Day-2 (The Macintosh Experiment)
by Jesse on Feb.21, 2011, under Macintosh Experiment
Ok, Day 2. The Mac is now under my desk where my PC used to be.
So far It’s been a mixed bag. But part of that is kind of understandable.
I’m running an older G5, with the PPC970 chip in it. (Only one of them 1.6Ghz, 800Mb FSB)
This means I’m already seeing some sluggishness. Again, if I had a 1.6Ghz P4 I’d be seeing the same thing, so this is not actually a negative.
Look-and-feel wise I’m liking it. Mostly because I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.10 with the Cairo-Dock for some time now on my Dell Adamo 13. My gods it looks identicial.
So far, the cons -
1. Not nearly enough USB ports, and my Best-Buy purchased Belkin 4+1 USB card causes the eternal hang at the blank blue screen.
2. The case doesn’t have a place for a Media bay (IE Flash storage, camera cards, etc) I have to use an external. See point #1 about USB ports.
3. Got a dual-port video card in it. I was happy to see this. One of the ports is something I’ve never seen before. Guess I have to pay a visit to best-buy tomorrow.
4. There are only two internal drive slots, and really nowhere else to mount an internal HD. Whereas my Dell Precision690 had four, so I could put two fairly high-speed drives in for the boot partition and two slower 2TB drives in for data. In the Mac, everything goes on the two, so unless I want to run everything over the network, I’m kinda stuck.
And while this isn’t strictly speaking a ‘con’ for the Macintosh, there is no copy of Office2k8 available on Technet…And Office/Mac 2k11 only works on the Intel platform, not PPC.
And the pros:
1. It’s smooth. The BSD Linux definitely has everything I’ve come to expect from a Linux distro, Once I found out where they hid the bash prompt, generated an SSH key and threw it into my authorized_keys directory on the CentOS servers I have running catbytes.com right now, I can get into and work on all of my systems. (I haven’t found the RDP client yet, but I know it’s out there.)
2. The smaller keyboard and in-line mouse that Apple is famous for leaves a lot more room on the desk for my usual clutter.
3. It’s *QUIET*. I can barely tell it’s running, while the P690′s do have some active cooling and so do make some noise, this thing is absolutely silent.
4. Software compatibility seems OK. And by that I mean other than Office 2k11, I haven’t found anything that won’t install even with the older hardware / OS.