Alright, alright, I admit it. I hate Freedom. Stuff your open source philosophies, your Free Software Foundation, your Libre / Gratis. Knackers to the lot of it.
I want a Mac.
Yes, I do, I want a Mac. I want a shiny, shiny MacBook Pro in all its aluminium unibody glory. I want to fondle its keyboard, hug its metallic curves and yes, possibly, gently lick its screen like a puppy.
Ahem.
Okay, most of what I just wrote is hyperbolic nonsense1, but in truth I’m seriously considering making my next laptop a MacBook Pro. There are a number of reasons, but I’ll outline just the most salient for the sake of brevity:
I’ve been a Dell user for a number of years, and my trusted Inspiron 640m has flown countless miles and taken much punishment from me. The keyboard is worn to the point where none of the letters are legible. The hard drive whines weirdly sometimes when it’s switched on. The volume controls are, shall we say, eccentric at best.
But from no-one who’s ever used a MacBook have I every heard “oh, it’s a bit plasticky” or “well, I wish they’d thought the case out a bit better” or “it’s just not a machine I’d like to be seen with.” MacBooks are the Jaguars of notebooks: even the ones that you think look ugly when they come out actually look astonishingly pretty; you just have to change your terms of reference to accomodate them (this metaphor falls down when we come to the S-Type, I know; I think that you’ll find the S-Type of notebooks to be something in the Acer range).
And the quality of the bits inside isn’t to be sniffed at, either. Although they’ve had their fair share of problems – just like most hardware manufacturers (anyone remember Dell’s exploding batteries? I’ve still got mine somewhere) – they are, for the most part, reliable and well built. They’re not as rugged as, say, a Thinkpad, but then I don’t actually need a laptop that I can use to beat a thief senseless with and still send an email from later (and come on, seriously, the case is metal).
Let’s cut to the quick. If I buy a non-Mac laptop, unless I buy from a very narrow range of manufacturers, I’ll get Windows with it. I don’t want Windows. Ever. I have no need for it and I wouldn’t ever use it now if I didn’t have to (see the next section). At least OSX, for all its freedom-hatingness, is Unix-based; at least I’m semi familiar with the way it behaves.
Truth is, I’d still want to run Ubuntu on the thing, either dual booted or inside a VM (can you have VMWare machine use an existing hard disk as its root partition? Just wondering, answers on a postcard), because I’m used to working in Ubuntu for ninety-odd percent of the time. I’ve no wish to change that. There’s only two programs that I’d every really need to run on OSX, which are…
There’s no nice way to put this: there’s just no equivalent digital photography tools in Ubuntu. None. F-Spot isn’t a Lightroom equivalent (nor was it meant to be). The Gimp isn’t a Photoshop equivalent (it’s getting close, but it’s not there yet). I am starting out on a path that’s hopefully going to lead to at least a semi-pro photography career, and I’ve gotten used to using pro tools. At the moment I use Lightroom and Photoshop in a Windows VM and it’s the hardest, most horrible thing in the entire world. I have to mess about with shared folders in VirtualBox and make sure that partitions are mounted properly all the time before I start Lightroom. I have to keep my Lightroom catalogues on the VM and sync them to my $HOME using Dropbox, because you can’t have catalogues on networked volumes (don’t ask me why, I’ve no idea). I have to put up with the horrible, aching, chugging of my entire system if the VM has to use more than a bit of its allotted RAM (and when you’re using Photoshop that happens a lot).
Yes, I know it’s not free software. If there was a free software alternative that was equal in quality to Lightroom, I’d use it in the blink of an eye. I would. Lightroom makes it astonishingly easy to do 90% of all my post-processing; Photoshop makes it possible (though not necessarily simple) to do the other 10%.
I don’t want to keep running these apps on Windows – face it, why would I – but I need to run them *somewhere*. OSX seems like the next best option to an actual free, open-source environment. It’s second best – and not even a close second – but I’d rather use Cupertino’s baby than Redmond’s any day of the week.
Yes, I hate freedom. But only a little bit.
1Except for the bit about the FSF. Screw ‘em.
Graham Binns is a photographer, writer, musician and software developer from Lancaster, England, with a bizarre imagingation, a penchant for odd t-shirts and a magnificent hat.
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Let me address some of your concerns:
Made up zealotry, sounds like you’ve been hanging out with Ted.
What, the Intel bits inside that you get in every notebook for less money? Those bits?
Yeah, ok. Let me know how that works out for you.
At this point what difference does it make which one you use?
Finally, you are making some sense!
What? That argument doesn’t even make any sense.
Okay, I accept that, fair point. Win for Apple’s marketing department there.
Sure. Maybe I’ll get frustrated with OSX; true, I can’t hack on the bits of it that break and I can’t go and file a bug about the breakages, and that’s annoying, but I’m willing to live with that.
Simple: I don’t want to use Windows. That’s a personal choice after years of using it and being constantly frustrated and annoyed and angered by it. I can’t guarantee that the same won’t happen with OSX; maybe it will. As I said, I’m willing to give it a shot.
Also, you didn’t address my third point: There’s just no equivalent workflow for what I want to do in the free software world.
And for the record, this isn’t a decision or a commitment to buy a MacBook Pro. It’s an expression of a desire. Two months ago I was set on buying studio lights. Things change.
Dupe search! Dupe search!
Hahahahahahahaha.
No.
Allegedly you can with VMWare Fusion, but I came to a different conclusion when I tried. There’s a newer version of Fusion out now that might make it work.
Nice, thanks. I’ll look into it (assuming I do actually go ahead with this whole venture).
I switched a year and an half ago after eight years on Linux, Like you I needed Photoshop for a job, Only for a couple of months. I bought an iMac 24 off eBay and was so pleased with the product that I keep it.
Couple of tips,
Do not use Apple mouses that are the worse in all the history of computing.
Tell no one in the FOSS community that you have a Mac as they will turn into twelve year old’s and say the usual stuff, Mac’s a expensive toys, They are for stupid people and now they use Intel chips they are just PC’s.
So just keep it a dirty little secret as I tried to have a discussion on Linux Outlaws about Mac’s and it did not go well at all.
Most of GNU’s stuff you can get with macports so best of both worlds.
Yeah; rule one of working in the FOSS community: People can’t express an opinion quietly; they’re either all in strident transmit mode or they don’t have an opinion to share.
I like Macs, for their simplicity and ease of use. Then I met KDE
Yeah. I love the Gnome desktop (I just don’t work well in KDE – I get distracted too easily) and happily live in it day in, day out. If Photoshop and Lightroom worked with WINE I wouldn’t even be thinking about this.
For some reason Gnome became too heavy for my laptop and it started overheating. It works fine with KDE and many more programs running
I liked*
Sorry for the mistake.
My Macbook Pro has held up quite well with the occasional thief. Thinkpads are more multi-thug street fight machines.
The trick is to to know your laptop’s beat down capacity.
Come on, they are the snow leopards of notebooks !
A little trick for you there: at UDS-L, I noticed a sticker on a girl’s laptop saying: "This is not my boyfriend laptop" (great one Ursula, take that you machos).
So, get yourself a sticker with: "This is my girlfriend laptop", even FOSS people will sympathize with you at this point
About the price, well, since you use your laptop a lot, quality matters, Apple hardware is not that expensive once you take that into account.
Yet, be aware that Macs have been configured with not enough RAM for a long time (less so recently, but still) so plan for more right now but don’t buy it from Apple. Having more RAM should also help you dedicate some more to a VM for Photoshop and Lightroom, so go for 4GB or even 8GB, you will pay for that, but you shouldn’t have to worry anymore thereafter
Plan for an SSD too, there is no more reason to not buy one these days. This one is little bit tougher to get right (the ones proposed by Apple are clearly not the best not the cheapest), but you should still be able to find one (there are even some hacks to replace the DVD drive with an SSD (and keep your original HD) if you feel adventurous).
Oh, and the rumor is that new laptops are going to be announced next Tuesday (~13 April)… if nothing else, that should lower the price of the actual models.
I’d be quite happy to use my wife’s laptop actually, though it’s a desktop replacement so lugging it around would be even more of a strain on my back than my usual bag of bits is already.
And as for the sympathy vote, I don’t think I need to have a sexist sticker to protect me. Maybe a "Yes, this is my laptop. WHY, HAVE YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT?" sticker would work better for my purposes…
Agreed. It’s about 100 quid cheaper to get an 8GB kit from Crucial, say, than it is to get the upgrade from 4GB to 8GB from Apple.
Also agreed, though I quite like having a large hard drive, too… One to save for, this one.
I’ve heard that one too, and I’m not looking to buy until at least the end of the month, which should give me plenty of time to find out what it’s best to spend my money on.
New opinion: After working a couple more days with KDE, I now share your opinion. I just cannot be productive there, with so many little things to push/pull/twist/touch and God-knows-what-else.
I am a bit scared of Gnome 3.0 which is said to put lots of little useless things into Linux. I hope what I saw are only mockups, and they are gonna stay mockups, because otherwise I’ll have to go to XFCE/LXDE and learn stuff all over again.