Thursday, November 11, 2010

MacBook Pro and Mac OSX Love+Hate

MacBook Pro

Love

The Long battery is quite nice - I seem to get the 7 hours I should, though I haven't ran it on battery for that time in the one session.

I really like the nice shape - it's good how it doesn't look like other laptops.

I love how it's so thin and on top of that it's the same thickness along the whole deceive so it fits in satchels easier.

Like

I like how the base doesn't seem get too hot when I am using it on my lap.

It handles windows file shares quite well, and finds them automatically, if possible.

Dislike

It has no hhd light or optical drive light so I can't tell what it's doing when it stops responding. This is annoying because it's just silly - they waste a hole with an IR port (see below) but don't want to put two colored lights on the front?

I've also discovered that it has no Ethernet lights - not a big issue (you can get it off Activity Monitor, which is a nice touch), but why not just put them on?

The miniDP needs an adapter to actually connect it to anything! I'm putting this in dislike not hate because I understand why they went with it - full DVI ports would have been more then the thickness of the laptop anyway!

Hate

Sharp! When I rest my arms on the front, the edge rubs into the my skin...

Mac OSX

Love

I love how you can Drag and drop to install applications - it's so much easier than having to go through a wizard.

The trackpad is quite good, I quite like the two fingered scrolling and navigate websites with three fingers. (Annoyingly though, swipe to navigate doesn't work in Mac Help...)

Like

I like how you can access the dictionary and calculator in spotlight search. In spotlight, it will show you the first few words of the definition of the word typed into it. Also, if you type math syntax into Spotlight, it will give the answer.

I think it's cool how you can quit a program while still inside option-tab. (By pressing q.)

Dislike

On Windows 7, you can drag windows to the edge of the screen, and it will resize it to half the screen width, so you can place them side by side. Mac should have this feature (or at least something similar), because it's supposed to be better than Windows.
I'm putting this in Dislike because while XP did have the ability to tile windows, it wasn't very visible, Windows 7 made it obvious but (to be fair) only came put recently.

I don't like how the red close button isn't consistent - sometimes it exits, sometimes it just closes the window. But this isn't too much of a problem because command+q exits the program completely anyway.

Hate

There's no global font scaling like on windows. On Windows, you can increase the global font processing size to make test look bigger. On Mac, everything is so small... This is partly worse because my MacBook Pro anti-glare only comes in high resolution. Why doesn't Mac have this ability when Windows does?

The green zoom button is useless in safari - if the browser is the same size as the web page, zoom does nothing at all.

There's no grouping of file types in Finder like on Windows. Even since XP, we could group icons in Explorer by file type, date, first letter or size. This separated groups of icons with a title and a border. I hate this because Windows has had this feature since 2001, and it can't be a difficult feature to implement.

Can only resize windows from the bottom-right - why? That means that you have drag the window opposite of where you want to resize it.

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