May 19, 2006
MacBook Not-so-pro
As some of my friends know, my work assigned a Apple MacBook Pro to me to use for testing. MacBook is such a crappy name. So I "affectionately" gave it a more proper name: evilBook.
Things that I have noted about evilBook that lives up to its name:
1) Despite being a Rev D which is supposed to have a lot of bug fixes, it periodically takes well over 15 seconds to load apps that should be near instantanious. Such as System Preferences.
2) For a while, it would freeze completely, giving me the illusion that it just crashed and I lost all my data. As I think "oh shit, what the hell happened," and wonder if I should reboot it, it comes back to life a minute or two later as if nothing happened.
3) It runs so hot it's gotta be trying to set me on fire.
4) Sometimes when putting it to sleep, it just shuts itself off instead. So I lose whatever I was working on.
5) The new chipset and drivers used for wireless networking doesn't seem to be very good. In fact, it doesn't seem to work with my Apple base station most of the time.
While everybody's all excited about it, I'm still in the PowerPC camp of the internal architecture wars. I admit there's some advantages of running the x86 chip for the customer (such as being able to use Windows for a few games, and using the Java HotSpot optimizations, gcc targetting x86 makes more optimized code), I say that discontinuing the use of PowerPC in Apple's product line is bad for the industry and for Apple.
Anyhow, here's something funny that I noticed. It's understandable that Apple's CHUD tools report the Core Duo as a Pentium M because it really is. MenuMeters, reports my CPU as a 80486.
