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February 25, 2005
It's the Software, Stupid
After 4 months trying to become a happy Mac user, I'm officially throwing in the towel on "my" powerbook. It's driving me insane, and I'm giving up and going back to intel/linux.
This morning I wrote an email, with my tail between my legs, thanking my VP for bending the rules and approving the powerbook purchase 4 months ago, and asking if I could give it to someone who would be better suited to it and get a Dell (the corporate standard) instead.
The last straws were the performance of Eclipse and the lack of availability of JDK 1.5 on OS X.
I hated writing that email for a number of reasons - not the least of which is that the PB hardware is nice. The form factor is almost unparalleled in the PC world (certainly Dell doesn't have anything that comes close) and the fit and finish, well - let's just say that Apple builds the BMW of the notebook world.
I've written before about some of the reasons the powerbook and OS X have annoyed me, so I won't rehash them here. There are a few things I'll miss, though.
I found to actually be fairly useful (in addition to being cool eye candy), and Quicksilver quickly became a "must have" application. OmniGraffle kicks ass (totally blows Visio away, IMO, especially in terms of ease of use and producing "pretty" drawings). But that's really about all I'll miss.
There are expose-like hacks for X, and there's an early version of a Quicksilver-like app for Gnome as well. As far as OmniGraffle goes... well, I guess I'll go back to Visio under Crossover Office ('cause unless Dia has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last four months, it's not there yet.)
I went into this with an open mind and high hopes, and I've come out disillusioned. Apple - lauded as the last bastion of good UI design and implementation - seems to have lost most of that ground. (Even on the eye-candy front - check out these movies of Enlightenment.)
Anyway - I'm now back into the hell of trying to find a rational Dell (Latitude, not Inspiron) notebook. Looks like the contenders are either the D505 or the D810 - but neither of them is really perfect.
Posted by dberger at February 25, 2005 3:45 PM