I Got A Mac!
I spent a lot of my recent time trying to figure out a way to get a cheap and decent Dell laptop. The decision of where to buy the laptop from, and how to get a discount so as to make the machine fit into my budget almost consumed me. I had quite a decent configuration in mind, and was basically stuck on an Inspirion 1525 and a Vostro 1510. XPS was way out of my budget. The Inspirion didn’t have a graphic card, but I didn’t find much use of a gfx card on my lappy anyway. Inspirion was way too cheap in the US, around 41k (after a coupon discount) and the same config here was for around 60k. But I couldn’t find anybody who could get the machine for me from the US.
Vostro, on the other hand, was available at decent rates in India, but some of its specifications were unsatisfactory. So I couldn’t convince myself to pay such absurd rates for a not so good config.
As mentioned earlier, I did have my eyes on the Macbook, but never really considered it as an option, because it was out of my budget. Then, Uncool Shitty and Irfan came forward, and told me about the ongoing student discount. They both bought the same model of the Macbook, the one with the 2.4 GHz Core2Duo processor, which cost them 54k. This was still a price which I considered to be high. I asked Uncool why he chose to go for a Mac rather than a Dell or any other normal laptop.
Uncool’s response was very typical of him. He said that
a) His main reason for buying a laptop was that he could have a separate programming workstation, which he doesn’t have to share. A Mac was the perfect choice for it, because it was a UNIX-based environment, and the perfect hardware-software interaction and compatibility in a Mac would make him comfortable in his main task, which is, programming.
b) His other secondary tasks were the basic ones – web surfing, listening to music, and basic multimedia features. A Mac does all these perfectly.
After this, I went on and asked Irfan’s opinion. Before that, you need to know a little history about Irfan. I believe that until recently, Irfan has never owned an Apple product in his whole life. But he is the biggest Apple fanboy I’ve ever seen in my whole life. He’s been a member at a Mac Emulation Forum since early 2007 and is now a moderator over there. He used Windows XP on his PC, but you it would really take you a long time to figure out that you aren’t running Mac OS X.
Considering this history of Irfan, I really disregarded all the points he said in favor of a Macbook, and assumed that he went for a Macbook just because it had a lot of eye candy and, most importantly, it had the name of Apple.
I decided to visit Uncool’s house and have a look at his Macbook for myself. The first thing that anybody would notice in a Macbook is its amazing exterior. After working for about an hour on the machine, I felt that the environment was indeed addictive, and was also very usable. Also, the common platform shared by the native applications, made the work experience all the more easier, and more fun.
This was around a fortnight ago. After this, I got busy with college and all the paperwork that comes with it. It was until recently that I met Uncool again, and he reminded me that there were only 2 days left for the Student discount offer. After some more thinking, I realized that the decision wasn’t that difficult after all. 10 minutes later, I had placed my order for a Macbook.
P.S. – Details of the Macbook and my usage experience in the next post.
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lavkush on 
nandan on 
puneet on 
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Congrats on your purchase.
I also bought Macbook Pro few months back, when the discount was not there
I could have saved about 11K had I waited a month more.
Anyways, enjoy the machine and post more details and ur experience soon.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Sigh. Another sane guy turns over to the Dark Side of the Force.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
This website is very useful : http://iusethis.com
Only after using this machine can you understand the cause of fanboyism among Mac users. Three words : it just works.
The only system that can come close to the Mac in terms of simplicity and user friendliness is Ubuntu.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm
@Uncool Shitty: Ubuntu isn’t the simplest nor the best Linux distro, it’s simply the most popular. The distinction of being the easiest to use – and not suck while doing it – goes to Mandriva Linux. And the distro which innovates the most, without any doubt, is openSuse. Novell’s funded a LOT of the stuff which eventually makes all distros better.
I’ve used Mac OS X once, and I hated it. On a lighter note, you might want to see this (no offence meant): http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=macs_cant
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I’ve used Mandriva. I never liked it much. I don’t know why, but I prefer small, single CD distros which integrate a handful of useful programs to work well with the distro instead of package whores like OpenSuSe, Mandriva and Fedora. Ubuntu, PCLOS etc. are good. Minimalistic distros are also cool (Slackware, Arch etc.) but difficult to maintain for long periods of time.
Anyway, my reason for getting a Mac was it’s UNIX roots. It’s a lightweight, stable, safe and solid OS. Apple’s display server (Quartz) is much faster than Xorg (let’s not talk about Windows here), I’ve got Mac versions of all my favorite tools (Ruby, Python, GCC) and I never have to do any maintainence at all. On my PC, I still run Linux (a new distro every few months).
Apple has contributed a lot to open source. CUPS is mainly developed by Apple. WebKit was forked from KHTML by Apple, and now it’s the fastest web engine out there. Even Google Chrome is using WebKit (but they use their own VM for JavaScript called V8, which kicks the balls off any other virtual machine out there).
I’m no fanboy. I just chose the most user friendly UNIX out there.
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Oh dear, I just used “out there” consecutively in that comment.
(I hate being a language Nazi.)
September 3rd, 2008 at 4:40 pm
@Uncool Shitty: Mandriva *does* have a single CD download – it’s called Mandriva One, and it’s been around for quite a long time. True, package management does suck on Fedora / openSuse – but I’d say Mandriva’s management tools are as good as Synaptic – if not better. Plus, with the advent of PackageKit, squabbling over package management frontends will come to an end.
CUPS was ‘mainly developed’ by an independent group before Apple bought it a few years back.
I haven’t used Chrome, but I think it’s too early to call it badass.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
@Vijay
Thank you, and I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying the experience of using my Macbook.
@AnkurB
Well, I still love using PCLinuxOS on my home PC. I may be using a Mac right now, and really love its simplicity and usability, but that doesn’t mean that I have changed my ideology and that I am a closed-source-swearing-by-Apple-fanatic. We all love reading what Maddox writes, and I had a good laugh when I read the article quoted by you, over an year ago. Things haven’t changed much since then, and I still chuckled while reading the article again. But now we both know what the truth is and what is exaggerated.
And I believe that PCLOS is the most usable system in the world and the three words – “It just works.” are better suited to PCLOS system than a Mac.
@Uncool
I use this is turning out to be quite a nice source for a beginner. Its just like our old Digg, except for Applications rather than news.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:43 pm
@Apoorv: “…but that doesn’t mean that I have changed my ideology and that I am a closed-source-swearing-by-Apple-fanatic…”
THAT’s a relief. Good thing that you’re still sane.
Maddox was totally right about one thing – how Apple hypes Mac to be more than a computer, and into an ‘experience’ – which is just that, hype.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Apple’s interface is good, agreed; but Compiz Fusion isn’t anything less. My point is that what I use should be open source (the ideology bit) and *good* (the practical bit). Ubuntu 8.04 sucks, so I’m waiting for Intrepid Ibex which is supposed to be a ‘laptop centric’ release – plus it’ll have OOo 3.0.x which has Office 2007 format support. I’d have installed openSuse 11, but I’d rather wait for a stable KDE 4.1 version of the same (limited bandwidth connection).
September 4th, 2008 at 12:47 am
When I said Chrome was badass, I wasn’t talking about the browser. I was talking about the V8 JavaScript engine. I’m a Ruby programmer and this engine has a lot of potential for dynamic languages like Ruby and Python. Already somebody has hacked it to run Ruby bytecode.
I find Compiz to be just a toy. I’m not into eye candy, and even on the Mac I’ve disabled most of the annoying GUI effects that come enabled by default. On Linux, I find plain old GNOME to be good enough.
PackageKit is a nice idea, but it doesn’t really affect me. I spend most of my time inside the command line and I barely touch Synaptic except when I need to look for a program I don’t know by name. A sidenote : check out Fink.
Before anyone labels me a fanboy, let me remind everyone that I still stand for open source. If ever I develop something that is worth releasing to the public, it will be under the GPL..
Apple is just a company. Let’s leave it at that. They make computers. I just purchased one and I liked it.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Another flame war!
@Ankur: I don’t know how you rate Linux distributions but I know you will like some distribution more than the others. Ubuntu is a choice. Mandriva is a choice. You cannot go around calling any of them the best because everyone has different needs. You may like KDE even if I write a really bad review of 4.1
@Apoorv: Congratulations on your purchase. Hope this is the first of many Macs to come.
@Uncool Shitty: User friendliness isn’t something that can be defined easily. I use Mac OS X but my family doesn’t. Just because I find it user-friendly and simply, everyone else wont. If I did not have the option to buy a Mac, I would have either waited till I got that option or bought a computer with Windows Vista(more likely, since I don’t wait usually).
September 5th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
For me, user friendly = UNIX. Period.
I understand that for most people user friendly simply means “the same thing I’ve been using for the past 10 years”. Hence the success of Windows.
July 1st, 2009 at 1:46 am
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