Apple MacBook Pro 17" Anti-Glare Notebook MC110LL/A

I'm about as far as you can get from a mac fanboy. I've openly criticized Apple's approach to just about everything in business from its highly proprietary worldview to itunes DRM and everything in between. I've done this despite being fond of Macbooks, OS X, and my friends who work at Apple.

I'm not alone.

I've run linux on virtually everything I own for almost ten years now. Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu. My wife runs ubuntu on her dell laptop and she's not even a technical person.

But I was beginning to see the cracks in the armor of the open source approach. I've been blown away in general at the technical achievement, but there are serious problems in the way that design, QA, bugs, and bug triage are handled. You don't get that for free. Period.

At least not well.

There's a lesson that the linux guys are starting to learn - when you try to put your OS on numbers of machines above 10^6, or beyond, and multiply by the number of peripherals that are expected to be supported, you have a very large problem.

Microsoft solves this by throwing money at the problem. Walk through the halls of building 27 on the Redmond campus as I did in 1997 and you'd find stacks upon stacks of peripheral boxes sitting outside developer's offices. Why? Because they actually design, build, and test with that stuff.

Apple, of course, solves this problem by placing severe constraints on the hardware on which their OS has to run. They control the machines. Period. That gives them a huge competitive advantage that is well-documented. It also narrows consumer choice.

Since Barry Schwartz documented that our satisfaction is inversely proportional to the number of choices, Apple's success is not difficult to understand.

The peripheral environment has gotten more open over the years, but a fair bit of that burden is stomached by the peripheral makers, no matter how poorly, not Apple.

You can argue that Apple's relationship to OS X's BSD roots is no different than Canonical's relationship to the Linux kernel, and you would be correct; however, the major difference is one of scale. It's still a really large problem, one that is not being filled well by open source volunteers, no matter their intent, or nobility. I myself have contributed all manner of bug reporting, patches, and source code, but the problem is not the source code, it's what happens with that source code when it trickles down through the development process.

So I finally broke down and bought a mac, but not just any mac - a MacBook Pro 17" with the antiglare 1920x1200 screen, 4 GB RAM, and 320 GB disk at a grand off the list price from Mac Mall after the $150 rebate.

If you're looking for reviews of this machine, look here.

If you're looking for insane amounts of detail about the various generations of this machine and their similarities and differences, look here.

So why did I all of a sudden decide to switch?

I love ubuntu, but the instability in the 64 bit desktop variants that I was running was getting the best of me, resulting in a few crashed and completely gone file systems, among other woes. I was to the point where I just didn't have time to sort out the latest regression in the kernel, the file system, or whatever package somebody decided to muck up this week.

Having had a few bad experiences recently with the glare on PC laptops, I couldn't imagine how bad the new black bezel macbooks would be. Love the design, but the usability in anything but darkness has to be compromised. I prefer working with a little natural daylight beaming through my office window so those glossy screens are a non-starter. The nice thing about the antiglare option on the 17" macbook pro is that it has the silver bezel like the older-styled powerbooks. No, it doesn't have the I-only-wear-black-mock-turtlenecks-hipness of the new black bezel but it has absolutely no reflectance and the LED backlit screen is so bright it has to be seen to be believed.

So, why do I love this machine so much?

1. The screen. Did I mention the screen?
2. The keyboard. Finally, a notebook keyboard that's anywhere near the quality of my old thinkpad.
3. The multitouch trackpad. There's been way too much said about this buttonless multitouch trackpad, but it makes mousing so easy, I wonder how I lived without it.
4. The form factor. Incredible structural rigidity plus light weight plus thin equals the most portable no-compromises desktop-cum-notebook on the planet.
5. OS X brings it all together. This harkens back to Geoffrey Moore's concept of the whole product - a gestalt, if you will. There's not anything I've wanted to do that I can't. Imagine that.

So, when you put together the first three, you have arguably covered the most important of the I/O bases. Get those three things right in a hardware design and people will line up in droves. Yes, the OS matters, but the hardware is so good I'd be embarrassed if I were trying to compete with this thing.

I thought I would begin documenting my experience switching my daily work over to the mac from my last five years or so of ubuntu linux.

While I've had Powerbooks on at least 2 or 3 occasions at work, they've tended to be the exception not the rule and so my knowledge, or rather remembrance, of all things mac is sketchy at best. This switching article at life hacker helped me remember some of the keystrokes that I was so fond of like command-tilde to switch among active windows within a single application.

Here's the list of Mac OS X software that I'm currently using:

Spotlight So far I've been using spotlight as a replacement for my old habit of using quicksilver for search-as-navigation and that has worked great.

Time Machine One thing that I hate about the way this product is designed is that the alternative storage solutions that it supports are so buried as to make them useless to anyone without a computer science degree. But this post makes setting up Time Machine to work with a freenas vmware appliance trivial.

Free NAS Did I mention Free NAS? While not ostensibly related to Mac OS X, it's inclusion in my time machine solution (based on lots of free disk laying around in various vmware servers) should give you an idea of how I feel about it. Totally web-based administration, clean interface, smart defaults, what's not to like? - one of the easiest to configure NAS solutions I've seen.

Virtual Box Setting up ubuntu jeos 8.04.3 (that's juice) on VirtualBox was trivial with the exception of Guest Services. I used this post to get that configured on JeOS. Also, cloning virtual machines is getting easier with import/export. On version 3.x I did the following:

1. export the guest that I wanted to clone.
2. import the guest changing the name and the disk that I wanted to use for the new guest.
3. switch the network adapter of the new guest to another bridged adapter.
4. boot into the new guest.
5. delete the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-network.rules file.
6. edit /etc/hostname and change the hostname.
7. reboot.

VueScan The Canon LIDE 50 USB scanner that I have has such broken Mac OS X support that it's a miracle it works at all which is amazing given how it just works on ubuntu. The current generation LIDE 50 drivers don't work with 10.5 intel. So you have to use the LIDE 30 driver. That works but the Canoscan Toolbox doesn't work on 10.5 intel either. Neither version that I tried worked so I resorted to vuescan after reading that some people had gotten the driver to work with photoshop. It appears that applications with scanner support (most likely TWAIN) will work.

Spaces Clearly part of Mac OS X itself, this is a big deal since just about anybody accustomed to modern desktops on Linux is used to virtual desktops. Spaces solves that problem on OS X and is a welcome addition AFAIC.

HP Color Laserjet 2600 N While obviously not a piece of software, the venerable laserjet has remained among my favorite devices for reasons that have more to do with software. Configures automagically on both OS X and Linux presumably thanks to bonjour and the underlying zero conf networking bits.

AFP on Ubuntu Linux This guide was the best for getting AFP (the Apple Filing Protocol and Time Machine) setup on Ubuntu. I mount my development file system from a virtual box guest so that I can edit on the host using TextMate instead of fooling around in the JeOS guest.

TextMate I don't know how I lived so long without TextMate. I've had licenses for it at 3 of 3 places I've worked where I had a mac on my desk so I guess I'm a fan.

IStatPro I like to know what my machine is doing under the covers, thus I need a decent system monitor widget. This is it. They also have the similar functionality for the menu bar. I like the menu bar widgets so well that I rarely if ever use dashboard which strikes me as an odd modality anyhow.

EasyEclipse for Python I don't care what language you prefer, the EasyEclipse builds are the best. I'm running the latest stable version and it works great. There's a ganymede 3.4 build available but I try to avoid the pre-release stuff.

Seashore Think gimp light with less features but better usability. Photoshop it ain't, but it doesn't cost a grand either.

MythTV Frontend I used this build. Works great running with my Mythbuntu back end.