Ended up buying an Apple...
Carlos Gonçalves
by Carlos Gonçalves

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I have an Acer laptop for about 5 years. It includes a generously 512MB of RAM, Intel Centrino 1.6Ghz (M730 processor to be more precise), ATI Mobility Radeon x600 64MB VRAM, 80GB HDD, yada yada yada. The battery is in an awesome shape if we consider the age and the usage I put on it during this time - previously 3 hours fully charged and now around 2 hours, so… I couldn’t have asked for better. Nevertheless, the laptop has an 15.4” display and weighs 3Kg with battery plus the charger which I have to take always with me otherwise the battery would ran out quickly. All this factors led me to buy a new laptop with the main features to consider and give more priority on the weight, battery and size. I didn’t want to buy again a new 15.4”, up to 4 or 5 hours of battery, and weighed laptop. Basically the requirements were: 12” or 13” screen, up to 2Kg, battery that lasted at least 7 or 8 hours (wireless and reasonable screen brightness), 4GB of RAM or more, and obviously a “good” brand (Sony, Lenovo, Apple, Dell, and HP were on top of the list), not to mention a decent price I could afford. A few hours/days later I decided to pick an Apple Macbook Pro 13” 2.4GHz, not because of the Mac OS X as some might be imagining by now but because of the hardware itself.

The Apple Macbook Pro 13” I bought Tuesday includes an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3, battery up to 10 hours (wireless and 50% screen brightness), and weighs 2.04KG. It cost me 1.149€ but had an (indirect) discount of 5% plus 10€ on the FNAC client card (costs 5€ per year but worths it since it also gives you other discounts and benefits). Here is a short list of highlights regarding the hardware itself and the Mac OS X operating system which, by the way, I have to mention I have never used it until now:

Pros:

  • Laptop is solid rock and its aluminum unibody makes it truly fresh (I don’t fell any heat, except in the fan area where the air flows out obviously, while the Acer laptop is more like a heater than a laptop (I bet I could fry an egg on it));
  • Touchpad pretty flexible e practical;
  • Battery lasts up to 10 hours, meaning I don’t have to carry the charger wherever I go;
  • The charger has two cables: the charger with the cable to plug in the laptop and another one to extend the length of the cable to the wall socket. This means for, most of the cases, I can leave that extra cable aside or at home;
  • Auto brightness (think a little and you will find how useful it can be);
  • OS X is functional, intuitive, and has a clean UI overall.

Coins:

  • I’m used to have the Ctrl key switched with the Fn key (something I want to get used);
  • At least for the Portuguese keyboard, the square brackets as well as the curly brackets aren’t shown in the keyboard and the key combination for the curly brackets isn’t easy and convenient: alt+shift+8 for { and alt+shift+9 for } (keys 8 and 9 are where the parentheses are located at). Imagine how great will it to code, not!
  • No “Cut” on files?!
  • “exit” in the Terminal doesn’t close the tab, but logs out and stays there opened;
  • If running the OS in Portuguese, cmd+w doesn’t close the tab as expected since the shortcut isn’t associated and seems there is no way to do so. If running in English, the shortcut is there and do the job;
  • Expected iChat to support the MSN protocol. Using Adium, which is way better;
  • The file (un-)compressor included by default lacks lots of features such has the capability to uncompress split files. Using BetterZip, but still missing Ark from KDE!
  • People advised me to use VLC instead of QuickTime for watching videos, specially those in HD since it seems the codecs used by QuickTime consumes more CPU than it should and that VLC consumes. I would have installed VLC anyway since I’m already used to it being the best video player out there in my opinion.

For those concerned about my devotion to the FOSS world and specially my openSUSE and KDE eccentricity, than there is nothing to you worry about! I’m still the very same guy you used to know. I just needed a laptop with the features I have stated above and that ended up to be an Apple Macbook. That’s it, folks!