the IP network.

The other way I thought of solving the problem is to use a camera. Now, cheap wi-fi cameras are pretty widely available - there are a few on Amazon.com for between about $70 and $300. One of these could be mounted somewhere, and when someone approaches the door, it’d set some motion detection going which could then trigger all the various events listed above to happen. This would have the extra bonus that an image could be taken of whoever is at the door.

I suck quite a lot when it comes to hardware. If anyone has any suggestions of the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to get this to work, I’m all ears.