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Little Mac
Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 01:10 amAfter many years of saving our pennies, we are now the proud owner of a laptop. To be more specific about the “we” part, it officially belongs to Nalan, but I get to play with it, and to be more specific about the “laptop” part, it’s a MacBook.
Yes, I have finally joined the community of Mac users—or at least put my head round the door. I shall start by saying what all non-Mac users say that really annoys faithful Mac users: Macs are weird. I say this not as some clueless newbie who has only ever used Windows XP and is going “Duh, where’s ‘Start’?”, but as someone who has used KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment and even fvwm. My latest KDE setup even prompted a colleague to say, “For God’s sake, if you want your desktop to look like that, why don’t you buy a Mac?” Aqua may look cool, but it sure as hell takes some getting used to. Having the menu for each application along the same strip at the top sounds like a sensible idea (you always click in the same place for the Edit menu, for example) but in practice, I find it confusing, especially when I'm switching rapidly between apps. It’s an option in KDE as well, and one that I’ve never used for more than ten minutes. Then there’s the practice of getting to your applications by opening the applications folder, the graphic equivalent of typing
Another problem is that I still haven’t managed to connect to the campus wireless network, but then I haven’t been able to do that in Linux either, so I assume this means the person to blame is our sysadmin rather than blue meanies at Apple Inc.
Nevertheless, these fade into insignificance beside the awesome coolness of the MacBook. I’s slim, it’s light, it’s white. That’s why I didn’t buy the MacBook Pro—who wants to pay extra money for a laptop that’s the same colour as a Dell? (Naturally, this argument is particularly compelling when you don’t actually have the money in question.)
Yes, I have finally joined the community of Mac users—or at least put my head round the door. I shall start by saying what all non-Mac users say that really annoys faithful Mac users: Macs are weird. I say this not as some clueless newbie who has only ever used Windows XP and is going “Duh, where’s ‘Start’?”, but as someone who has used KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment and even fvwm. My latest KDE setup even prompted a colleague to say, “For God’s sake, if you want your desktop to look like that, why don’t you buy a Mac?” Aqua may look cool, but it sure as hell takes some getting used to. Having the menu for each application along the same strip at the top sounds like a sensible idea (you always click in the same place for the Edit menu, for example) but in practice, I find it confusing, especially when I'm switching rapidly between apps. It’s an option in KDE as well, and one that I’ve never used for more than ten minutes. Then there’s the practice of getting to your applications by opening the applications folder, the graphic equivalent of typing
ls /usr/bin. Kind of reminds me of Windows 3.* (not surprisingly, since that was a blatant rip-off of the old Apple interface).Another problem is that I still haven’t managed to connect to the campus wireless network, but then I haven’t been able to do that in Linux either, so I assume this means the person to blame is our sysadmin rather than blue meanies at Apple Inc.
Nevertheless, these fade into insignificance beside the awesome coolness of the MacBook. I’s slim, it’s light, it’s white. That’s why I didn’t buy the MacBook Pro—who wants to pay extra money for a laptop that’s the same colour as a Dell? (Naturally, this argument is particularly compelling when you don’t actually have the money in question.)
