The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on March 13, 2004

So, I bought a 14″ iBook.

I'm over Liz's house. Her housemate, Irene, is graduating soon, and going to be doing some research work and travelling a lot. A laptop would be handy, she says, help me pick one. Well, what do you want to do with it, we ask. Well, she needs all the normal stuff: email, web, etc. MS Office interoperability would be nice, and she needs Matlab for work. That is the real gating factor here. She does NOT want a Windows machine, but as a non-computer person (Ocean Engineering major, IIRC), she doesn't want anything too complex either. Right now, she's running Fedora Core 1, but it's a little tough to do certain things (she still can't figure out how to burn CD's by herself; no one has shown her yet, she wants to figure it out). We thought, sounds like you could use a Mac, Irene. After all, there is a native MS Office port, and MathWorks has a native OS X port (if you didn't know about this, link here). Her price limit is $2000, without including MS Office and Matlab.

So, we sat her in front of Liz's G5, made her an account, and she started playing… and playing… and playing some more. (This morning, Liz and I came back from breakfast, and she had logged on again to get some more keyboard time – she's hooked). So, thanks to this fellow's nice suggestion, we went to the Apple store's “specials” section and looked at the refurbished Apples. She liked the 15″ Powerbooks, and the price was right. So, that's probably what she'll get when she graduates.

But, we're at the refurb site. I see a 900Mhz G4 14″ iBook for $999. I was going to get an 800 Mhz G4 12″ iBook for $1099 at the Apple store. Hmmm. Oh, and there's a refurbished AirPort extreme card for $79. I was going to pay $99 at the Apple store. All fully waranteed by Apple. Hmmmm…

900 Mhz/14″/40GB/256MB/AirPort Extreme for $1078
or
800 Mhz/12″/30GB/256MB AirPort Extreme for $1198

And the 14″ is roughly the size of my Dell (slightly smaller) and about half the weight (I have an Inspiron 8100 – it's a friggin' brick).

Which would you do?

So, I bought it. Next day shipping was $25. It will be here Monday.

Once the place reopens, I'll probably get something from MacSkinz to make it distinctive. A some nice tribal pattern would be cool – do it black on transparent so that it ends up as black on white. Could be slick.

I also recommend picking up Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks from BookPool. It was written by a friend of mine (Brian Jepson). There's some overview of how stuff works and all that, and it's pretty slick. Definitely packed with useful info.

What REALLY has gotten me juiced about this is the WWDC DVD's that Apple sent me. The downside is that they did it all in Quicktime. They say you need a Mac to play it, but you should be able to dig out the quicktime files and play them just fine. However, I'm just blown away at how they did their BSD implementation. In a nutshell:
1.) Take a LOT of successful F/OSS libraries/engines/software
2.) Make a nice distro
3.) Build a killer UI around it, complete with config tools that let Aunt Tillie actually USE the F/OSS software without having to edit raw config files or use a slightly different tool for each thing.
4.) Add LOTS and LOTS of API's and interface libraries. (For example, they took KHTML and KJS, which are KDE libraries and wrapped them in an Objective-C layer called the WebKit, which is a nice library that you can use to embed a browser window in your app. Hell, in the on stage session, they had a guy make a web browser in like 5 minutes. Just fire up the Interface Builder (which is your generic window layout tool and widget sticker thing) and drag over the web content window thing, then resize it. At a text bar and some buttons. Now, what you do is go into the code editor and write some glue code to tie the buttons to the content window, right? WRONG. The content window is an object. It has controls. These controls are things like URL, forward buttons, back buttons, etc, right? Standard stuff. Why reinvent the wheel? All you do is select the button, and then the web browser then drag a line between them, then tell the content window what control the button binds to. You have a web browser. It has ALL THE PLUGINS THAT SAFARI HAS. Automagically.

It's like: save your code for doing something novel and interesting. UI design shouldn't take forever.

That said, I haven't seen the code it produces. The MFC stuff does something similar, but the code it produces is a little strange, to say the least.

Anyway, the more I investigate it, the more I start feeling that we're going to see more of this. Apple's BSD “distro” is what other distro makers aspire to. From what I hear, SuSe is pretty close. But, Apple is here, and it's simple and easy, so that my Mom could use it. On the flip side, it seems hacker friendly enough that I can use it too, without feeling cramped. I rapidly expect my iBook to become my primary machine.

Besides, if I miss my Linux stuff, I can always fire up full screen X11 running FVWM2 and fill the screen with emacs windows and xterms (which is probably how I'll continue to do administrative tasks and write code).

However, despite all of the above, the Linux boxen won't go away. It makes a much better platform for a media center PC than I've seen on OS X yet, and it also makes a more cost-effective low end server platform (by low end, I mean “stuff I can get super cheap off of eBay, cannibalize for parts, and do small upgrades to keep it fast, like the server I bought with the 12 80GB IDE disks and 2 RAID controllers. For the higher end stuff; like competing with Dells and Suns, the Apple servers are a compelling choice. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, down the road, the core house processing server (DHCP, Mail, DNS, etc) was a Mac, and BSD/Linux boxen were only used to run vast arrays of disks.). So, play to the strengths of the platform; but acknowledge the deficiencies of both as well.

Makes sense, no?

Category: LJ Import
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