joereger.com
something opinionated and awesome goes here
| 10 Month | 7 Day | 2011 Year |
| 9 Hour | 30 Minute | AM |
MacBook Pro 2011
First Mac product I've purchased in 15 or 20 years. Coincidentally, I pushed the Order button just 10 minutes before the news flash about Steve Jobs. They interrupted prime time television to make the announcement of his death. These days I'm working with Hadoop and other open source big data technologies from the Hadoop ecosystem. After working on a desktop from home for some time my many laptops have gotten old/slow/obsolete. I need to be able to run an OS inside of a virtual machine. I've watched MacOSX gain acceptance in the developer community for years now but have resisted jumping in. I compared the specs on the MacBook(s) to a windows machine and realized that while there was a premium price being paid, it wasn't as massive as it used to be. So I jumped in. MacOSX is backed by linux which I use for all of my production stuff. Most of the open source big data projects maintain some MacOSX compatibility. Plus, the machine is pretty. Really is. Biggest fear: right click says what!??! I'll figure things out. Specs: MacBook Pro 15", 8Gb RAM, 500Gb 7200rpm drive, hi-res glossy screen 1650x1050, 1Gb video ram. I bought the 8Gb outside of Apple, can upgrade myself. Planning on moving to a main SSD drive with a secondary big drive. I figure I'll install everything, learn about the OS and generally screw things up before reinstalling when I get the SSD. Onward.
Update: Initial observations after 20 mins playing with it (the MacBook.) A softer experience with gradients and gentle bounces on screen. Maximizing windows seems to be discouraged leaving me with off-center windows which makes me feel disorderly. Icons free-floating all over the place feels disorderly. Definitely a user interface for those that don't like rigidity. I tend to like some rigidity on the interface because it acts as a crutch... organizing things and providing structure... so that my thinking can be more exploratory. The old lesson that we live in 3d but work in 2d... because the loss of a dimension allows us to think.
Update: I've used other people's macs hundreds of times throughout the years. I'm finally starting to understand some of the structure of this UI. Previously it was hunt and click.
Update: Less Save and Apply buttons in general. That's nice. I click a preference and it's automatically saved. In Windows the mindset is to make preference changes and then Save or Apply them, which takes a little extra work (but has some benefit.)
Update: I'm definitely negotiating with myself when it comes to changing config to be more familiar. For example, making the icons snap to a grid. I'm used to that and want to make the MacBook do that. But I'm also challenging myself to adopt the new freewheeling mindset of the UI. Fighting the current, at least this early on, not the best plan.
Update: So the default icon for a windows machine on the network is a 1994 CRT monitor and a BSOD. Well played.
Update: Obviously a mindset to limit system feedback to the user. No flashing lights telling you that stuff's happening. Can be scary for somebody who's worked on machines built with a mindset of giving as much feedback as possible. That said, I can't argue with simplicity.
Update: My move to the cloud a couple years ago has paid off tens of times with windows box reinstalls... I can usually be up and running in a couple hours while in the past it took weeks to get all of my data and apps moved. Thanks to GMail, Evernote, Dropbox, XMarks and other synchronizing apps I already feel like I can get some work done on the MacBook. Like, say, updating a blog.
Update: Ctrl-C driving me nuts... I keep hitting Fn-C.
Update, about a week later: I'm now about as productive as I am on a Windows box. Dev tools work. User interface makes sense. Microsoft Office runs. I really like the swipe gestures for Mission Control and Spaces... makes a laptop feel a lot like a multi-monitor machine.
Related Posts