After 17 years in the PC industry I have finished my conversion to my first Mac. I can remember my days at Limited Brands when the design department used them religiously. 11 PC people with me on staff at Victoria’s Secret back in those days and we had to outsource the support of the Macs. Surely none of us wanted to touch them. Now, 10 years later, I find myself on one.
My decision to go to a Macbook was not based on “the cool factor”. It was 3 things for me: battery life, reliability, and sturdyness (I’m a bit rough on laptops). Boasting a battery life of 7 hours seemed to good to be true but I was able to run 6 with no problem on my initial test. Reliability was becoming a problem with my old laptop. It was a Lenovo X61. Nice and small but it could no longer cool itself effectively. Running a demo or a intensive webex would get the CPU too hot and it would go into standby mode randomly to protect itself and not let itself out until it cooled down. Not very fun as it happened the last two times while I was on a Webex showing our software to a customer. Sturdyness, I cracked the screen of my first x61. The second and final one had a broken off PCMCIA slot door, and a chip off the base corner. I really liked the aluminum shell. I liked the fact that I can hold the laptop by the corner while open and the case does not flex from the stress.
Yes I paid a premium for it, but I was getting tired of all of the windows B.S. Don’t get me wrong, windows is a great OS. I hear great things are coming in Windows 7 and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some of them. I can’t wait to get my hands on it to load it into Fusion and play with the new features. However, as for my base OS, I’m going to give OSX a try for a while. I’ve been lucky enough to learn in my off time on my wife’s Mac I bought for her about 8 months ago. Her laptop was dying and I was tired of being the “helpdesk” for every issue. Getting a Mac was a great idea, supposedly easy to use and reliable. Besides, whenever she would ask me for help I could use the “I don’t know Macs” excuse (for future reference, this only works for about the first month, she stopped buying it after that.) So I would use her laptop on the evenings and weekends to understand it better. I found myself asking her if I could use it instead of my own. That’s when I knew I was getting hooked.
I was given the green light about 2 weeks ago. I went down to the local Apple store in Columbus. I really did not need the pitch or to ask any questions. Any self-respecting geek researches every possible technical question before going to a store to buy a computer. What I wanted to know is can I get one with a bigger-than standard hard drive in the store. Unfortunately, the answer is no, not in the store. They can add RAM for you but that’s it. If you want to upgrade the CPU or the hard drive or digress from the standard models in any other way but RAM, you have to order online. So I headed home. Got online and picked the 13-in Macbook Pro with the 2.53 GHz processor. It came with 4 GB of RAM (a must if you want to demo anything in Fusion). I added the 500GB drive to it. This was my whole reason for ordering it online. It you want to run a bunch of VMs on a laptop, get an external drive or the biggest internal one you can, so I did. The web site said it would ship with 2-3 days and I added expedited shipping for an additional $15. It was built and shipped in 3 days, from Shanghai. I ordered it on a Tuesday about 2pm and signed for it the following Tuesday at 10am.
I did the basic setup and then installed Fusion and ran a P2V of my old laptop. From inside Fusion I can now power up my old pc and get any info I need. I have an Airport Extreme at home now with a 1TB mybook drive attached to it. I have time machine backing up to it. One tip I can give you: if you use Fusion, exclude the VM directories from Time Machine. If you power up a VM in Fusion the vmdk (hard disk) files get updated. Time Machine is not based on block level changes, that is, it does not back up just the parts of the files that have changed. Instead, it is file based and backs up the entire file each time it gets changed. This will send a lot of data to your time machine that is not necessary. Copy them periodically to another file location but don’t let time machine get them.
So that’s where I am now. If you use a Mac and know some tricks or a great software app to use on it, please post in the comments. I’d love to hear from you. Next up, I’m setting up an entire SRM demo in Fusion on my laptop and I’ll be posting exactly how to do that in the very near future. I’ll do my best to have that done this week.
August 10th, 2009 at 7:55 am
These x61′s all have the same issues. Mine also overheats, and there’s also a crack at the base corner.
August 10th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Congrats! They are sweet machines. I’m always “borrowing” my wife’s. Now you just need to share the secret recipe for getting it approved!
August 10th, 2009 at 9:24 am
couple of (what i consider to be) interesting sites for you:
http://www.macsurfer.com/
http://www.macosxhints.com/
I switched to a Mac in 2003. Not for the “cool factor” either, but for the superior *NIX experience.
August 10th, 2009 at 10:22 am
I switched over about two years ago, never looked back. Apple’s are far from perfect, but I’ve experienced fewer of the little time sucking problems I had on Windows.
The mac software I use every day is:
OmniFocus
NetNewsWire
Evernote
Adium
OmniOutliner
MindNode Pro
iTerm
Fluid
MS Remote Desktop
Quicksilver (stick with it! hard to appreciate at first)
I also have Fusion running Win 7, but only really use it for Visio or lab work.
Another useful link.
http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/03/27/my-current-mac-applications/
August 10th, 2009 at 10:27 am
your story is exactly the same as Mine.. I did my switch in May. As a traveling Consultant, I needed something reliable, and the Lenovo t61 never came through.
August 10th, 2009 at 11:55 am
I was in the same situation last year. I bought my Mac for the hardware – it was sturdy, had excellent specs, and good battery life. I’ve since come to really appreciate Mac OS X, since I come from a UNIX background. Although I still use Fusion and Boot Camp, I mainly stay in the OS X environment now. It’s just a great environment to get stuff done.
Watch out though! Since then I’ve bought a Mac Mini as a home server/virtual lab and am seriously considering trading the old 15″ mac in for a 13″ like you got…
Since you asked, you must look into MacPorts so you can have all the UNIX goodies you want.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I’m considering donating my 13.3″ MacBook to my everloving and buying the latest model. I do so love my little MacBook.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Welcome! I’ve been a Mac user for well over 6 years now, long before they switched to the Intel platform. Feel free to visit my site; I have a variety of Mac-related posts that may be useful to you. Of course, you have my contact information, too, so you’re welcome to just give me a call, too!
August 10th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
So…for TM and Fusion VM’s, I might check out this approach.
http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/protecting-your-vmware-fusion-vms-with-time-machine/
And…here’s my general software list I send people who ask. ;-)
-Netnewswire – free – excellent RSS reader/weblog publisher
-Adium – free – better than iChat in lots of ways with the sole exception of video/audio chat
-TextWrangler – free – excellent text editor….set it as your default. Smultron is also free but I prefer TextWrangler
-Transmission – excellent – BitTorrent client for your legit BitTorrent stuff
-Mail – free – the builtin OS X Mail client is really quite good
-Transmit – shareware (but worth it) – probably the best file transfer client on Mac (SCP, SFTP, FTP, S3) – CyberDuck now has some of this and is free but Transmit is frankly better
-iWork 08 – paid but 30 day trial – better for most purposes than MS Office and faster/lighter too (maybe not for corporate use with macros and whatnot)
-SmartReporter – free – nice SMART status monitor
-Menumeters – free – good little app for bandwidth, cpu, disk and memory monitoring
-Memory – max to 4 GB or 6 GB if you can
-Perian – free – lets you place lots of video codecs inside QuickTime
-Flip4Mac – free – lets you play M$ specific codecs inside quicktime
-Unplugged – free – handy power notifications
-Camino – free – nice native Mac browser based on Mozilla engine (my default browser….I use Safari next and then Firefox).
-Growl – free – good systemwide notifications (Adium integrates with it very nicely)
-QuickSilver – free – a must-have for application launching and much much more (even if you don’t explore this much now, make sure to come back to it….is a major productivity booster)
-MenuCalendarClock iCal – free (if disable extra features) – turn off the builtin menu clock and use this for a nice calendar dropdown
-Shimo – free – dunno if you use Cisco VPN but if you do this is excellent
-VMware Fusion – paid with free demo (but can get for $40 if you look) – Windows OS + apps….need I say more? (more stable than Parallels and more polished than VirtualBox)
-Tinkertool – free – lets you tinker with lots of hidden settings (that you’d have to adjust using the Terminal otherwise)
-Handbrake + MetaX – free – lets you rip and label your DVD’s nicely for playback on your computer or iPod
-SmartSleep (if using a laptop) - lets you toggle the sleep modes (worth doing so you can wake from sleep immediately unless the battery is low)
-ie4osx – http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/ nice way to run IE 6 on your machine (Intel only) for sites that require it
-msgfiler – nice way to file messages in mail using the keyboard
-Dockstar – gives multiple mail notification badges
August 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I switched when apple switched to intel, have had two macbook pro’s since then and i love it. If it wasn’t for work i would be all apple :)
August 10th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
One more thing that I forgot to mention that I noticed about the new Mac: LED backlit screen. Apple.com says that it offers a 60% better color gamut than previous models. I can tell you that it is a noticeable difference. I notice it on web sites with lots of reds and blues. They seem much more vibrant. The only real gaming I do on it is City of Heroes and I can definitely notice better colors than on any other display in the house.
August 17th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
and another thing, my iPhone syncs about 50% faster on my Mac than it did on my PC. It’s not even close.
August 21st, 2009 at 11:30 am
The one thing that is keeping me from switching to Mac is the lack of an OS-X version of VMware Workstation. I really do use (and need) the tree-structured hierarchy of snapshots that Workstation provides and Fusion does not.
September 30th, 2009 at 9:28 am
You can use Time Machine with you VMs if you tell Fusion 2.x to split up your VMDK files into 2GB chunks. This works great for me, and is how Vmware suggest you do it. I have recovered from a time machine backup before of my VM restoring the files and it worked perfect. So instead of having to push 30gb a night to your Time capsule, you can just send the 1x or 2x 2GB files you modified that day to the Time Machine Backup! Hope that helps!