Taking a year-end look back, it's been an eventful 12 months with
our family fleet of Mac laptops.
Death of Two iBooks
2009 didn't get off to an especially auspicious start with the
failure of two iBooks. The heretofore faithful and reliable six-year-old 700 MHz G3
unit, which spent its first three years as my production workhorse
and was then used by my wife for from the summer of 2007 into 2009,
suddenly expired. It just shut down spontaneously one day and refused
to revive despite concerted efforts to bring it back to life. I expect
a massive motherboard coronary, but that's just a deductive guess.
My daughter's late 2004 G4
iBook died a somewhat slower death, having been increasingly
erratic and unstable for more than two years. It had been her last
college computer, had traipsed around Europe in a backpack, and then
spent two years in Japan where its owner taught ESL, finally failing in
England during a grad school stint at Cambridge University. She
replaced it with a white 2.1
GHz polycarbonate MacBook, which she likes and which so far has
proved reliable - and much faster than the old iBook.
9-year-old Pismo keeps going & going!
Ongoing Pismo Reliability
When the G3 iBook died, my wife took over one of my old G4 hotrod
Pismos, which she liked
better than the iBook and which is about as dependable as an anvil. I
don't think she restarted it more than two or three times through the
year.
As for me, after three years of solid and uneventful service from my
17" PowerBook G4, I
figured it was time to finally join the Intel Revolution, so in March I
replaced the big AlBook with a Late 2008 Unibody MacBook. In
20/20 hindsight, I wish I'd waited another four months and got a
13" MacBook
Pro, but no point in nursing remorse over that.
Loving the Unibody MacBook
Apple's prettiest laptop ever.
Aside from the abiding annoyance and frustration over its
FireWire-lesness, the MacBook, purchased as an Apple Certified
Refurbished unit, has proved to be everything I had hoped it would
be and more. It's gratifyingly fast, hasn't given a moment's trouble,
and is drop dead gorgeous to look at - IMHO the prettiest laptop Apple
has ever built and by far the most gracefully proportioned of all the
unibodies. I don't mind the glossy display at all, and while it's been
an adjustment going from the PowerBook's 17" 1440 x 900 resolution
screen to the iBook's 13.3" 1280 x 800 display, I've managed quite
handily - and OS X Spaces in
Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"
helps a lot when you have multiple projects on the go on a
smallish-screen machine.
Speaking of Leopard, I'm still using OS X 10.5.8, and have
procrastinated about upgrading to OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard", not
having yet discerned any compelling reason to do so. A project for the
new year perhaps, and at least the early days bugs are getting worked
out of OS X 10.6 by now.
Memory Matters
In the late summer, I upgraded the MacBook's RAM with a 4 GB kit
from Other World Computing, and
I wish I'd done that sooner. Running with the standard 2 GB wasn't
really giving me much to complain about, but it's a whole lot nicer
with 4 GB, which pretty well eliminate any concern about how many
applications are open at a time. Performance with
MacSpeech Dictate has also been enhanced by the extra RAM, although
a couple of version upgrades to the application are also probably
contributing to that.
One thing about the MacBook, as opposed to its MacBook Pro
successor, is that it has an easily removable swappable battery, which
I prefer, remaining unconvinced about built-in batteries. It also has
separate audio I/O ports, which is significant for users like myself
who like to keep both a microphone and a set of earphones plugged in
simultaneously.
In its workstation mode, I keep three USB hubs connected to the
MacBook (two of them in tandem), which helps work around the machines
port poverty (it has only two USB ports), but it sure would be great to
have FireWire.
My main backup drive has a quad interface, and those three unusable
ports (eSATA, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800) - all significantly
faster than USB 2.0 - mock me a bit and are a constant reminder of how
boneheaded Apple's evident determination to drop FireWire is.
The B Team
17" PowerBook remains a workhorse.
Over on the B Team, even though the semiretired 17" PowerBook was
still in fine fettle, I continued to rely on the delightful Pismo as my
utility and road workhorse, logging an average of about 3 to 4 hours on
it every day. In November, I handed off the underused 17" to my wife,
who is delighted with it, and now that we finally have broadband
access, she's using the Internet a lot more than she had been, taking
full advantage of that lovely big screen.
Consequently, I have the second Pismo back, and this month it got
upgraded yet again with a
full gigabyte of RAM and a real Apple AirPort Card instead of the
Buffalo CardBus WiFi card I had been using. The transformation is
nothing short of remarkable. Performance had been respectable with
OS X 10.4.11 "Tiger" and
576 MB of RAM, but now it just flies, particularly with Web browsers. I
only wish Google Chrome
supported PowerPC. However, Opera
10 does a fine job, supplemented by old Netscape Navigator 9 and
Safari 4. With the superb keyboard and better-than-average trackpad,
not to mention the Pismo's general tactile friendliness, I am delighted
with the shot of elixir de lapin the RAM and wireless upgrades
have given it.
If I've learned anything this year, it's that RAM is the last thing
you want to economize on.
Looking Forward
Looking ahead, I'm anticipating that 2010 will be much more of a
stand-pat year, barring unforeseen circumstances (which you can never
rule out). I expect I'll still be using the MacBook and the two Pismos
a year from now, and if things unfold as I project, my next major
system upgrade will come in early 2012. But we'll have to see.
Low End Mac will be taking an editorial break until after New
Year's, so I'll take this opportunity to wish all my readers a Merry
Christmas and Happy New Year! See you in 2010.
