Last Word on Laptops
| August 11th, 2008Back when I was at university, I had an old Sony mobile phone. I loved that phone, because of two functions: firstly, it had a scroll wheel on the side, and secondly it could record sound. If I got a text message I would get a one-second blast from Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”;, which always made me feel better.
I had that phone for about two and a half years, and at the end of that time it started to break in interesting ways, probably due to over-exposure to pocket fluff. At first, it would freeze and only show the same screen, no matter what button was pressed. There would be one random button that would turn the backlight on or off, but I would have to reset the device. Then the phone started to sometimes invert it’s display, showing a negative version of what it normally would have on it’s tiny screen. I had to replace it when all the text started showing as negative mirror writing, because it was just a wee bit hard to work out what was going on.
Six years later, I guess something similar has happened to my laptop. My venerable G4 Powerbook finally died, giving up late last Sunday night, which was a bummer as I had just made it a ‘retirement home’. This consisted of a Zalman laptop stand and my collection of external drives - the idea being that even thought I couldn’t take it anywhere, I could still use it in the house. The setup was pretty impressive:
Just how sick was my laptop? Rather than type it out in prose, I’m going to resort to a table to give you an indication of it’s woes:
| Part | Brokeness |
|---|---|
| Battery Life | About ten minutes |
| DVD Drive | Not working |
| Hard drive | Replaced |
| Case | Case Bent (when replacing hard drive) |
| Keyboard | Keyboard 3,e,d,c keys not working |
| Fans | Left (main) fan not working |
I still loved it though.
Last weekend, though, the machine took a turn for the worst. I was dealing with a lot of weird bugs; I had to restart it when the wifi dropped out for no reason. And then it started having kernel crashes. Irrecoverable kernel crashes, that meant I couldn’t even start the laptop. There was a brief reprieve, when I managed to start it, do a Time Machine backup, but it died again.
These crashes were as random as the crashes on my mobile phone, that I talked about above. My guess as to why they started? I think the notoriously hot-running G4 processor started to cook itself when the main fan in my laptop died. Why do I think the main fan died? Possibly, the amount of use it got after I installed 10.5. But there’s no way I can be sure about these as causes; it’s all just guessing.
I’m currently at a stage where I really need a laptop. In fact, after some advice from my father, I went out and brought a laptop the day after my powerbook broke. Emotionally, this felt very weird; a bit like buying a new puppy after your old faithful hound just died.
Some of that advice that my father gave me was that linux could be seen as ‘a nice extra’. I was all set to go and get the cheapest laptop around and run Ubuntu on it, but it was pointed out to me that having used Apple’s OS X for at least half a decade I would find this a bit of a change. In the end, I had to discount both the ultra-cheap (Asus eee) and ultra expensive (Mac Pro) options as being not really feasible.
Because I don’t think I know anybody who has a good use for a Mac Pro, not really. Maybe Kelly, but really? No. There’s just too many cores that cost too many notes. You can build your own renderfarm using lego bricks, there’s no need for aluminium.
So this is my new laptop: it’s a black Macbook. Not a white Macbook, like I usually advise people to get, nor a more pro-level Macbook Pro. It’s also not the travel-friendly Macbook Air. Not that it’s also not a Linux-friendly Lenovo thinkpad, or a pre-installed Ubuntu Dell.
I walked into what could be called the king of English retail stores, John Lewis, and picked it up on Monday. The thought of spending that much money was so traumatic that I ended up having to order myself a pancake and a cup of tea afterwards from the posh cafe that John Lewis runs, which made it seem like a good idea to go there. I love those pancake’s crepes that they do. There were two (non-pancake related) reasons I went to John Lewis though - I wanted to get insurance on the laptop itself, and secondly, I wanted to get back to work ASAP.
There was a certain element of doubt in getting a new laptop now, as opposed to a few months time - although this is probably more an indication of tech-led blogging from major sites like Engadget, BoingBoing, and others - because Apple are supposed to be releasing a new redesign of the Macbook range. If that does happen, then I don’t want it - I want my laptop to be a machine that is proven to work, unlike some of the problems that have surrounded other first-generation releases of technology from Apple.
Being able to walk into a store, and walk out with a 250gb hard-drived Macbook really did make it worth spending the extra sixty pounds for the black version, too. All the Macbook range are solid all-round machines, easily capabile of things that would stress my Powerbook (like rendering the House of Cards video from Radiohead), and with this amount of raw horsepower being available at the ‘consumer’ end of the market, I didn’t see the point of trading up to a Macbook Pro, and having previously ordered ‘custom’ laptops from Apple I didn’t really want to wait.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone else buying the black Macbook unless they really knew what they were doing. But for me, I’m the sort of guy who really does need that extra space on the laptop. For the first time since 2002 I’m thinking of keeping all my music on one drive. That’s pretty exciting. I’m also excited about the 50gb I’ve set aside to run Ubuntu on.
And there is one final thing I’m excited by: no more reasons to post about my dying laptop. This is the last post I’m going to do about my laptop, and from now on I’m going to try and post a lot more about cycling, Processing, and maybe even some work I’m making.
