Having lived with the MacBook Pro for two weeks now, there are a few things which need venting:
- The machine’s design is incredibly clean compared to Windows laptops. There’s no stickers, unnecessary creases, etc. It looks like a solid block of aluminum except where there is a functional need to mar the surface. Very nicely done.
- The machine runs reasonably cool under battery but gets quite hot quickly when running on AC adapter. I don’t understand why this would be. The CPU should still slow itself down as necessary and I’m not doing anything graphically intensive at all. There are reports that the machines have way too much thermal paste applied to the chips which hinders heat transfer but the temperatures these people are quoting are much higher than what I am seeing. I’m seeing 60C+ CPU temp and they are reporting 75C+.
- The machine crashes much more than my Windows XP machines have. The crash seems to be just a single problem within the wireless network driver. I use WPA security at home and that is the only time I’ve ever seen the problem so I suspect the problem lies therein. Update: nope, it just crashed after 30 minutes on a public access point (no security at all).
- I still have a major beef with OS X because it is not nearly as keyboard friendly as Windows. It took me a week to get used to the keyboard shortcuts but there are still times when I don’t know which key to hit: Fn, Ctrl, Option or Apple.
- The PPTP VPN does not handle the case where the local subnet and the remote subnet are the same. Webify’s internal network uses 192.168.0.xxx. Several Austin coffeeshops also use 192.168.0.xxx. Essentially I can’t VPN into work from these coffeeshops due to this limitation. Windows XP had a checkbox to handle this case, something like “Forward traffic to remote connection”. This is a major limitation to me. Anyone know of a solution?
- Rails development is fantastic on it so far. TextMate + Locomotive start up in under 10 seconds, compared with about 10 minutes for WID and WPS at IBM.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Dan Fabulich // Jun 22, 2007 at 1:13 am
I don’t own a MacBook, but a thought just occurred to me.
1) I’m sure you realized that you could use Boot Camp or some VM software to boot into another OS which doesn’t have the same VPN problems. But that’s no fun.
2) Had you considered running your VPN software inside the VM, then sharing that Internet connection with your MacBook (as a secondary adapter)? It’s a horrible hack, but I bet it’d work.
2 mperham // Jun 22, 2007 at 6:51 am
That’s not something I had considered actually but I don’t have a Windows license. I guess I could put Ubuntu on but IMO that’s like using a flamethrower to handle a rat problem - dramatic overkill. Thanks for the ideas anyhow.