Things were a little quiet today so I took a drive down to Brent Cross and picked up a
MacBook from the Apple retail store there. I already had one on mail order but Apple seemed to want to take about a month to ship it to me and Brent Cross is about an hour and a half's drive away so...
What can I say about it that others haven't already? Here are my first impressions. I plan to do more work on virtualization and other clever tricks with it once a memory upgrade arrives, but here is what I think so far.
- 512MB is in no way enough memory (2GB kit on its way from Crucial)
Apple ship their machines with the minimum needed to get the basic work done. You could make do with their shipping memory levels if you want to do the basics, but for "serious professional work" you'll want an upgrade.
Even with 512MB, it's faster than my old Mac. Mind you, I'm comparing it to a G4 800Mhz.
Basic hardware is as you expect from the other reviews on the net. 2.0 Ghz Intel Core Duo, DVD Writer, etc. Very well put together.
- It looks fantastic. No, really.
The black vs. white style is down to personal preference. Having tried both in the Apple store you can see which one I picked, but really they are both very nice looking.
- The default install image appears to be ~ 15GB of hard disk space which is way too much.
DeLocalizer and a bit of judicious pruning of stuff I just wouldn't be using managed to clear at least 4GB off the hard disk. I don't mind spending a lot of disk space but I don't like wasting it. Still, the stuff I trashed may well be the only reason someone else purchased a Mac so who am I to judge.
- For all the comments about the video, it handles the OS X desktop effects nice and quickly.
Not sure I've got much to say about this. First of all - it isn't like the crippled display in the G4 Mini; the MacBook handles core image and Quartz Extreme just fine.
It even looks good playing a few simple games - though I admit I wouldn't rush to install F.E.A.R. on any Windows install using that graphics chip.
- The keyboard might look odd but seems to type very well (as ever, YMMV).
Not much to say here. It feels fine to me, and with the speed I type, feel is important to me. If you worry about it, or if indeed you have nothing better to do, you should try it for yourself.
One minor thing that I'm sure we'll all enjoy: It's nice not to have Eject and F12 sharing any more as they did on the iBook.
[edit after another day of use] I'm normally quite fussy about keyboards but so far I think this keyboard is great - I've been using it for most of the day to do various bits and pieces and I find it an improvement on the iBook keyboard. I also use a Samsung laptop at work, and again the MB is better than that keyboard.
I think the keyboard may be a lilttle more roomy than most notebook keyboards, and the keys certainly don't feel anything like as odd as one would imagine they do from looking at pictures; I've seen people compare it to the keyboard on the Sinclair QL by appearance but I've used a QL (now I'm dating myself!) and it doesn't feel like one at all.
- What about the heat? Can you really fry an egg on your trackpad?
CoreDuoTemp reports an idle temp hovering between 48C and 52C, and the system seems pretty damn quiet. Running an 'average app' such as Garageband raises the temperature to the mid 60s, again with no noise problem.
Running a couple of 'yes > /dev/null' commands in the terminal ramped things up to a max of 88C and made things much warmer. Round about that point, the fans kicked in and made things noiser as well, quickly driving the temperature back down to 72C. Killing the terminal processes that were pushing the proessor made the temperature and noise drop very quickly.
The hot spots were at the back of the case and on the underside; not an issue if you're using it on a table but maybe a little too hot if you want it sitting in your lap.
More to come, I'm sure.
Apologies in advance to anyone who feels this question is too basic and wastes your time. Fact is, it might be a basic question but I've been asked this question or a version of it quite a lot recently.Emulation is providing your user with a complete model of your emulated system for their use, requiring every little thing to be translated between your host and your target environments.
Virtualization is a way of exposing the "virtualized" object for shared use, in other (very loose) words, dividing the resources of your host computer into many "virtual copies" of those resources, fooling the user of each virtual copy of the host into believing that they are running on a "real" machine and have the whole machine to themselves.
Virtualization is much faster than emulation, due to the fact that you are using the "real" components rather than a software simulation. In a case where VMWare and Virtual PC 2004 both emulate the BX chipset but virtualize the processor this is much less resource intensive than emulating both the chipset AND the processor AND everything else in a tool like BOCHS.
http://www.kernelthread.com/publications/virtualization/ is an interesting little discussion, possibly a little too "theory orientated" but a good place to start if you're interested.
Virtualization in the recently popular sense comes in two flavors.
1.
System Virtualization: This is where a virtual model of the computer hardware is created. This enables the user to create multiple "sessions" that each think they are running on top of the real computer directly.
Popular examples of this kind of system are
VMWare and
Virtual PC.
Quite often in this kind of virtualization, the most important parts of the host hardware are virtualized but some components of the virtual computer environment used by guest sessions are emulated, to ensure stability and consistancy when moving virtual machines from one physical platform to another.
2.
Application Virtualization: This is where an application is placed within a virtualization session "wrapper" running on top of your current OS. Examples of this kind of system are
Thinstall and
Softgrid.
The "wrapper" intercepts all interactions between your application and the real system, in order to protect the main system from any programs that you need to run but which sometimes misbehave or which have very odd compatability requirements (e.g. assume they are running as admin).
So far, this article has sounded like a paid advert from the international society for the promotion of Virtualization, but emulation has its uses. Emulation is used to allow a system to run software that was originally designed to run in a totally alien environment. It does this by creating a complete map, in software, of the hardware and software in the original environment.
A popular example of emulation that I've already mentioned is
Virtual PC for the Power PC Mac.
Another popular example, still centred on the Mac, would be Apple's "
Rosetta" technology to allow the new Intel based Macs to emulate a Power PC processor to run code originally produced for the old Mac systems.
Yet another example, and those of you who enjoy the odd computer game will have heard of this one, is
MAME. Mame is a system that allows modern computers to emulate old style arcade game cabinets, leaving you to load the appropriate, legally acquired, game ROM whenever you want to remind yourself of all the time you wasted in games arcades when you were younger.
Hopefully I'll be getting a MacBook in a week or two, in fact I'm
selling the G4 iBook on eBay to help finance it, if anyone in the UK
fancies finding it and making a bid. Once it arrives I will of course be writing about it and using it to further the integration and virtualisation parts of the site just for my visitors
![Smile [:)]](/emoticons/emotion-1.gif)
Oh yes. For those unsure what the fuss is about:
Video of a MacBook running
Parallels virtualisation software and
Virtue, a Virtual desktop manager for OS X. I believe the words you are looking for are "Wow. I have got to get me some of that".