FirstMacImpressions
=== Pros
=
- First boot, played Kruder and Dorfmeister while it welcomed me====
==
- very good USB + drivers support
- runs CUPS
- runs ntpd synced to time.apple.com
- seems like they've really made a lot of functionality available underneath, just from reading the macosxhints site about getting itunes to encode vorbis. (see the extended thoughts below)
=== Cons
=
- chsh doesn't seem to save the changes
- Have to reboot after installing the latest Java and Quicktime.
- No obvious way to resize windows with the mouse and keyboard. Seem to be required to grab drag handles.
- This 15" thing is big. But the 12" gets too hot.
- This thing runs pretty warm as well, the fan keeps coming on. I think the rubber feet on the bottom aren't tall enough.
- Can't run cdparanoia, looks to be very much a linux thing. :( Maybe I can run linux in a vm and run it in there?
- broken stuff galore: sherlock crashes upon startup, can't read DVDs, software update can't detect the network connection
=== Extended thoughts
=
For the most part, apple tries to hide away the real way everything works. However, they seem to also be taking on a strategy which Jon recommended employing for our calendar. Make all the functionality available, but make the interface to it complex enough that only the elite can reach it. I.e., where our calendar makes people use the XML interface to doing crazy stuff, OS X makes you route through the UNIXland of finding obscure directories to edit text files.
The metadata system rocks the h�us (so does the way you enter in funny characters, like an 'a' with an umlaut). In iTunes, the physical location of files is of no concern. I can load all of my music sitting on my raid5 server into it as pointers to HTTP streams. The only unfortunate part is that the metadata for the MP3 files isn't loaded until after i've tried streaming it. Maybe there is a way to force this to happen, I haven't looked into it. For now, there isn't much point because iTunes still can't stream vorbis files, even with the vorbis QT component installed. In general, Vorbis support under OS X is pretty crap.
Last Edit: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 12:12:54 -0700 Revisions: 7