Life in the Mac lane

[bdlaw]

Wednesday has a Dell laptop (Latitude) which is very nice; kind of large but the display is amazing; she runs both Windows and Linux on it.  Only problem she's had was that she was one of the many who had to replace the battery; that problem is as far as I know fixed now so new ones shouldn't have that issue.

I have had an IBM ThinkPad for several years now and love it; I wouldn't recommend buying one now though- IBM sold the business to Lenovo (Wed has one from work) and it seems a little unstable.

[SamS]

Ok, for those of you who say MAC's are over rated, what do you propose as a good alternative.  I'm in the market for a lap top as opposed to a desk top. I currently have a home pc, desk top which is about 6 years old. I'm looking for something that gives me more mobility.  I was considering the mac because of  the  "out of the box" readiness, the claim that is not as expose to virus' as PCs, and I get a discount through my employer   Still, I'm not married to it.   I don't do artistic graphic stuff and I am for the most part lazy about my picture management.  I fundamentally use my PC for word processing, internet access, occassional spreadsheet usage, storing my iTunes, chatting on WiredJc.

The other alternative I'm considering is a Dell, largely because I get a discount through work on a Dell, as I do a mac.  Also, I have a dell now, which has been pretty good to me.

[AmbushBug]

Can anyone explain why my iBook suddenly has much less battery life than it used to?  Not sure what is causing the power drain but it's a recent issue and really a hassle.

Any insight?

This isn’t a mac/PC issue, it’s a laptop issue.

Specifically a lithium-ion issue. Abruptly short battery life is the main disadvantage of laptop batteries, and it has a number of causes.

First, a Li-ion battery’s life degrades by orders of magnitude. To bring it back to Algebra class, it’s geometric, rather than arithmetic.

That is, when your battery dies, you imagine that its life drops off evenly, like a gentle hill —

But this isn’t true Instead, Li-ion batteries lose life in a curve —

so the loss starts off gradually, but gets much steeper as it goes on.¹

Also, the way people use their laptops tends to mess with battery life.

For instance, like all batteries, laptop batteries are sensitive to heat. So someone who uses their laptop a lot (say as their primary computer), or does a lot of processor-intensive computing (say multimedia editing) is going to produce more heat than their system can really deal with, and this seriously affects battery life. Add to this that most people (myself included) often sit with their laptop literally on their lap, or on other places where it can't cool itself properly, which also helps kill battery life.

Plus, every time you recharge your battery, no matter how briefly you were off A/C and on battery power, you're using up a limited supply of recharge cycles. Even if you only unplugged for a few minutes, it still works as like a recharge.²

Laptops aren’t meant to used the same way desktop computers are. I admit that I only have one computer, and it's a notebook, but I also don't expect it to survive like a desktop machine would.

¹ Also, this decay occurs whether or not you're actually using the battery, unlike, say, your typical alkaline battery in your fridge which stays pretty much fine so long as you don't use it.

² Note: I'm not sure if this is true with recent Li-ion batteries but was the case with my last machine, the final PowerBook model circa 2001 or so.

[LadyDi]

How new is it?  Welcome to planned obsolescence. They are good for about a year, two if lucky.  Then you have to junk up a landfill, and buy a new one.   And for the price of a replacement, and since your OS update will run slower after two years, hell, why not upgrade!

I'm sure PCs are no better with batteries.

Can anyone explain why my iBook suddenly has much less battery life than it used to?  Not sure what is causing the power drain but it's a recent issue and really a hassle.

Any insight?

[NON]

Can anyone explain why my iBook suddenly has much less battery life than it used to?  Not sure what is causing the power drain but it's a recent issue and really a hassle.

Any insight?

My PowerBook G4 has the same problem. It's about 3 years old, it has a battery that's about a year or so old (part of the recall). No idea what the problem is, and the tech guys at Digital Society said they couldn't diagnose anything particularly out of the ordinary with the hardware.

So it's the evil boogeyman i like to call "mac-overratedness".
 

[jennymayla]

Can anyone explain why my iBook suddenly has much less battery life than it used to?  Not sure what is causing the power drain but it's a recent issue and really a hassle.

Any insight?

[e-eff]

There's a Weekend Errands Service that might do this for you.

Luddite here again.

I don't know if this is the right thread for this, but I have a question:  Does anybody have an ipod-filling service?  Or sell pre-loaded ipods?

I do not have an ipod.  I find the barrier to entry to be too much.  I want someone to load the cds I have and load a range of other music based upon some broad criteria from me. Does anyone do this?  And what would it cost?

PG

[groucho]

I loved playing moon patrol on the apple computers in grammer school

[LadyDi]

Back in the day, I could say 100% that Apple products were waaaay superior.  In fact, just sold MCA what was the best machine I ever owned:  an ibook laptop.  Upgraded recently, and this one's a dawg--crashes, had to be reinstalled after only 6 months.  We also had a mac mini that died completely one month after its warranty was up.

I sometimes wonder if it's the intel processors--seems like a lot more lemons happened after they went intel.  But, that's just a theory.

BTW--the Air looks super-adorable, but how dumb is an $1800 piece of equipment with no CD drive?  Unless you were loaded and had three computers...

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as bad as Applecare support.  I do better myself with a google search.  Comcast service has 'em beat.

[jennymayla]

...Growing up, my public schools were filled with various generations of Apple computers, while at home I had dos, and later Win 95....

I love this because I have distinct memories of a big school meeting in the auditorium of my grammar school when they unveiled the school's first big clunky massive computer.  It scared the shit out of us.

I also remember dying to run the slide show in social studies class and sniffing mimeographed paper.

Don't act like you don't remember that, some of you who shall remain nameless. 

[SamS]

I'm giving more consideration to getting a mac myself.

Is that what you switched over to skwirrl?  Otherwise, perhaps I should be saying, "finally, welcome to me team."

Made the switch. So far, so good. Much easier to set up and faster performance.

[skwirrlking]

Made the switch. So far, so good. Much easier to set up and faster performance.

[Case]

How it all began.

[CeeDub]

Once you go Mac  you never go back!

[elgoodo]

after reading this thread, seems like the pro-mac people out number the anti. am seriously considering ditching the Dell and going to Mac. Anyone have any bad experiences doing this?

I have to say that I've had no major issues with my G4 Powerbook (yet.)   Over two years of use.  This powerbook was my first non-iPod Mac purchase.  Personally, I'd NEVER go back to PC.  I am damn near computer illiterate in many ways, and I find the Mac is just less of a headache than a PC.  It's more intuitive, more user friendly.  And a bonus it both looks and feels nicer than a PC.  The cool factor means nothing to me in terms of status but I'm not gonna lie that I don't appreciate the fact that it looks and feels cool as fuck.

That said, I do know that Apple's customer support DOES leave a lot to be desired.  Luckily, I haven't had to use them for anything other than iPod issues.  So far.

It helps that I paid significantly less for my top-of-the-line (circa 2005) Powerbook than the Apple list price - I bought it after the Macbook pros came out, and the Apple store was trying to get rid of them.

[NON]

after reading this thread, seems like the pro-mac people out number the anti. am seriously considering ditching the Dell and going to Mac. Anyone have any bad experiences doing this?

As a 3-year long powerbook G4 owner, i would have to say that the apple markup (say about 200-300% for a PC laptop with comparable or better performance) is not ultimately worth it. I have had multiple hardware problems, which were covered by my 3-year applecare protection plan, but were still a massive pain in the ass. My battery life (even with a 1 year old battery sent as part of the recall) is now less than 1 hour.

Having just shopped for a PC laptop for EFL and weighing the pros and cons, I don't think I would replace my current powerbook with another apple laptop. It's just not worth it, regardless of the "cool" factor (which is sort of old news now).

[skwirrlking]

after reading this thread, seems like the pro-mac people out number the anti. am seriously considering ditching the Dell and going to Mac. Anyone have any bad experiences doing this?

[ianmac47]

I had been a long time Windows advocate. Growing up, my public schools were filled with various generations of Apple computers, while at home I had dos, and later Win 95. And over all, being on Dos / Windows was much better. But as of late of definitely changed my tune.

Last year I realized the time had come to replace my aging dell. Well, it wasn't that aged, but it was a dell so after 3 1/2 years, it was time to be replaced. But at the time I knew the new ultra cool windows vista was set to arrive in January, so I waited to buy a computer-- I basically made the decision to buy last summer, so waiting six months didn't seem to be a big deal.

Anyway, by February I still had not purchased a computer, largely because I was debating between Vista and sticking with XP. I finally went with a laptop running XP, mostly because it seemed buying a PC with enough power to run Vista was going to cost twice as much. Great, like I said, I was a windows advocate, and XP is stable and for the most part efficient.

This summer my better half got herself a Macbook. Her four year old HP was just not up to the tasks anymore. Mostly, all I can say is, wow, what a difference.

Printing:
When I first plugged the printer into my computer, the first thing that happened was windows told me new hardware was detected and asked if I wanted to download the drivers. Sure, of course I do. Except windows couldn't find drivers for the printer, and wanted to know if I had a disk. Um, no. So then I had to locate on the internet the correct drivers from Lexmark, and download them, and install them, and then restart my computer. 20 minutes later I finally printed the two pages of directions. On the other hand, plug the Macbook in and it printed. That was all.

Camera:
So I take a lot of digital pictures. I have about 15GB of photos. I plug the camera into my laptop, it does the whole finding drivers bit, and so on. Then I copy the photos off the camera to a hard drive. But windows keeps giving me problems deleting the photos from the memory card on the camera-- "the file is in use by some other program." Sure it is. By contrast, I plug the camera into the Mac, tell iPhoto to copy the photos to the harddrive and delete the pictures from the camera when its finished. Done.

Burning data DVD:
One of the first things I wanted to do was backup my data to a DVD. I had been using my iPod to transfer my 15GB of photos and other files between computers, but really I needed a permanent backup solution-- which DVDs are great for, because of their large size, ect.  Only Windows doesn't support burning DVDs without extra software. Only they don't mention this. So I tried both types of writable DVDs, and kept getting an error trying to burn data. Then I realized I needed to buy software to burn DVDs, or download some freeware. Ok, fine, did that, and an hour later I was starting to backup my data. By contrast, I put a blank DVD into the Macbook, and in about 30 seconds it was copying data to the DVD.

In short, I'm tired of manually doing all the things that Windows should do automatically, and which Apple has successfully programmed their software to do for me. I've had bad experiences with Macs in the past, but their current OS iteration is far superior to anything from windows. I'll hopefully never need to deal with Vista, and my next computer will almost certainly be from Apple.

[NON]

Does anyone have recommendations for Mac repair shops in NJ? I know about Tekserve, but would welcome any suggestions to avoid having to lug my desktop on the PATH.

TIA

It's also in NYC, but i had a great experience with Digital Society in the Village (either 9th or 10th street near broadway). Very nice guys, small shop, very friendly, and really reasonable.

[jcpeace]

avoiding tekserve is your first good move....

according to the apple website, there are service centers in edison, somerville, bridgewater, north plainfield and others....

just go here http://www.apple.com/buy/locator/

condolences...

[MCA™]

Does anyone have recommendations for Mac repair shops in NJ? I know about Tekserve, but would welcome any suggestions to avoid having to lug my desktop on the PATH.

TIA

[LadyDi]

I highly recommend the apple site for all tech questions about the hardware or software. Follow the support discussions path, and choose some keywords particular to your problem or questions.  Someone has probably had the same issues before and there are lots of geeks just waiting for a question that they can answer.
Don't forget to do a search in iphoto help.  I just looked there and learned some things that I didn't know. 
It looks to me as though you can create multiple libraries that do not load unless you go looking for them.  There is also a rebuild library command that sounds like it will reconcile the thumbs to the actual files.
I haven't had the need to do these things myself, as my library is not too large, and I've grown sort of disenchanted with my camera, but I'm intrigued by the multiple library idea.

One thing I really love about the Mac community is that they have awesome geek online presence.  You can google about any issue and come up with a thousand great sites on how to deal with it.  I find it much more helpful than the apple site, and have gotten myself out of some pretty major shit on my computer following the geek blogs and posts.  Try it out.

[Binky]

I highly recommend the apple site for all tech questions about the hardware or software. Follow the support discussions path, and choose some keywords particular to your problem or questions.  Someone has probably had the same issues before and there are lots of geeks just waiting for a question that they can answer.
Don't forget to do a search in iphoto help.  I just looked there and learned some things that I didn't know. 
It looks to me as though you can create multiple libraries that do not load unless you go looking for them.  There is also a rebuild library command that sounds like it will reconcile the thumbs to the actual files.
I haven't had the need to do these things myself, as my library is not too large, and I've grown sort of disenchanted with my camera, but I'm intrigued by the multiple library idea.

[AmbushBug]

Ambush, have you put the Library in thumbnail view?  You can change the view to show little mini jpegs.  Took me a while to figure it out, but hugely helpful...and at 10,000 thumbnails...you really should consider moving some of those puppies off!  Unless you've got oodles of disk space, I'd think that's makin' you drag pretty heavy.  I only have 1000 and on my g3 oldie, it's definitely a drain.

This is exactly my problem. I've moved everything pre-2007 off my HD onto my external, but for some reason iPhoto has kept all those thumbnails, and it slows the fucker down something awful. Especially since sometimes I'll accidentially select one of them and iPhoto gets confused since the source file isn't there anymore.

Anyway . . . is there a way to get rid of thumbnail view, or just delete the old thumbnails (that is, rebuilding the library rather than just going into the "info" folder and deleting everything by hand)?

[justiceiro]

Here's the deal.

I just bought a MAc, a wolverine ESP, and a 430EX.  I am brikkity-Broke as hell.  Does anybody ahve a copy of Photoshop CS-3 (or CS-2) for the mac that they can "lend" to me until I get some scratch up to buy a licensed version which, of course, I will do.

Alternately, andy "students" out there?