OK, technically it's OUR new MacBook, and I do have to fight Michele and both of the kids to get some time with it, but that notwithstanding, and at the risk of sounding geeky, it's got a really high coefficient of cool.
I've been a PC user my whole life. No, really - I started using DOS 1.0 when I was about 8. I remember when there was no such thing as a subdirectory. I remember Cassette Basic. I remember 8MB hard disks. I remember punch cards. OK, the punch cards weren't actually for the PC, but I do remember them, since my mom used them when she was studying computer science in college and used to take me to her classes.
When I was in college, the computer labs had Macs and PCs running DOS. Windows only made an appearance in my last semester, and then only in some of the labs. I always used the PCs, even when it was the last week of the semester and everyone was finishing their papers and I had to wait for one and there were rows of available Macs. Here I must admit to being a computing elitist; I've always thought of Macs as hand holding pieces of trash.
Until now.
It's really about the design. I'm a big design freak. I am disproportionately annoyed by badly laid out carparks; don't get me started on the barely usable Sky+ user interface. It's total crap. Crap+, even. But I digress, and I'll post something about that eventually. It's crap. The MacBook, (we bought the 13" aluminum model through the employee discount website on an impulse just before being put 'at risk') on the other hand, is sleek, yes, but it's also got a well thought out functional design.
First, there are two large areas on either side of the mouse sensor where I can rest my meaty paws while I type. The aluminum stays nice and cool, so my palms don't get all sweaty and sticky, and they're just the right size that the edge of the laptop doesn't cut into my hands. I'm sure my hand position isn't 'proper', but who cares, I'm comfortable.
Second, there's the mouse sensor itself. I've been using IBM Thinkpads for years, and have gotten used to the little red eraser head of a mouse in the middle of the keyboard. But the Thinkpad mouse has a serious flaw - and I've encountered this on every single Thinkpad I've used with operating systems from Windows 3.1 through to Windows Vista - the damn thing has a mind of its own. The pointer would float across the screen even without me touching it. When I wanted it to go the other way, I had to fight with it. Not so on the MacBook, the mouse goes where I put it and stays there. Period. There are also no mouse buttons to futz with, just tap the pad to click. Now I've used Thinkpads with trackpads before, and the first thing I always did was to disable them, because the sides of my palms would always touch the pads and move the mouse around as I was typing. Again, the MacBook doesn't suffer from this problem.
Next, there's the keyboard itself. The keys are spaced far enough apart that even with fingers like sausages, I seldom bonk the wrong key accidentally. Here again, this compares favourably to my Thinkpad, whose Backspace key is blank and shiny from erasing the typos caused by its teensy little Chicklet keys.
Now, lest you think this a paid advert for the MacBook, I'll throw in my two complaints about it here. First, there's no Delete key. Well, there is, but it doesn't behave like a PC's Delete key, which removes characters to the right of the cursor. The Mac's Delete key acts like a PC's Backspace key, removing characters to the left. Try as I might, I cannot seem to find a key combination that emulates the behaviour of a PC Delete key, so a beer to the first person who can tell me how. Second, the X key falls off at the slightest provocation. This is surely a manufacturing defect, which I expect would be corrected in short order by taking it to a repair place. With all this redundancy time on my hands, I may just do that.
OK, back to the upside.
Scrolling on a Thinkpad requires a carpal tunnel-inducing hand contortion involving holding down the mouse button with your thumb while simultaneously keeping the aforementioned willful mouse pointer confined to a horizontal space roughly the width of a helium atom and moving the mouse pointer vertically with the eraserhead. On the Mac, you put two fingers on the sensor and move them up or down, left or right as appropriate. Good design.
In Windows, to switch between applications, you hold the Alt key and press the Tab key repeatedly until you find the one you want, then you let go of the Alt key. On the Mac, you swipe horizontally on the sensor with four fingers and click on the one you want. Good design.
In Windows, to zoom in or out on a photo, you muscle the mouse pointer over to some sort of zoom control. On the Mac, you pinch (to zoom out) or, um, unpinch (to zoom in). See - I'm getting more creative already and making up verbs. To rotate, you turn your thumb and forefinger clockwise or anticlockwise as appropriate. Good design.
There's very little technology that doesn't disappoint me the minute I take it out of the box. My iPod was one. My TiVo (God, how I miss my TiVo) was another. My, er, OUR MacBook is the third. Thanks, Steve Jobs!
2 comments:
yes, OUR Macbook and don't you forget it!
Oy Vay...Pat Jr. couldn't breathe without his!
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