A review of my new MacBook Pro

I saw David Pogue’s review of his new MacBook Pro and had a couple of thoughts about my own recent purchase. Also, I had at least one person ask me for a review of the Touch Bar after I’d had a chance to use the laptop for a while. So here we go.

This is my third MacBook Pro. I had a late-2007 15” model and a mid-2012 13”. I loved both of them and I’ve become a big fan of macOS so I had no desire to get a Windows 10 laptop. I was willing to trade off the lack of compatible USB ports and the loss of a MagSafe power adapter in order to have a computer that didn’t show me the macOS “pinwheel” anytime I launched another application or opened a tab in Safari. So I bought a 13” version with the Touch Bar, 8 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD space. Since I use iTunes Match to store all of my music in the cloud, I moved my 140 GB of music to a portable drive at home and just copied my Photos database from my old laptop.

Things I love:

The TouchID power button that logs you in with a fingerprint is so convenient that I wish I could do it on every computer I use. Also, I don’t have to type my master password in 1Password anymore, so I’m using it more on my laptop now than I used to. It can also be used to pay for purchases with Apple Pay, but I haven’t done that yet on the computer.

The Touch Bar is still a little gimmicky for me, but I’m starting to appreciate it more and more. I added a Lock button to the standard row of keys (accessible when you tap the < next to the omnipresent brightness, volume, and Siri controls), so I can lock the laptop with two taps. I like the ability to tap and drag to change the volume or the screen brightness. Other things, like having tap access to your Safari browser tabs, are less useful features. You can’t see enough detail on the tabs in the TouchBar to be able to switch between them. I haven’t used the auto-complete feature that much yet. I do like having access to emoji on the Mac now. I’m sure there was a way to type them on my previous laptop but the Touch Bar suggests emoji replacements the same way as on iOS, so it’s much easier now.

The speakers aren’t quite positioned where the holes in the top case would make you believe they are, but the sound is loud anyway. I almost always listen to music with headphones or external speakers anyway, but the audio is excellent. 

It’s ridiculously light and thin. My previous MBP weighed about 4.5 lbs. This one is supposed to weigh 3.5 lbs but it feels much lighter, and it’s half the thickness of my previous laptop. I hardly notice it’s in my backpack.

The Retina screen is gorgeous. When I have to connect to my office network and use a Citrix remote session, it’s noticeably less sharp than the native macOS apps. My photos have never looked better.

I like the larger touch pad and I don’t have the accidental cursor problems Pogue describes, even with “Tap to Click” turned on. I do have some issues with click and drag, so I need to tweak the settings. But the touchpad is fine and I don’t know why anyone would deface their laptop by taping a piece of paper over part of the top case.

Things I don’t love:

The keyboard is a little too lightweight and click-y for me. I loved the keyboard on the 2007-era MBP, and moving to the “chicklet” keys on the 2012 MBP took a little getting used to. I’m adapting to this keyboard, though. If I can type on an iPhone or iPad, I can get used to typing on this. It is a fast keyboard, and find myself making fewer mistakes with it. This review is the most I’ve typed on this laptop to date, though.

Things that are fine:

The USB-C ports are great as long as you have compatible cables or adapters. The day I ordered the MacBook I ordered three short USB-A to USB-C cable adapters and two USB-A to USB-C adapter plugs. I also ordered a spare Apple 61W charger and a USB-C to HDMI adapter for my 21” monitor on my desk at home. I had factored the expense of these adapters into my purchase price, and I spent about $130, the bulk of which was the spare AC adapter ($70). Thanks to the flexibility of USB-C, I could have bought an off-brand backup charger for the office, but I didn’t want to take my chances connecting my brand-new laptop to a knock-off charger, even at a lower voltage. But it’s a possibility if you want to do that. 

I don’t miss the SD card slot from my old laptop, as I hardly use my standalone digital camera any more. I might need to get a USB-C to Ethernet adapter at some point, considering that my main job is computer networking. But most of my work is with Wi-Fi, and I can’t remember the last time I had to connect my old laptop to my router at home, let alone a switch at my office.

I also didn’t buy a USB-C to Lightning cable. I connect my phone to my MacBook about once a year. With iCloud and Apple Music and iTunes Match, I only need to connect my phone if I need to back it up through iTunes or recover from a fatal problem. I can use one of my adapters in that case.

 I haven’t had a chance to test the overall battery life. Most of the time, my laptop is connected to AC power, either at home or at the office. I ran it down to 40% or so the other day over a couple of hours. It charges faster than any Mac I’ve ever owned, so I don’t see how the battery life is going to be an issue for me. I also don’t live off this laptop the way I do my phone, where I obsess over battery life. 

Overall, I’m extremely happy with my new MacBook Pro. It’s lighter and faster than my previous one, with an improved display and a Touch Bar that I think will be a great addition as more third-party applications support it. I’m going on a short trip for work at the end of the month and I look forward to seeing how I get along with it on the road.

My computer is like an old car

When I was growing up, my mom used to talk about how her cars would always start to fall apart just when they were out of warranty.  I'm not sure if that was really the case, but it did seem that her Datsun 310 had more problems at the end of its five-year warranty than ever before.  Of course, she drove that car everywhere and it was on its third clutch by the time we traded it in for a Toyota Corolla in 1986.  Nevertheless, her words have come back to me the past few months as my Macbook Pro nears the end of its three-year warranty.

When I invested in this computer in February 2008, I knew it wouldn't last forever.  I always assumed it would hold up for about three years and then I'd buy another one.  But I didn't think its demise would be so obvious.  My Windows desktop PCs always deteriorated gradually.  Each one needed a new hard drive sometime in its lifespan, but other than that entire components didn't just fail out of nowhere.  They just started performing slower and slower until I couldn't take it anymore and bought a new desktop PC.

However, the MacBook Pro has declined in marked stages.  One evening in October it refused to come out of sleep mode or boot up.  A two-night stay at the Apple Store in midtown Manhattan resulted in a new logic board (which I assume is the motherboard).  A few weeks later I noticed that the keyboard and touchpad would stop working periodically.  They usually came back after a reboot, but by mid-December the problem was serious enough that I took it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Chelsea.  That was a three-day stay (and a trip back to the mothership in Houston) for a new "top case" of a keyboard and touchpad.  I got the laptop back a few days before Christmas and it was great to have a fresh keyboard and non-worn-out touchpad, plus a fully functional 9 key.  But I suspected that something else would break sooner rather than later.

A few days ago I opened the laptop and saw that the speaker icon in the status bar was grayed out.  When I tried to play music I didn't hear anything.  System Preferences claimed that the internal speakers weren't there.  I plugged in headphones and external speakers and they worked, so the audio system itself was OK.  After a reboot my internal speakers came back.  But now they're not working again.

I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble of taking it back to the Genius Bar again in the next few weeks before the warranty runs out.  I suppose it is; if it's possible to fix the problem for free, I should do it.  Once the warranty is up I'm not getting anything fixed.  And I'm planning to buy a new MacBook Pro later this year when Apple refreshes their laptop lineup.  I just need to hold out until later this spring and hope that nothing else happens to this computer.  And I need to keep getting regular backups.  You never know when you'll lose a hard drive.

Duke Nukem Never

Wired has the inside story on how 3DRealms' long-promised Duke Nukem Forever never came out. I knew some of the details on the game's many delays, like the various engine changes. But I didn't know about creator George Broussard's obsession with including the latest and greatest visual effects in his masterpiece. The story is a study in when the artist lets the public see his creations.

I played Duke Nukem 3D back in 1996 when I was still in college. While I loved the game, newer games with better graphics quickly took Duke's place on my computer. Like everyone else who loved the game and the character, I followed DNF's developments in the late 1990s and eagerly awaited a playable demo or even video footage. But by the early 2000s the game had become a punchline. Now I doubt we'll ever see anything playable from the 12 years 3DRealms and Broussard spent developing this game. It's a shame.

Puzzled, perturbed, and becoming peevish over Mac troubles

My MacBook Pro has been acting funny for the past few days. When I close the lid, the computer is supposed to go to sleep. It does sleep, but if I disconnect the AC adapter and leave it in sleep mode, eventually it turns back on or runs the battery down in some other way. Twice last week the battery ran out while the computer was in sleep mode and resting under my desk at home in a laptop bag. The first time that happened I assumed I'd left the computer turned on somehow. But the second time I was certain it was in sleep mode, yet when I got home the computer was off and the battery dead. I brought the Mac to work this morning. It was asleep when I put it in my backpack but hot to the touch when I took it out 30 minutes later. The system wouldn't wake up and I had to power-cycle it. It seems the computer had turned itself back on during my commute.

Along the same lines, the laptop's battery life has declined steadily over the past few weeks. The battery is less than a year old. I replaced it last December when the previous battery began to lose its capacity over the course of a few weeks. I'm sure I can get another battery through Apple support, but I wonder if the battery life and the sleep issues are related. I've also had weird issues with the OS. Last night I had to reboot before Photo Booth recognized the built-in iSight camera. System Preferences has given me the "beach ball" a few times. I couldn't even run System Profiler yesterday without rebooting. It's possible that some of these problems are happening because of the improper shutdowns, though that seems unlikely. I did upgrade to Snow Leopard about six weeks ago, though these problems only appeared last week. I've checked the system logs but they're not much help, though you'd have to be a developer to understand most of the entries in the log.

I am growing concerned. Let's call it "threat level: troubled." The computer is under warranty for another 16 months, so if I need help from Apple I can get it. But it's my baby, and I wouldn't be a good parent if I weren't just a little worried about what's going on under the keyboard. I'll try a few more self-help ideas like clearing the PRAM and looking at any other recent upgrades before I give up and visit my local Genius Bar. If I go that route, I just hope I get a real Genius and not some doofus who just got out of the training program. I've not been impressed with what I've heard about the newbies at the Bar.

Really early thoughts on iTunes 9

I seem to have become an early adopter. I had to grab iTunes 9 as soon as it "dropped" this afternoon. It took me about 25 minutes to download the 82 Mb installation file and roughly two minutes to install it. I launched iTunes and after the usual licensing page it went into "updating iTunes Library" mode. I had left my Time Machine backup disk connected to the laptop, and while iTunes claimed to be updating my library, my Time Machine disk was running. I didn't pay much attention at first, as Time Machine regularly backs up the disks during the day. But after 10 or 15 minutes and no change in the status, I took a chance and forced iTunes to quit. Then I disconnected the backup drive and re-launched iTunes. This time iTunes came right up. It must have detected a copy of my iTunes library on my backup disk and started to organize it. That's bad, iTunes. Leave my backups alone!

There's a slightly different look and feel to the interface. The icons along the left side have subtle changes. The smart playlists now have a gear icon instead of a note, so it's clear from the icon and the color that those playlists are different. The list view shows artists on the left and songs on the right, and the grid view has a white background instead of the older dark gray background. You can change the columns in the list view, and you can switch back to the older view with the columns on top. I'll have to play with it for a while to see which way I like it. The Podcasts page mimics the iPhone podcasts view by using a half-filled circle to indicate which podcasts you've listened to only in part.

More importantly for me, there's also an iPhone update to version 3.1. There are some video tricks and MMS enhancements in there, but the feature I like most is the ability to drag and drop your iPhone apps from iTunes. When the iPhone is connected to the computer, the Apps page shows you all of your iPhone apps by the "page" on the iPhone. You can move apps from one page to another and remove apps from the phone with the mouse. Now I can roughly organize my apps by type: one page for music-related apps, one for productivity, one for restaurants and movies, and so on.

Apple also introduced iPod Nanos with video cameras, updated the iPod Touch line with new hardware with more memory and faster video chips, and bumped the iPod Classic to 160 GB. I should say that they bumped it back to 160 GB, because I own a 160 GB Classic I bought two years ago. But this new Classic uses a one-platter hard drive, so it's thinner. But it's good to know that Apple still has an iPod for geeks like me who want to carry around all their music. And if my old Classic dies, I can replace it without spending too much or sacrificing space.

A man and his toys

When I was growing up, I had no shortage of toys: Legos, Star Wars figures and ships, G.I. Joe figures and playsets, and Transformers, just to name a few. My brother and I would play together after school and after watching cartoons featuring some of these toys. As I got older, I knew that eventually I'd have to give up my toys and become a boring adult. I didn't want to be that kid in my neighborhood who was about five years older than me and my friends and clearly too old to hang out with us while we played with plastic Star Wars toys. But I also didn't want to give up my toys. At 12 years old, I actually worried about this upcoming change in my life.

Then I discovered computers and computer games, and I forgot about Transformers and G.I Joe. Just like that, they weren't cool anymore and I didn't care. Also, I'm sure puberty played some role in this change. It's hard to get the attention of girls when you're still bringing your Storm Shadow GI Joe guy to school. So computers and my Walkman became my new toys. I hauled a case full of cassette tapes to England in 1989 so I'd have music to listen to on the flights. I spent hours in front of the computer writing programs, playing games, and tinkering.

My adult life has featured a succession of computers and gadgets, all of which have fulfilled the role that toys used to play. I've run home from work to set up a brand-new computer. I've stayed up late at night playing games on the computer and on my Xbox. And I've carried my laptop to far more places than necessary, under the pretense that I *might* need it but mostly because I just wanted to have it with me.

My four primary "toys" are my laptop, my camera, my HDTV (and the cable box and Xbox that go with it), and my cell phone. The last one is the newest, as I've finally upgraded to an iPhone. I didn't want the iPhone when it first came out. It was expensive, it wasn't as fast as my Samsung flip phone, it looked fragile, and since it couldn't hold more than a few gigabytes of data or music, I decided to wait. Last summer's release of the iPhone 3G tempted me a little more, but I was happy with my old reliable cell phone. And I was still under contract for another six months. This summer, after another year of frustrated texting on my old phone's numeric keypad, I decided it was time to get into the market. Kate got an iPod Touch as a gift, so I got the chance to play around with it and try out the virtual keyboard. I found that I could deal with that feature and that I really liked having a full version of Safari available. I considered buying a smartphone from another manufacturer and I gave serious consideration to Nokia's E71. But the more I thought about it, the more I just wanted to get the iPhone already. Five years ago I bought a MP3 player that wasn't an iPod, in part because I didn't want to be an Apple guy. Two years later I was tired of dealing with my crappy MP3 player and bought an iPod. When I thought about buying a smartphone from another manufacturer, I remembered my previous experience and I didn't want to spend the next two years wishing I'd gotten the iPhone instead.

So now I've got my iPhone. I've only had it for 24 hours, so I haven't played with it that much yet. But from what I've seen and done so far, I think I'm in love.

"...something called the 'Internet'"

It's hard for me to believe it, but there was once a time when instant messaging, online shopping, and 3D multiplayer video games were but figments of our imagination. Tom Brokaw takes us back to that time in the video clip featured here. I remember most of the programs and computers shown in the video. I feel older than usual right now.

I don't know what it's for, but I'm using it anyway

I tend to follow along with the social networking crowd. Many of my friends have begun using Twitter to send messages to each other and the world. So I've done it too. Right now, no one seems to be certain just what Twitter is supposed to be (though they are fairly certain what it is not). It's more than just Facebook-style status messages, but it's not a robust communication system or a full-fledged marketing tool yet. Based on the messages from my friends on my Twitter feed, it's a medium for incredibly brief thoughts, updates on events in peoples' lives, and the occasional promotional message. Twitter works well as a microblogging tool for instant response to events and feedback. During the Oscars, several friends and I sent Twitter messages (I don't like calling them "tweets" or "twits") to each other about the ceremony, the winners, and the presenters. It was like being part of a group live-blog but without the organization necessary to get everyone on the same site at the same time. One advantage of Twitter is that since the messages are limited to 140 characters, they can be sent and received as text messages on cell phones. I think I'd use it all the time if I had a phone with an unlimited text plan. As it is, I have two Twitter clients on my Mac, as well as the web site for all the other devices in my arsenal.

Of course, I still use Facebook, and sometimes I post the same message there as I do on Twitter. I also persist in maintaining this traditional blog, which feels more antiquated each day. I will resist the temptation to switch to Tumblr or some other format just because the crowd is moving that way. If you want to keep track of me by yet another technological means, you can find me at http://twitter.com/catelinp.

Why you should keep your backups separate from your computers

William Wiley was a passenger on US Airways Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River last month. He had a laptop with him with about $30000 of data on it. He had a backup of this data on another laptop. However, he had this backup laptop with him on the flight. Both laptops are now in storage, awaiting data recovery which will take about eight weeks.

Backups are a great idea. But you don't want to have your only backup copy of your data stored with your primary data device. You want to keep at least one backup in a different location. I have two backups of the data on my Macbook Pro: a Time Machine disk at the office that backs up the computer every weekday, and a SuperDuper backup at home that holds a recent image of my laptop (at the moment this image is about a month old). I also back up my photos and music on my iPod. I wasn't always this conscientious about my backups. But I lost all the data on my PC a few times when the drive crashed, which cost me about two years' worth of old e-mail and old documents. Now I'm paranoid about backups because you never know what's going to happen.

Geeking out on my holiday vacation

I spent last week in Johnstown, PA, where I could have been blogging, but I chose to relax and spend time with my family instead. (I hope they appreciate the sacrifice on my part.) I had the opportunity to hang out with my mom and my brother and talk about music, computers, cooking, and coffee, among other things. We couldn't make coffee in the morning without discussing whether to use the electric coffeemaker or the French press, or which of the estimated 20 varieties of coffee beans to try that day. I come from a family of coffee addicts, and I admit that I feed my mother's coffee-collecting habit. In fact, her present this year was a gift box of three different varieties of beans from Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn, my new favorite coffeehouse. On our last day in Johnstown, we did a direct taste-test with the same coffee made in the electric coffeemaker and in the French press. Both were drinkable without milk or sugar, but I thought the French press version had more "notes" to it. There was a extra flavor to the press coffee that the electric seemed to have filtered out. But I don't plan to use my French press more often. My four-cup Mr. Coffee is still more convenient.

My brother and I also managed to break my mom's computer while we were there. We were trying to hook up a spare hard drive internally when the power supply died. Since we couldn't resurrect that computer right away, we hooked up her old Pentium III/Windows 98 PC from 2001 and ran Damn Small Linux on it for a day. Michael called Dell tech support and to our surprise they sent replacement parts and a technician to our house on Christmas Eve to replace the power supply. So we only suffered for a few hours with less than two functioning computers in the house. We never did get the hard drive installed internally; we bought an external HD enclosure and used that instead.

We didn't get to our other long-term back-burner project of getting old files from our childhood Commodore 64 onto modern media. I did some Google searching yesterday on the best way to interface an old Commodore 1541 floppy disk drive to a Windows PC. (Mac would appear to be out of the question entirely.) It would take a hacked-up serial-parallel cable, some special software, and we would have to hope that the 5.25" floppy disks and the 1541 drive still work after 18 years in a hot attic. Given the magnitude of the project, I think that if we ever get around to doing it, we'll have to ship all the old equipment to my dad's house and let him hack away at it. It sound like his kind of project, especially since he's the one who keeps suggesting it. I'm interested in what we have on those old floppies (mostly papers and short stories we wrote as kids) but I think I could live with myself if I never got that data back.

Another sign of the times: Novell cancels BrainShare 2009

Novell's BrainShare conference has been an industry tradition for 20 years, but it won't happen in 2009. Novell announced yesterday that next year's conference has been canceled due to a significant drop in customer registrations and comments from said customers that they're cutting back on travel and other expenses in light of the current economic climate. I went to BrainShare in 2002 and 2004, and I enjoyed both conferences immensely. I learned more about the Novell products I was already using, and attended sessions on new products that would help me in my job and in my career. My firm's decision to switch from Novell NetWare to Microsoft Active Directory signaled the end of my BrainShare experiences. When I read this story, my first thoughts were of the people of Salt Lake City that work for the Convention Center where they hold the conference, and for the hotels and businesses that depend on that business. I doubt there's another major conference scheduled for Salt Lake City that will make up that loss of business. It's sad, but many people are probably going to lose their jobs as a result of this decision. I can't blame Novell; it's not their fault the economy is what it is. If customers weren't going to make the trip to Utah for the conference, then Novell and the local businesses would lose money anyway. But it's bad news all around. Apple announced on Tuesday that it will pull out of MacWorld after 2009. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft cuts back or even cancels its annual TechEd conference. That would be bad for me in particular, as I think it's my turn to go to TechEd in 2009. That's if my office allows me to go. It's a vicious circle.

PC Magazine is no longer (in print)

Ziff Davis announced yesterday that they will end the print version of PC Magazine and make the title online-only. I have been a subscriber to PC Magazine off and on since college, at home or at work. My father, or one of his co-workers, used to get the magazine at his office when I was in high school and college, so I would read his copy and get the reviews of new hardware, software, and gadgets. For example, I remember first reading about Windows NT in a copy of PC Magazine when I was still in high school. Back then, of course, print was the only way to get this kind of technology news.

As I've become an avid online reader of all thing technological, I saw less need for a print version of the same information, especially when the printed news was several weeks old by the time I got it. But I would still read PC Magazine when I found it on a colleague's desk at work. I hadn't planned to become a subscriber again, but then I went to a trade show at the Javits Center and an attractive saleswoman from Ziff Davis talked me into a four-year subscription. What can I say? She was hot, and I couldn't resist. As Krusty the Klown said, "I'm not made of stone!" Also, at $10 a year for four years, it wasn't a bad deal.

But as I read each issue of the magazine, I thought about how much easier it would be for me to read the same information online, updated, with search capability and windowing. So when my subscription lapsed a few years ago, I ignored the renewal letters begging me to stay with them. I suppose you could blame me for the failure of the print edition, or lump me in with the rest of the subscriber base that abandoned the dying medium for the online version. But digital media is the present and future, so this was an inevitable step for Ziff Davis. Dropping the print edition is the right decision.

Now if only they'd streamline their web site. There's a lot of things going on there.

Computer problems on my vacation

On Monday morning I went to check my Windows desktop PC which I'd left on overnight. I found that it appeared to be dead. Moving the mouse didn't wake up the monitor from sleep mode and when I power-cycled the computer the monitor insisted that it had no signal. I opened the case and poked around. Everything looked OK inside. The PC was getting power because the optical drives' lights flickered when I turned it on, the fans came on, and the hard drive light worked. But I never got any POST messages or beeps indicating that the PC was trying to boot up. So it looked like the motherboard had died overnight. It's a three-year-old Dell PC that's out of warranty, and I bought my MacBook Pro to replace it, so it's no great loss. But it is now trash.

I wasted little time in dismembering the PC. I took out the hard drive, installed it in a USB enclosure, and used SuperDuper to clone my MacBook Pro to it. Now I have a spare, bootable copy of my Mac that I can run on any other Mac, or use to restore my system in a hurry if I have a hardware failure. This backup is in addition to the Time Machine backup drive that I keep at work. (In case you haven't noticed, I'm a zealot when it comes to data backup.) I might cannibalize the DVD drives as well, though I don't really need them.

I have another backup drive that I used to keep for the Windows PC. It now holds the last good backup of the PC, from just before my move to Brooklyn in July. I can access it from my Mac, but because it's in NTFS format, I can't write data to it from the Mac, I can only read it. I tried writing data from my Windows Vista VM on the Mac, but that didn't work either. If I want to edit that data or reformat the disk, I'll need another Windows PC. I could always bring home my work laptop and use that. Or I could take this as a sign that it's finally time to give Boot Camp a try and install Vista on the "bare metal" of my MacBook Pro. While I'd be able to access Windows resources natively with the Mac hardware, I'd lose 20-30 GB of hard drive space to my Windows installation. I've resisted that temptation until now, but without a reliable PC at home, I think my hand has been forced. But that will be a task for after my vacation. In order to use Boot Camp, I need to print out the software manual. However, my home printer has been out of order for a few weeks with ink cartridge issues. I need to replace the ink cartridges to get the printer working. So I'll have to wait to install Boot Camp until I go back to work after Labor Day, print out the instructions, then have a free day at home to play around. I love tinkering with my computers, so that sounds like a fine way to kill an afternoon.

On not pulling the trigger

I was thisclose to clicking "place your order now" for a brand-new Macbook Pro from the Apple Store when one of my colleagues forwarded me a blog post about rumors of new Macbook Pros coming soon from Apple. After talking to him, I closed the browser window.

I've been waiting for a while to buy a Macbook Pro. I've been thinking idly about it for about a year, and when I decided last fall that my next computer would be a laptop, a Macbook Pro was a natural choice. I don't want to use Windows Vista, I've gotten to like the software that comes with Mac OS X, and many of my friends have Macs and love them. A Macbook Pro would have the RAM and processor requirements that would be equivalent to my last few desktop PCs. And with a laptop at home, I could finally sit in front of the TV and use my own laptop instead of the one from work that isn't quite mine no matter how much I tweak it.

But a Macbook Pro would cost about twice what I paid for my last PC. It would be the most money I've ever spent on a computer. I bought a custom-built PC in 1998 that cost about $2500, and the only reason it cost that much was that I bought it through a vendor friend of mine and I wanted to give him some business. (Actually, the Macbook Pro would only be slightly more expensive than that PC, but with the warranty and the tax the difference is significant.) I know that for the price, I'm really getting two computers: Macs can run Windows as well as as OS X.

I guess what I'm really afraid of is that I'll buy a Pro now, and then in a week or two Apple will announce the new lineup and there will be some hot new feature that I really want but can't have. One of the rumors is that the Pro line will get the same multi-touch trackpad that the new Macbook Air has. Another rumor is that they'll update the hardware with the latest Intel processors. I know that every technology purchase is obsolete the minute you get it. On the other hand, if I'm one of the first ones with a new piece of hardware then I get to be one of the first ones to figure out what's wrong with it. The advantage of buying a Pro now is that the hardware has been tested by the user community and most of the issues are known. I'm not sure I want to be an early hardware adopter when I'm not that familiar with the OS either.

So I'm waiting for now. I'll give it a few more days. Maybe I'll do my taxes in the next few days and see how that affects my financial situation. Maybe Apple will decide to announce the new Macbook Pro specs next week and I can make a truly informed decision. Or maybe my gadget lust will overcome me, I'll click that "buy" button, and I'll hope that whenever the new laptops are announced my reaction is "meh."

A fool and his money are soon parted...again

One of the things I did this weekend was get myself to the Apple store on 5th Avenue to check out the new iPod Classic in person. I'd seen one at a Best Buy on Thursday, but it didn't have any music on it, so it was impossible to give it a proper tryout. On Sunday afternoon I had the chance to plug in my headphones and test the newest object of my tech affections. I spent about 30 minutes with an 80 GB Classic and another 10 minutes with the 160 GB version. Aside from a few issues with the Cover Flow feature (which Apple fixed in a firmware update this past Friday that had not made it onto the test iPods on the showroom floor), I liked the sound and the menu updates. I hadn't intended to spend the money on the new model yesterday, especially when I saw the serpentine line for the register and remembered that I had other things to do that afternoon. However, there was an Apple store employee standing behind a cart with a plastic box covering an assortment of iPod Classics. He looked like a guy selling watches on the street, but he was actually selling iPods right there. I saw another customer give him his credit card and ID, and the employee ran it through a PocketPC/Newton-like card reader and sold him an iPod. Well, when faced with instant gratification like that, I was powerless. $442 later, I was the proud owner of a new black 160 GB iPod Classic. It was exactly one year ago yesterday when I got my first iPod. My justification for this kind of foolishness is that I'd always planned to upgrade that iPod within a year, assuming that I'd run out of space. When I got home last night I copied my music and photos onto the new one, and I've been using it at work today. I have to be extra-careful with it for the time being, as I don't have a proper hard case for it yet. I'm carrying it around in the black slipcover that came with my 60 GB iPod.

So far, the sound quality is equal to my old iPod, and I like the new cover animations and menu features. It's an iPod, so the differences are minor. I'd like to sort my albums by album name in the cover flow screen instead of by artist, but I think I can fix that in iTunes this evening. There is a minor problem with the photos application. I can see all my photos in the preview mode, but I can only scroll through older photos with the scroll wheel. When I try to scroll through photos I've taken with the Canon SD550 I bought in April 2006, they don't appear. I can see them if I use the slideshow feature, so I know the iPod can display them. And I didn't have a problem with those photos on my old iPod. I read a few forum posts about the problem on Apple's web site, so I'm not the only one who's encountered this issue. I figure there's a firmware update coming that will fix this, but I can live with it for now.

Someone stop me before I buy a Macbook. I'm thisclose to blowing a month's rent on one.

downloading music from legitimate vendors

For years I've sworn never to pay for music downloads. Even when I bought myself an iPod last fall and moved my entire MP3 collection to iTunes, I resisted the Apple Store's siren's call of cheap downloadable songs and albums, and stuck to buying CDs and finding music online from less-reputable sources. But when it came to finding recordings of the music for my upcoming NYRO concert, I didn't want to shop for CDs and my usual gray-market sites didn't have what I needed. That's when I turned to eMusic.com. I'd bookmarked an eMusic page a few months back because they had a recording of a viola concerto for which I bought the music many years back. The same CD had the Martinu Rhapsody-Concerto that we're playing next week. Seeing no other option, I broke out the credit card and became an eMusic subscriber. For $10 a month, I can download 25 MP3 files that are blissfully DRM-free (DRM being the big reason I never got into iTunes downloads). I found all the music for the concert, plus some other classical works I've been putting off buying for a while. I'm happy with the service, and my only complaint is that the search feature for classical music is either too broad or too narrow. I haven't figured out the right combination of search terms to find some of the music I want, without having to click through a four-page list of results.

The other reason I didn't get into online music downloads for so long is the physical media factor. I like buying CDs and getting the liner notes in the package. Plus, should MP3s ever become less viable as a file format, I've got the CDs so I can re-rip them into whatever format I need. But subscribing to eMusic is an admission that I listen to most of my music on my iPod or at my home PC, and not on my living room stereo. One of the things I'm looking for in a new home theater receiver is the ability to hook it up to my PC or my iPod so I can play MP3s in the living room. Which reminds me yet again that I need to get moving on my home theater upgrade. I don't want to be watching analog TV forever.

too many bloggers in one place at the same time

Last night was another Varsity Letters night at Happy Endings, again featuring some of the top sports bloggers in and around New York. I got to meet Will Leitch of Deadspin (again) and Matt Ufford of With Leather and Kissing Suzy Kolber, and hear some excellent blog posts, book excerpts and stories read by the original authors. You can see my photos of the event at the usual location. I didn't get a photo of myself there, but someone else did.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper

We turned off the last of my firm's Novell NetWare servers this morning at 11 AM. That marks the final, real end of an era for me as a Novell network administrator. Now I'm just a Windows network guy, with some Linux and VMWare management tasks as well. The occasion feels like it merits a eulogy of sorts for NetWare, but I grew weary of defending NetWare for so long that I just don't have the energy. It was a great OS in its day with a superior directory system, but it couldn't weather the lack of support from 3rd party software developers, who preferred Windows and its ease of integration with the desktop. With the advent of Linux as a viable alternative to Windows on the server side, NetWare was finished as an OS. Novell figured this out and bought SuSE Linux a few years ago, so my firm will continue to use some Novell products. But NetWare and its directory are gone now.

Maybe I'll listen to Verdi's Requiem this afternoon in memoriam.

the end of an era

I just unsubscribed myself from the Novell NetWare administrators' e-mail list. I've been on this e-mail list since 1997, through several different jobs as a Novell network administrator. But my office is in the final stages of eliminating NetWare from our network, and I hadn't been an active participant in the list for a long time. It's one more reminder that my career as a Novell admin is at an end.

I also used to be active on a Novell GroupWise e-mail list, back in the late '90s and 2000 when I e-mail management was my primary job function. Copies of my posts on this list are still floating around the Internet, which explains why they come up when you Google "Phil Catelinet." I have to use Lotus Notes at work, and I still miss GroupWise. It was a real e-mail system, as opposed to Notes, which is a database with an e-mail system awkwardly bolted onto it.

I forgot to mark this milestone in my life, but the end of May 2006 wasn't just the 10-year anniversary of my graduation from Georgetown. May 29, 2006 was the 10th anniversary of the start date of my first real job out of college as an IT professional. As of this year, I've been working full-time in IT for 10 years. And with my Novell background, I already feel like a graybeard talking about the "good old days" when we had to use floppy disks and program in BASIC. Maybe this year when I'm home for Christmas I'll finally break out my old Commodore 64 and see if it still works.