Well, it’s about time I confessed, a few days ago an opportunity popped up for me to get a eeePC priced white macbook (the one before the current model), fool that I am I accepted and now here I am with a macbook in my lap pondering how much of a whore I really am.
First of all I think I got set the record strait, I’m not a mac fanboy, if anything I’m a mac hater! They’re overpriced pieces of machinery that are tangled with apple only bullshit just because they say so, much like the iPod shuffle (it was a gift ok?) which would force me to use crapy iTunes just to put music on it (I use foobar plugin instead) instead of a simple drag files to it system, and don’t get me started on the proprietary plug, ARG!!
So I went in a bit skeptical on a one week trial to see if I liked it, using OSX because… let’s face it, it’s a mac!
Machine wise the macbook was pretty decent, I always found the 13.3” form factor ideal, not to mention the apple design is actually very clean, something I appreciate. Two things bothered me though, the one button touchpad and the keyboard layout. For some reason Apple decided to make their own Portuguese layout so unless I was just typing the alphabet touch typing was a no go, luckily it wasn’t an impossible fix as some fellow Portuguese had created a Portuguese layout for use with pc keyboards. After applying it I could touch type again as long as I didn’t look to the labels on the keys.
The touchpad was also a bit of a surprise, at first it also seemed a deal breaker not to have a second button, being a windows user I like my right click, yet OSX surprised me again with right click support by simply tapping with two fingers instead of one, not only that but there was also two finger scroll functions that were simply awesome for browsing, yet that functionality comes disabled just like keyboard navigation… retarded? Yes, but it’s the way apple does it.
With the major hardware issues resolved I moved on to try and live with OSX. People say it’s just so much simpler and wonderful, for me, it’s just different, and not that much different to be honest, OSX as it’s stupidities and bugs just like windows, so, if you ignore windows security issues (that never really affected me) I’d say they’re mostly equivalent. The applications are there, Microsoft Office, Adobe tools, Eclipse, MATLAB, World of Warcraft, basically all the things one needs for an academic life.
Still one thing I miss in windows is the freeware, with some many people using there was always a free alternative to must things, the mac as a much lesser array of choises and most of the ones I found as been payed, time will tell.
