On Apple and my new iMac
So, still on light posting duty going into the long weekend. The computer’s mostly set up - everything I actually need is pretty much in place. But I have some beefs with Apple now. Apple tries to be so consumer friendly, everything puts on a nice face and pretty pictures but just like the company itself, the OS never tells you what it’s actually doing. This is fine when everything goes just right, but less fine when something goes wrong. Which it always does.
Take, as an example, the migration helper - when I turned on the machine for the first time it asked if I wanted to bring over all my old stuff, so I said, sure. Firewired my old machine to my new one and away it went, for like 6 hours. Of course the status bar said 24 hours remaining, 8 hours, 14, jumping around like crazy - you know that we here are opposed to numbers that go beyond useless to actively wrong, they should get rid of it and just give a percent remaining, maybe even total amount transferred or something. Then, with “18 minutes” left to go, it just stopped. Nothing seemed broken, mouse was active, the firewire symbol on my old computer still bouncing around, but we never moved off 18 minutes for like half an hour. One hard reboot later, it was as if nothing happened, got the welcome screen, asked me if I wanted to migrate my old computer (learning from my mistakes as wisemen do, I opted out of that one) and finally I’m on.
No files were present on my machine - it was still a clean install. Which, I was actually thankful for because mid migration I decided that it was probably a bad idea to move all the cruft from my old machine onto my new. Manually igrating apps is a pain, but mostly doable except for the ones that just don’t work - *cough*vpntracker*cough*. Thanks to Ben for holding my hand during this process.
What else? Oh, Apple in all it’s infinite wisdom decided that I shouldn’t be allowed to control my screens’ brightness unless I had an Apple keyboard (if you’d like to read my opinion on apple keyboards and what I’m rockin’ with now). There’s no onscreen brightness controls. It’d almost be understandable except for the fact that even when you’ve got the keyboard brightness control, if you have two displays you’re controlling both of them at the same time. There’s no mechanism to set brightness individually. Which is awesome when say, hypothetically, your brand new iMac 24″ is about as bright as the sun and your oooold 23″ cinema display is noticeably less bright.
More awesomeness is when the mouse driver for your Logitech tons-of-buttons mouse suddenly decides to drop out leaving you with just two buttons. You have to go back into the control panel and click around the mouse prefs for a little while to rejigger them. That’s great, too.
*sigh* Having said all that, the computer is way faster than my old 20″ iMac. Way faster. I’ll see how firefox works out over time, but so far it’s behaving very well. I don’t know if it’s the processor, the tons of memory or maybe just the removal of all the cruft, but it really just hums along. Which is very happy making despite some of the birthing pains.
August 31st, 2007 at 10:05 am
These problems seem minimal considering your Windows alternatives. When I built my new machine (the HAPPYBOX, an AMD Dual core 64+ machine) I had similar problems with my Kensington Mouseworks software for the trackball. To this day I have it installed twice. Even shows up twice in my installed programs list. Can’t remove either one, or the mouse gets none of it’s special features. (hold key down to slow to a crawl, great for animation, that kind of thing) The entire program is about 4 Meg’s so whatever, but I can see some kind of plug and play device eventually getting screwy because of it.
Good luck with the rest of your installations.
I wanna see the puter!
-Poyla
August 31st, 2007 at 11:16 am
Yeah, it’s true. I could be on window’s which would almost certainly be worse. So I shouldn’t complain. :) But I will, since that’s what I do best. You’re welcome to head over and check it out whenever you want!
August 31st, 2007 at 1:34 pm
What? You only waited half an hour before deciding it had froze? Should’ve gone for at least an hour. ;-p You should try out the Firefox compiles that some people have done specifically for Intel Macs. Supposed to fly.
August 31st, 2007 at 3:09 pm
I actually tried that on my last iMac. I thought it did something for a little while, but then I think I changed my mind - if it was faster it was at least not really usefully faster.