Good and Bad
Well, it’s been a few days now, and I have good news and bad news about the new MacBook Pro.
First off, it’s fast; much faster than my old Powerbook, but then again my old Powerbook is four years old and that’s not a fair comparison. Regardless, I’m pleased as hell with the speed, and recently ran a Radiance benchmark test on it and the MacBook Pro proved its mettle. But some other niggly details are pissing me off and ringing in my ears (literally) and I feel the need to vent.
Where the hell did tabbed browsing go? I’m using Safari once again because it’s a Universal Binary, and I’m trying to simplify my life so I thought running the browser that comes with the operating system would be one way to do that (opposed to installing Firefox (or Deer Park, the Universal Binary beta of Firefox)). But there seems to be no way to do tabbed browsing anymore in Safari. What the fuck is up with that?
Battery life on this thing sorta blows. My old slow-ass 550 MHz G4 Powerbook could go five hours with minimal disk activity. This thing expects an olympic gold for three hours. It’s got a Bode Miller battery. What the fuck is up with that?
The Apple email program sucks at IMAP. It lacks the ability to save sent mail to an IMAP folder, and the workaround (prepending “INBOX” to your path) only makes your IMAP folders show up outside of the main mailbox tree. This is, like, totally gay. The best option is currently to save copies of sent mail to a local folder, which of course flies in the face of the whole premise of IMAP in the first goddamned place. What the fuck is up with that?
All the above complaintes are nitpicks. My main problem with this thing right now is that it emits a high pitched whine, basically all the time. It’s an electronic hum, a binary squeal. And it is pretty much constant. I’m thinking of calling Apple on this one, because it’s starting to give me a headache, but I fear that I’ll get some zit-faced surfer on the line telling me that this is “normal”. My old laptop did this very occasionaly, but this thing emits satan’s squeal pretty much all the time it’s on, and it’s starting to make me a little nutso. What the fuck it up with that?
Whenever I spend a couple grand on something, I seem to obsess about my percieved derived value from said purchase. This one is a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. What the fuck is up with that? Apple? Apple?
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11 comments
Sorry to hear about the problems. That’s the main reason I never get the first of anything. Regarding the tabbed browsing, I can’t imagine it’s gone. Why would they take it out??? I am running Tiger and Safari and I can enable it in the Safari preferences. PS. I like Safari a lot.
Hey Perry, welp, the tabbed browsing was an easy fix, thanks for the tip. Guess I totally forgot you have to enable that. Why in the hell would that be an option? Anyways, I’m tabbed once again. The other issues remiain.
I’ll ask a friend of mine who knows all sorts of things about Apple and their products and see if he knows anything. I’ll let you know if I hear anything of any help to you!
Hey Rob,
Amy said you were having some problems with your MacBook… I sent her an email with some instructions and a screen shot of the preferences in Mail where you can set it to have your sent items stored on the server. As far as the whine you are hearing I found a thread posted about it, don’t know if it will help all that much, but you might be interesting in reading it: http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=286994&highlight=hum+noise
Sorry about the whine… In addition to the MacNN thread above, here’s a rather long thread on the issue over at Apple’s support page:
http://tinyurl.com/pbgm6
Hope there’s a solution in there for you.
Thanks Erik & Phil, at least I’m not alone. I think I will bitch about this to Apple, even though it probably won’t do me any good. I was playing with the Photo Booth app last night and I do notice that the whine is greatly reduced now, so maybe I’ll try that for now.
As for mail, I know about the preferences change, but your suggestion makes Apple Mail store my sent messages locally, instead of on the IMAP server, which sorta defeats the point of using a server-based email like IMAP. I’m doing it that way anyway, because it’s better than nothing, but I’d love to see Apple get their act together and fix this bug. Thanks again for the advice!
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I have no clue. Glad it was an easy fix though. I hope you get the rest sorted out. I am no Apple fanboy but I do root for them to do well and get more market share. I am too stupid to use Linux and too smart to use Windows so I need Apple more they need me.
For some reason, what I was responding to in the previous post got snipped. I was responding to your comment on tabbed browsing which said:
“Guess I totally forgot you have to enable that. Why in the hell would that be an option?”
Also, just remembered: I don’t know if previous versions of Safari had this but v2 has spell check. It’s really nice to have a system-wide spell checker (finally) that works with mail, browser, text edit, etc. I am surprised it took so long to get that done.
“As for mail, I know about the preferences change, but your suggestion makes Apple Mail store my sent messages locally, instead of on the IMAP server, which sorta defeats the point of using a server-based email like IMAP.”
Erik let me know that when setting this option, as he described above, it saves his mail to the server. He is uncertain why it works for him but not for you. ??? Go figure…
Damn Rob, if your new computer is making noises like the one sampled in the first fourm thread, I’d have to chuck it! I couldn’t stand having to listen to sh*t like that for any length of time. That’s horrible!
I hope that you get your ‘puter issues sorted out.
Yeah, it’s a real drag. All weekend, it went away, but now it’s back. When I run PhotoBooth, the noise goes away, so I guess it’s something to do with the iSight camera, but I shouldn’t have to run the camera just to have a quiet computer. I will complain to Apple about this, but I keep putting it off because I know I’ll be disappointed with the response I get. For now I have the camera running all the time.
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