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.
