Comments on: MacBook https://rants.vastheman.com/2006/09/20/macbook/ Take a hit with V-Real Fri, 03 Aug 2007 18:24:08 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 By: brian https://rants.vastheman.com/2006/09/20/macbook/#comment-13 Fri, 03 Aug 2007 18:24:08 +0000 http://rants.vastheman.com/?p=24#comment-13 Well, you know what they say about opinions… everyone’s got one and they all stink. (That’s the clean version of that cliche, anyway.) Mainly, I just thought it was an odd combination of ideas–that Apple sucks for not having a built-in modem, because you want one and don’t want to carry around an extra piece, but that they should have gone with FireWire 800, because you want it and everyone else should just carry around an extra piece. 🙂

As you know, everything is a tradeoff. For every person who wishes a MacBook had (a FireWire 800 port/a native DVI connector/a modem/etc) there are a thousand others who a) don’t care and b) are happy to have machine that cost less than it would have if it had all those things they don’t want anyway. I can count on my fingers how many faxes I’ve sent in the last 3 years, and I’ve got several FW400 devices but none that support FW800.

Hopefully you’ve discovered that Dashboard can be easily disabled, and check your font smoothing settings in the ‘Appearance’ preference pane. I’m not a font snob but I know a decent amount about type and I spend a lot of time in both 10.3 and 10.4 in a design environment, and saying “the font rendering is nowhere near as good as Panther” is a bit of a stretch. I just took screenshots of your page on rock-stock 10.3 and 10.4 systems and overlaid them in Photoshop (tough to get right since you’ve got your text set to fully-justify–ick!) and there are nearly no differences. At 100%, toggling one layer’s visibility on and off, you can just barely see the tiniest bit of flickering between the two. At 300%, with the top layer’s colors inverted and the opacity set to 50%–thus making all identical pixels grey and all other pixels a different color–you can see how little difference there is.

By the way, I too bought a MacBook and work gave me a MacBook Pro. I could list exactly what I do and don’t want in a notebook, and my list would be different from yours and anyone else’s. I would have liked them to have thrown in an optical audio cable, but I suspect I’m in the vast minority.

I stumbled across your blog randomly and it’s entirely likely I won’t make it back; feel free to reply via email if you care to.

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