I'm not sure if this applies to the MacBooks, but on my Core2 Duo Mac Mini, the left audio channel frequently gets a lot of static when playing music; it seems to be a random thing on boot; either you will have static on this boot or you won't. It's a common problem of the Mini with Linux, but I have no idea if it ever happens on any other Mac.
If you're a KDE user, then OSX's finder will drive you mad. They don't have IOSlaves, but they do now have Fuse, which can allow you to browse remote file systems over ssh. If the ssh connection goes down, every finder window (including the desktop) freezes until the fuse connection times out, and it never feels quite as nice as KDE's IOSlave system, but it does make browsing of remote systems possible.
Spaces is a little flaky if you try to use it the way you use a normal multiple desktop implementation. With spaces, you can have either all windows of an application on the same virtual desktop, or you can allow them to be on multiple desktops. If you do multiple desktops, then alt-tabbing to a running application won't ever switch your current desktop. Since OSX generally only has one instance of each application running, this can make switching between windows of the same program on different desktops a bit of a pain. It's not terrible, but it isn't as smooth as it could be.
To be honest, I'm not really sure why a developer would use a MacBook at this point. When I bought mine, Linux's wifi support was a sick joke, which made it pretty pointless for a laptop. OSX is very polished and clean, but their developer tools for python, php, etc are going to be the same tools you'd be using under any other OS, I would think. Is TextMate a killer app for OSX now? What does OSX offer that's really good for web development?
I'm perfectly happy with Coda for web development, although I wish it had function collapsing.
The real advantage of OS X is that the rest of the system gets the heck out of your way so that you can get work done. There's a million tiny little touches in the system that make life easier, so you spend more time doing actual development instead of wrestling with the email attachment that Aunt Edna sent you.
It's also the most popular *NIX out there, outnumbering everything else by an order of magnitude (or two). That means that virtually all recent UNIX software has been either been tested on the Mac, or written on one. That's nice.
Sorry to rain on your parade but both of these statements are wrong.
Under the hood it is Unix, includes Python and wxPython by default, Xcode is free and an awesome development environment so I can do as much and more than I can with a Linux box.
If you need to run Ubuntu, just do it in Parallels, otherwise your annoyance is going to be having to reboot into OSX.
Tried Parallels, and had too many problems.
VirtualBox is a very good alternative and open source which is always a plus.
It’s just that I could be an outlier, these kinds of stories are always so freaking anecdotal and not really a help when deciding what to buy.
My screen failed and was exchanged. Then my main board failed and was exchanged. Now everything seems to be working fine. Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot, my DVD drive was unable to burn anything so it was exchanged. The exchanged drive was also unable to burn anything and was exchanged again. After those two tries it finally worked. And I already destroyed two batteries. After mere 110 cycles both were unable to hold much charge (they lasted for 30 min or less). Both were exchanged.
All this, and the MBP is not even two years old. Since I have Apple Care I didn’t have to pay for labour or parts, but I had to pay for transport to and from the few places in Germany where Apple hardware is repaired and I didn’t have my laptop for several weeks in the span of those last few months.
I hope that’s all for now because I actually still like my MBP. I planned to buy a new one at the earliest in three years, but after all those failures I don’t have much hope that my MBP is going to make it.
But: it simply cannot be the case that every or even a big percentage of Macs fail like this. With Apple having to pay for two batteries, one whole screen, a main board and two DVD drives plus all the labour they certainly didn’t make any profit from my purchase.
(Oh, I nearly forgot, the "F" key on my keyboard failed, too. It – i.e. the whole keyboard – was also replaced.)
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/0413212
Resetting the power management memory seems to fix it, but this amounts to rebooting. C'mon! It's just like I'm back on Windows 95!
1) Hard drive had IO errors and was replaced (2 months)
2) One of my keys stopped working. (9 months)
3) The right fan died. (10 months)
The last company I worked at had a small fleet of MPB's and hardware problems were a regular occurrence. Far more frequent than when I was at an IBM/thinkpad shop, but drastically less than when I worked with Dells.
Jeremy
You have 2 verified MBP users with a total of 4 problematic MBPs. That's raw data right there.
Do not confuse data with statistics.
No cut and paste between windows - But I use the command line for most things, so it's not that big of a deal
Out of curiosity, what is a typical "donation" to the developer in this style of licensing?
As an aside, does anyone know of an agregator of blog posts concerning sales data for ISV's?
Still, these issues are minor and infrequent. Linux installs aren't always painless and will require triage from time to time, too. But compared to doing the same stuff on windows, well ...
I've owned a couple (15" MBP currently), and I think there is more durable hardware out there that can be had cheaper.
I don't really have any annoyances with OSX or the MBP hardware. That is not to say it is perfect, just that I knew what to expect going in, and that there is no all around perfect OS or hardware. I do find the overall annoyances much less than when I've had to work on plastic (Thinkpad) laptops with Windows.
Several of the OSX annoyance I have faced came from switching to a mac from Linux using a tiling windows manager. I found some software "SizeUp" http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/ that lets me do similar keyboard controlled tiling of windows and with few other cheap apps I'm almost 100% keyboard :)
For me, the real winner is AppleCare. Apple has the best support that I've encountered for consumer hardware. It's also valid anywhere in the world, which is a lifesaver if you do a lot of international traveling.
I always just use 'mv', etc. from a terminal. So this is genuine curiosity - is there something that other people do for which a Finder window and cut and paste is better/faster/less prone to mistakes, or is it just that the shell is not as familiar for them?
I just can't imagine a hacker workflow that involves doing that even once per week, much less day.
I'm not saying I don't miss Cut/Paste on those occasions, but it comes up so rarely and I feel like I gain so much more by using OS X that I just don't care.
At first I couldn't think of a real use-case that matched your description, but then I realized one that might be close - Say I want to copy some pictures in a directory that relate to a craigslist posting over into another directory. I've done that. And since I only ever use those photos once, I prefer not to import them into something like iPhoto or the like.
So that's a case for having a GUI file manager, but (back to the original point), I'm not sure it's a case for cut n' paste.
There's no real downside to running any Linux distro in a VM. (Again, I recommend VMware Fusion.) You can put each VM in its own full-screen space and switch around between them (and Mac OS X) with a keystroke.
Highly recommended.
(BTW, the way that Fusion works it that it essentially goes "under" OS X, when Fusion is running; it becomes a hypervisor, running OS X and the other OS(es) as virtual guests on an equal footing.
I heard a great talk at C4[1] from one of the VMware Mac engineers, who said that the Apple engineers weren't very happy to learn the details of how virtualization works (since it replaces their precious OS at the lowest level), but they didn't really have any choice, either. ;-)
This blog entry contains a video of the talk along with some other relevant links.
The talk is quite entertaining, reasonably deep, and highly recommended if you're interested in such things.
Oops, this is an anti-annoyance. ;-)
Four things OS X can learn from Windows 95 http://www.tinyapps.org/weblog/mac/200703210700_four_things_...
You would think that after all these years, Apple would have copied these simple yet essential abilities from Windows 95:
1. In Spotlight's search result window, files should be able to be deleted, copied, moved, renamed, etc.
2. Spotlight should offer an "In Folder" or "Location" column rather than forcing the user to press the tiny "i" symbol for each result.
3. The Trash should have two more columns: "Date Deleted" and "Original Location".
4. The context menu in the Trash should offer a "Restore" option to return files to their original location. This is especially useful in putting back the 20 or 30 files from 10 different locations that Adobe asked you to remove and then realized they shouldn't have.
Sorry about that - you're right about the deleting and copying in Leopard. As with the Finder in general, files cannot be cut/moved, and renaming is not available from the Context Menu or by pressing Enter (though it is available by clicking the file names).
As for #2 ("In Folder" or "Location" column in Spotlight results), can you please tell me how to display such a column?
1) The new Macbook Pros moved all the function keys around. I can no longer control the volume with one hand, because the Fn key is too far away from F10-F12. (I want my F-keys to be F-keys, not Fn-F-keys, because I use Windows via Fusion all the time, and use F-keys in Mellel all the time as well).
2) When opening a Finder window, Finder starts to create thumbnails of all the documents it understands, and replacing the default file icons with the thumbnails. Nice feature - except that every time it creates a new thumbnail it refreshes the window. Consequently, if you are trying to rename a file, you can't do it in the window. Every time you try, the window refreshes, and you lose focus on the filename! You are forced to do a Command-I just to rename a file. There is no reason this has to happen. Why can't Finder refresh a thumbnail without stealing focus? Idiotic.
But the worst thing is that when I switched to my Dell Notebook (ArchLinux), I was too used to the iMac's mouse =\
I think I use USB overdrive on my iMac which might explain why I don't have the same problem with it. Or it might just be that I use a Razor-mouse.
I enter only those shortcuts that I tend to need from whatever App I use. I spend the odd 10 minutes each day repeating keystrokes. The shortcuts seem to stick in the grey matter after a while.
Windows-style "pick up here, drop there": - make selection with mouse - cut with keboard - navigate to destination with mouse - paste with keyboard
Mac-style "carry from here to there": - make selection with mouse - drag with mouse - navigate to destination with mouse - drop with mouse
You can learn to use the other kind, but if you have to switch between them often you'll likely grow frustrated with one or the other. With the Finder for lacking Cut and for others lacking spring-loaded folders and Expose.
But your point is well-taken.
Fitt's law helps here, though--you can ram your pointer up top and generally hit the menu bar.
I really like Terminator on linux; it's a python script that wrapps Gnome Terminal and lets you split the screen horizontally and vertically. I'd love to have that on OSX but don't want to run X/Gnome/etc.
Why does't toggle full screen work in stock X11?
Why is it so hard to get plan9/wmii to work properly :(
Binary package managent for common tools, like subversion etc.