{"id":277,"date":"2008-05-25T11:12:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-25T11:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.cottee.org\/2008\/05\/welcome-from-the-macbook-pro\/"},"modified":"2008-05-25T11:12:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-25T11:12:00","slug":"welcome-from-the-macbook-pro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/?p=277","title":{"rendered":">Welcome from the MacBook Pro and Another Welcome from Refurbished Computers UK"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&gt;It arrived a day late and is looking pretty cool so far.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m typing this with MarsEdit first of all to see how I get on what that.<\/p>\n<p>What have I noticed about the new machine. Some random comments made in no particular order. Here&#8217;s the low down on the specs of the Machine.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Model Name: MacBook Pro<br \/>\nModel Identifier: MacBookPro4,1<\/p>\n<p>Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo<\/p>\n<p>Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz<\/p>\n<p>Number Of Processors: 1<\/p>\n<p>Total Number Of Cores: 2<\/p>\n<p>L2 Cache: 3 MB<\/p>\n<p>Memory: 4 GB<\/p>\n<p>Bus Speed: 800 MHz<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It has a 250GB hard drive, 5400 RPM<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been through a number of laptops in the last couple of years. I had the <a href=\"http:\/\/cottee.org\/articles\/2006\/08\/23\/white-2-ghz-macbook\">MacBook<\/a> which replaced my old <a href=\"http:\/\/cottee.org\/articles\/2005\/12\/31\/apple-ibook-g4-12-1-year-on\">iBook<\/a> and died a horrible death. Which was replaced by a <a href=\"http:\/\/cottee.org\/articles\/2007\/04\/17\/dabs-crap-misco-good\">Sony Vaio VGN-FE41Z<\/a>. And I&#8217;ve also been running the <a href=\"http:\/\/cottee.org\/articles\/2008\/04\/26\/the-hardy-heron\">Dell Inspiron 630m<\/a> which I think become my second favorite laptop ever, just behind the 12&#8243; iBook before it too popped it&#8217;s clogs. So maybe over three years I&#8217;ve had five major laptops &#8211; running a mixture of OS X, Linux and Windows (XP and Vista).<\/p>\n<p>I had a bit of a epiphany regarding laptops a short time ago. Because even though I was loving Hardy Heron on the Dell I realised that linux laptop compatibility is a lottery &#8211; unless you get one with Ubuntu preinstalled which limits somewhat your choice of machines, trying to get all your laptop features running can become something of a fulltime job. Even on the Dell resume\/suspend didn&#8217;t work (although it did under Gutsy 95% of the time &#8211; I suspect I tweaked something in the past which I&#8217;ve since forgotten). So upgrades are exciting times with new treats and old ones sometimes taken from you. The Dell 630m was great but even it was showing it&#8217;s age. I was plotting what to replace it with and was thinking of something like my last week&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.cottee.org\/2008\/05\/ubuntu-vmware-vista-xming.html\">Vista setup<\/a> but on a much nicer spec machine. You have all the drivers provided, suspend works, you can buy some crappy bargain bit of hardware not wondering if you&#8217;ll ever be able to use it. So if the &#8220;X Server, VMWare&#8221; trick works and you can use Ubuntu easily within a windows environment it makes sense to go the Windows route.<\/p>\n<p>Because the only other option is the Apple route and I swore to the gods I wouldn&#8217;t give them my money again until they sorted out their production process &#8230; i.e. I won&#8217;t buy a MacBook until they start making them reliable and resilient. I even thought of buying refurbished computers from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gigarefurb.co.uk\/\">gigarefurb.co.uk<\/a> because I have heard how worth it they were. We&#8217;ve bought so many of these Macbook and had so many problems and the Apple Care they provided wasn&#8217;t much use either because you have to sit there arguing that, no, you didn&#8217;t crack the front casing of it and this is a problem that thousands of others have suffered from. And they still don&#8217;t believe you. And why don&#8217;t we just buy Dell&#8217;s instead because you can get cheap accidental damage cover with that. And actually Vista is not that ugly. It&#8217;s quite nice. But it&#8217;s slow. And not very reliable. And 3GB of RAM is about your max. Oh and Steve Balmer.<\/p>\n<p>Apple are evil. Microsoft are evil. Ubuntu are not evil (or at least, if they are, they&#8217;re keeping it quiet so we don&#8217;t feel bad about using an evil os). But we have to use evil hardware with the good software and maybe something won&#8217;t work properly. Hmmm &#8230; Apple.<\/p>\n<p>Am I rambling?<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, on the spur of a moment decision I went back to Apple. I bought a MacBook Pro because I was not aware of them suffering the same monumental build quality issues as the MacBook. It&#8217;s a Unix based laptop. It has a great screen and a great keyboard. It has good battery life. It&#8217;s fast. I was in Japan when the other laptop died and I could easily get a US keyboard and a worldwide warranty. I love OS X.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll blog a bit shortly when I have my same Ubuntu VMWare setup up and running. I&#8217;ll blog a little bit later, maybe in a couple of months, when I&#8217;ve worked out whether this is really changing my life. If it can and I can reduce my laptops to one again, I&#8217;ll be a happy man.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/9210244490645736884-1803032224881183792?l=blog.cottee.org\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&gt;It arrived a day late and is looking pretty cool so far. So I&#8217;m typing this with MarsEdit first of all to see how I get on what that. What have I noticed about the new machine. Some random comments made in no particular order. Here&#8217;s the low down on the specs of the Machine. Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro4,1 Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz Number Of Processors: 1 Total Number Of Cores:&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/cottee.org\/?p=277\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[25,29,30,31,32,33,47,50,51,52],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oldsite","tag-hardy","tag-laptop","tag-linux","tag-mac","tag-macbook-pro","tag-macintosh","tag-ubuntu","tag-vista","tag-vmware","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cottee.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}