Two Weeks with 12" PB

[Andrew]

Today marks the passage of two weeks since I switched back from Windows 
to Macintosh.  I'm still learning my way about in OS X (Panther) but 
its becoming second nature.  The various apps are the easy part, as 
Word, Excel and the like may look a little different, but are 
essentially the same.  What is most frustrating remains the total 
inability to import information directly from Microsoft Outlook for 
Windows, which stores everything in a file called Outlook.PST.  I did 
manage to sync my Palm to Outlook, then to the OS X address book for my 
contacts, and after 5 1/2 hours of uploading blocks of 200 messages to 
my school IMAP account and down into Entourage, I got all of my email 
archives transfered.  The hard part then was getting my many contacts 
from the OS X address book into Entourage.  I ended up giving-up and 
just imported the emails in OS X Mail, which uses address book as its 
address book (imagine that).  That only leaves notes and calendar.  
Calendar synchronizes with iCal, so thats fine, but notes are still in 
Palm Desktop.  I would rather use Entourage as it is an all-in-one 
solution, but it can't import my contacts and won't sync to my Palm.  
Oh well, stand alone apps are working fine.

Everything else isn't better or worse, just different than Windows.  
The iApps are OK, especially iTunes which I really prefer to Windows 
Media Player for music, but once again I have to use a separate app to 
play videos.  WMP simply played everything, which was very convenient.  
DVD playback is another give and take.  The playback quality is 
considerably better than on my ThinkPad X21 (Pentium III 700) running 
PowerDVD XP, but I have far fewer controls over playback.  PoewrDVD 
allowed me to skip the warnings and government threats and jump right 
to the root menu, which the DVD player in OS X 10.3 does not.  It also 
had something called Pan And Scan, which would let me set different 
aspect ratios and zoom increments.  For example, some wide screen 
movies are REALLY WIDE, which makes the picture simply too small on a 
12" LCD.  With PowerDVD I could tweak it a little so that I got smaller 
black bands on the top and bottom, but kept much of the sides, all 
while keeping everything in proper proportion.  The important 
difference was that in PowerDVD I could control how much I wanted to 
magnify the image, thus also controlling how much of the edges of the 
image to cut.  Of course the actual video quality is noticeably better 
on the PowerBook, without a single lost frame or jitter, EVER.

Finally the hardware itself, which is a very personal thing.  I am a 
big fan of small laptops, the smaller the better so long as the 
keyboard is easy to touch type on.  I am also a trackpad hater, and 
love the little eraserhead on the ThinkPads.  In fact, I used to prefer 
Toshiba Portege laptops until Toshiba went from eraserhead thingies to 
touchpads, so I switched to IBM.  Even IBM is playing with touchpads 
now, but thankfully the really small X series has the eraser.  Needless 
to say, buying the PowerBook has forced me to tollerate a touchpad.  I 
have to correct the position of my cursor and move errant text at least 
once or twice per hour after accidental touches during touch typing put 
my cursor, and subsequent text somewhere OTHER THAN where I want or 
expect it to be.  I hope I can get used to this, or I'll have to start 
carrying an external mouse, which defeats the whole purpose of an 
ultracompact laptop.

Also, while the 12" PowerBook is small, it is still rather thick at 
1.2" and heavy at 4.6 lbs.  My ThinkPad (admittedly without the benefit 
of an onboard optical drive) had the same 12" screen size, but was less 
than 1" thick and weighed only 3 lbs.  I'd gladly have my combo drive 
as a clip-on base station to shave off 1.6 lbs.  Still, the PB is very 
compact in most dimensions, and the clevor screen hinge makes this 
thing handier than my ThinkPad on airplane tray tables, where I spend 
entirely too much time using my laptops.  Also, the aluminum case is 
very cool.

Performance of the 1GHz G4 (768MB RAM) running Panther is about the 
same as the 700MHz PIII with 384MB running XP.  This isn't benchmarks 
as I'm sure the Mac will trounce the old PC for actual number 
crunching, just the subjective feel of how quickly windows open and the 
like.  Since the visual effects of Panther are so impressive, to do it 
in the same blink of an eye as my PC is quite impressive, and suggests 
that this is actually a very powerful computer that is simply doing far 
more advanced work in the same amount of time.

Of course, the main reason I switched back (I was a Mac user from 1993 
to 1998) is all of the current malware on the web.  I know Macs aren't 
immune to virii, but the attacks on my PC number in the HUNDREDS PER 
DAY, something I simply no longer care to deal with.  In two weeks I've 
not had a single worry.  Nothing has crashed, and I've had no doubts 
about my computer security.  That is VERY refreshing.  So refreshing, 
in fact, that I just ordered a used Power Mac to replace the PC that my 
wife and daughter share.   I will set it up to dual boot OS 9 (for my 
daughter's games) and Panther for my wife's email and word processing, 
and for my use as a backup to my PowerBook.

Well, there it is, confessions of a 4-time switcher.

Andrew

--
"The lord's our shepherd says the psalm, but just in case....., WE'D 
BETTER GET A BOMB!"

© Tom Lehrer, 1965

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