After many weeks in the FreeBSD wilderness, I have migrated back to OS X aboard a 12" aluminum PowerBook.
I plan on detailing my time in exile in a future post, complete with screen shots and bullet points.
Right now, I just want to note what an excellent piece of hardware this machine is compared to my previous PB, a 500MHz Titanium. That thing scratched like a CD and was as floppy as a phone book. Granted, I tend to be hard on computers, but dammit, portable computers should be designed to be ported, and not require sheepskin swaddling and leather screen-protectors and ultra high impact copolymer resin cases (as cool as those things may be, especially ultra high impact copolymer resin).
There's hardly a speck of paint on this entire computer, and in nearly three weeks of use I have yet to put a single scratch or mark on it -- whereas usually the first ding is inflicted within 24 hours. Hell, even the trackpad button is aluminum! One of the dumb flaws of the titanium was the plastic frame between the upper and lower cases. Thousands of anal-retentive Titanium PB owners shat their pants as they noticed their wrists had worn the paint down to the decidedly un-titanium black plastic underneath. On the 12" there's a small grey plastic seam around the edges of the lid and base, and I'll bet like five dollars that it is solid-color plastic all the way through.
The silver keys I'm less confident about -- time will tell. But at least they're not translucent, so I don't have to stare at the eyelashes and other detritus trapped underneath them. Maybe I wasn't sufficiently antiseptic to own a machine like the Titanium. All I know is, the 12" is tight.
I plan on detailing my time in exile in a future post, complete with screen shots and bullet points.
Right now, I just want to note what an excellent piece of hardware this machine is compared to my previous PB, a 500MHz Titanium. That thing scratched like a CD and was as floppy as a phone book. Granted, I tend to be hard on computers, but dammit, portable computers should be designed to be ported, and not require sheepskin swaddling and leather screen-protectors and ultra high impact copolymer resin cases (as cool as those things may be, especially ultra high impact copolymer resin).
There's hardly a speck of paint on this entire computer, and in nearly three weeks of use I have yet to put a single scratch or mark on it -- whereas usually the first ding is inflicted within 24 hours. Hell, even the trackpad button is aluminum! One of the dumb flaws of the titanium was the plastic frame between the upper and lower cases. Thousands of anal-retentive Titanium PB owners shat their pants as they noticed their wrists had worn the paint down to the decidedly un-titanium black plastic underneath. On the 12" there's a small grey plastic seam around the edges of the lid and base, and I'll bet like five dollars that it is solid-color plastic all the way through.
The silver keys I'm less confident about -- time will tell. But at least they're not translucent, so I don't have to stare at the eyelashes and other detritus trapped underneath them. Maybe I wasn't sufficiently antiseptic to own a machine like the Titanium. All I know is, the 12" is tight.
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