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They can be a bit slow on some websites, and they can be challenged
by some YouTube videos, but for the most part they work well enough.
They're also reliable and paid for. Even if I had the money to buy an
Intel-based Mac, I don't need to - but I definitely want to
someday.
A MacBook for School
A niece contacted me several weeks ago. She is continuing her
education and was ready to throw her Windows laptop into the trash. She
wanted a Mac, and who better to come to for advice than Mr. Low End Mac
himself?
Unless budget were an overriding concern, at this point I wouldn't
recommend a PowerPC Mac for anyone coming to the Mac. Apple moved from
PowerPC CPUs to Intel in 2006, and the Intel model have the huge
advantage of being able to run Windows if you need to without a
performance robbing emulator.
Heather and I discussed the 13" MacBook vs. the 15" MacBook Pro, and
she decided that she really wanted the bigger 1440 x 900 display on the
Pro model. Then I did my research, checking our Best 15" MacBook Pro Deals
for a bargain. I gave her a few suggestions, and the best one we could
find within her budget was a 2.16 GHz Core Duo machine, the top-end
model from the
first MacBook Pro generation.
This is a stock machine: 1 GB of RAM and a 100 GB hard drive. We'll
talk about upgrades later.
The machine was ordered from
TechRestore and arrived here on Friday. I gave it a couple hours to
reach room temperature before unpacking the computer, and I was
impressed with what I saw. This machine showed few signs of use - just
a faint dot pattern on the display and one of the tiny rubber feet
missing.
It was loaded with Mac OS X 10.5.7 "Leopard" plus the iLife
suite, and the first thing I did was run Software Update while giving
the battery a full charge. Three rounds of Software Update later, we
had it at OS X 10.5.8 with the latest firmware, security, and
software updates.
Next up was installing some excellent third-party software for
Heather: browsers (Firefox,
Camino, Opera, and Google Chrome), Adium (a great multi-service messaging client),
the latest version of Flash Player, NeoOffice (OpenOffice for OS X), OnyX, and a few other
utilities to strip unnecessary localizations and PowerPC code. All
told, this used up about 20% of the 100 GB hard drive leaving plenty of
room for Heather's photos, videos, GarageBand projects, etc.
Color Me Impressed
I've played with modern Macs at the Apple Store and tinkered with
other people's MacBook Pros now and then, but I hadn't spent any
extended amount of time with them until now.
One Small Headache
The only frustration I ran into was a "feature" introduced with
OS X 10.5 that warns you each and every time that you run an app
downloaded from the Internet using Safari. Every time I launched
Firefox or Camino, the two browsers I installed first, I got the
blasted warning. I logged out and logged back in - no change. I
rebooted the MacBook - no difference.
I researched the problem and found the
Unquarantine script by Henrik Nyh. After downloading this,
installing it in ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts, and
logging out and back in from the user account, the warning message went
away for new downloads - but not Firefox or Camino. I had to download a
fresh copy of the installer and replace the previously installed
versions to eliminate the reoccurring message.
As someone who rarely uses Safari, I never ran into this issue on my
Power Macs, as I already had my favorite browsers (Camino, followed by
Firefox) installed when I migrated from OS X 10.4 "Tiger" to 10.5. Never
using Safari for downloads, I wasn't aware of the issue until now.
A New Favorite?
Living in the world of PowerPC Macs, I'd never been able to try
Google Chrome, the new browser that many predict will eventually
displace Firefox as the #2 browser. With traditional browsers, each tab
or window runs as a thread within the application, so they all share
the same resources. Chrome introduced running each tab or window as a
separate process, essentially treating each one as a separate program.
That means when one window crashes or is bogged down running
JavaScript, the other windows are unaffected.
You can achieve the same result by running different browsers, each
with just one tab in one window. Or you can run Chrome. (Other browsers
are adopting Chrome's process model.)
Chrome has a minimalist interface, brings some fresh thinking to
browser design, and has only two strikes against it: It won't run in
OS X 10.4 and it won't run on PowerPC Macs. Those only matter to
low-end users, as Intel Macs have been around for over four years now
(about 35 million sold to date) and over 80% of Mac users have moved on
to OS X 10.5 or the
Intel-only 10.6 "Snow Leopard". (According to January 2010 stats, 43% of them are
running 10.6.) Only about 15% of the Mac installed base is still
running 10.4, and the remaining 5% are divided among earlier versions
of OS X.
Anyhow, if you have an Intel Mac and are running 10.5 or later, you
owe it to yourself to download the latest beta of Google Chrome and
give it a test drive.
It Really Is Faster
Honestly, I didn't expect to be blown away by the power of dual-core
Intel processing. After all, the bottleneck is the speed of your
Internet connection. How much difference could more processing power
really make?
A lot! For text and static images, my old Power Macs are fine. For
streaming video, there's not a whole lot of difference, as bandwidth is
the big factor there. But for websites that use Flash or JavaScript -
the vast majority of the Web these days - the difference is huge.
I regularly visit two sites that make a lot of use of Flash:
Facebook and Geni. I was completely blown away at how
much faster my farmer moves in Farmville, which has become a bit of a late
night vice for me, although I'm learning to plant more crops that take
2-4 days to grow, which reduced the amount of harvesting necessary on
any given day.
All the work of planting, harvesting, and plowing goes a lot faster
on this nearly four-year-old MacBook Pro than on my dual 1.6 GHz Power
Mac G4. It could probably cut my work time in Farmville in half. If
you're into Mafia Wars or any of the other Facebook games, migrating
from PowerPC to Intel could make a huge difference for you.
Geni, an wonderful genealogy site,
isn't too slow for most screens, but when you display a visual family
tree, there's a world of difference between between PowerPC and Intel
Macs.
I've been happy with my G4 Macs for a long time, but now I'm lusting
after Intel power. I would absolutely love a refurbished 21.5" iMac or a used 17" MacBook Pro (the
900 pixel height on the 15" feels tight compared with the 1024 pixel
height I'm used to), but even a used Mac is 100% out of my price range
in the foreseeable future.
Heather's MacBook Pro
There are pros and cons to buying a first generation Intel Mac. The
original Core Duo CPUs do not support 64-bit mode, and memory expansion
is more limited than with newer models. Then again, 64-bit mode only
matters if you're running OS X 10.6, and even there you can be
completely productive in 32-bit mode.
The 15" Core Duo MacBook Pro doesn't have FireWire 800, but FireWire
400 is adequate. Perhaps the biggest limitation is that this model
supports a maximum of 2 GB of RAM. The Late 2006 Core 2 Duo model
has a faster, more efficient CPU; includes FireWire 800; can use
3 GB of RAM; and has some 64-bit support. For about $100 more on
the used market, that's the way I'd go if financed allowed.
Finances didn't allow, and even with its stock 5400 rpm hard drive
and 1 GB of RAM, this is a perky machine. We could double RAM for
under $50, which would help if performance seems to be bogging down at
some point, and you can replace the hard drive with a faster on quite
economically today should you need more space.
Heather's MacBook Pro came with a pretty good battery - a least two
hours of use with a full charge. Not at all bad considering its age.
$100 will buy a new battery when she needs it, but she plans on running
from the power adapter most of the time.
She's Lovin' It
I brought the MacBook over Sunday afternoon, along with the Willow
Design case and Podium CoolPad
that I used for my late Titanium PowerBook. I also gave her my old copy
of MacBook
for Dummies. We set her up, temporarily connected to a
neighbor's unsecured WiFi network (my sister wasn't home to provide the
password for the home WiFi network), and began Macintosh training.
Macintosh 101
Heather had used Macs at school, but I felt it important to let her
know some of the differences between Macs and Windows:
Closing a window usually doesn't quit the program, which is the
opposite of the way Windows is designed. A light blue lozenge-shaped
dot below the apps program in the dock lets you know the program is
running.
Command-Q will quit a program, as will choosing Quit from the
application menu. (Command is that key next to the space bar. It is not
marked Command or Cmd on her MacBook.) Quitting programs you no longer
need is important with limited RAM.
Removing an icon from the dock does not remove the application,
just the shortcut for launching it.
When using a notebook, you should always run it from battery at
least once a month and give it a good drain. If you don't, when you
want to take it in the field, you may have seriously degraded battery
life.
I explained the five browsers I'd installed, told her how impressed
I was with Chrome, and let her play around. She soon removed Safari
from the dock and made Camino her default browser (we use Camino by default).
Having Fun
Then I pointed out one of the fun apps that Apple provides, Photo
Booth. Photo Booth works with the webcam and includes all sorts of
filters to modify and distort images such as sepia, comic book,
fisheye, and putting backgrounds behind you - all of this in real time.
But that's just the beginning.
Next we checked out iChat and Adium, and then Heather downloaded AIM
from AOL. She managed to connect to a friend for video chat, and then
started experimenting with the Photo Booth filters. Heather was having
a great time distorting her face, and we all got a kick out of watching
her friend crack up.
I don't know how many more hours she spent on the MacBook Pro, but I
suspect she didn't leave it alone until bedtime. Not only is she
thrilled with this four-year-old Mac, but both her sister and my sister
want Macs as well. When they're budgets permit, we'll have two more
switchers in the family.
Looking Ahead
And for the first time since I got my first G4 Mac, I'm feeling
underpowered and left behind. My dream is to someday get an Intel-based
Mac with a widescreen display, such as the 1920 x 1200 resolution of
recent 17" MacBook Pro, the 1680 x 1050 resolution of earlier MacBook
Pros, the 1920 x 1200 resolution of the current 21.5" iMac, the 1920 x
1200 of the discontinued 24" iMac, the 1680 x 1050 resolution of the
discontinued 20" iMac, or a 2009 Mac mini with a 22" to 24" 1920 x 1080
display.
Of these options, the 21.5" iMac and Unibody 17" MacBook Pro are the
dream choices, the 20" iMac and earlier 17" MacBook Pro are more
practical considerations, and the Mac mini is probably the most
affordable, as 1080p displays are getting very affordable. Of course,
by the time finances turn around here at Low End Mac, everything will
have gone forward another generation or more.
Now that I've experienced the difference, I very much look forward
to eventually making the move to Intel.
Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986,
sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and
has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.
Links for the Day
Mac of the Day: Yikes! Power Mac G4, introduced 1999.08.31. The only Power Mac G4 with PCI graphics was built on a modified G3 motherboard.
