I Haz A Mac
So I got a MacBook Air yesterday, with zero mac experience or background and a lifetime of PC use. Initial impressions, compared to when I bought a Gateway laptop from Fry's previously:
Initial goal: Replace my normal hulu/netflix/youtube/video watching laptop in the living room.
a) Beautiful unboxing / initial setup experience. It's pleasant and friendly and nice. It even came with a charged battery. There are so many nice touches - even the battery charger is the nicest battery charger I have ever seen. The touchpad is actually a joy to use. Apparently I need to learn gestures now, but they are apparently fantabulous.
* Apple 1, Windows 0
b) Hit up the Apple Store to get a mini displayport to HDMI adapter. It feels like a magical place with some sort of secret that I don't know. What are all those people doing in there? Should I be one of them? What is a genius bar? I feel on the outside looking in; I snuck to the adapters wall to get what I needed, eventually found the laptops with credit card readers to pay, and snuck out, feeling like I was intruding on a domain of cool where I didn't quite belong.
* No clue how to score this one. It might just be me, feeling odd and left out.
c) Spent half an hour of unplugging, replugging, rebooting, power cycling, installing OS updates, and googling to get HDMI adapter to work. What finally worked was either an OS update, or else the following ritual: Plug in HDMI adapter but not HDMI cable to laptop, turn on TV, plug in HDMI cable to TV, once everything is on and plugged in, plug in HDMI cable to adapter. From google, other people were not as lucky as me.
In contrast, the Gateway just worked. Plug in HDMI cable, done.
* Apple 1, Windows 1
d) Spent an hour trying to learn how to maximize one window (2nd screen) while using another window (1st screen), so that I could devote the second screen to watching stuff. Macs have a 'zoom' button, but no standard-across-the-OS concept of 'Maximize' or 'Fullscreen'. Nothing like 'Alt-Enter' on Windows. So, you get to learn app specific tricks.
Netflix is somewhat easy: There is a 'maximize' button. When you hit it, Silverlight is supposed to prompt you if you would like to stay maximized. It did not do this prompting for me at first; I suspect it is related to silverlight having just installed itself? Eventually closing the browser and re-opening the browser got the full screen prompt, but oddly enough I didn't think to try that until after I had googled unsuccessfully for half an hour.
Hulu is much harder: There is no maximize button. Google says command-F goes full screen, and it does, but Flash loses fullscreen the instant you click on another window. On windows you have two options: Use Chrome or Firefox, Pick the 'pop out' mode on the site, and hit F11 so you are technically running in windowed mode but taking up the full screen; or else hex edit the Flash binary to remove the lose-fullscreen-when-you-lose-focus feature. On Mac... I can't find a link to tell me how to hex edit the mac binary. I googled a bit and found Hulu has a desktop app, and command-F goes full screen in that (although I can't find it on a menu anywhere) - but for some reason it overexpands a bit and runs part of the video off the bottom of my screen. I'm going to try Chrome and pop out and F11 next.
This was frustrating. Eventually I got Netflix right, but Hulu is still not perfect, and I haven't even made it to Youtube yet.
* Apple 1, Windows 2
e) Tried to load a file from my windows box on my Mac. This is -hard-. The mac has to be reconfigured to use smb file sharing, and networking has to be configured for WINS, and I think you have to pull tricks like entering your PC's IP address as the WINS server for names to work right (instead of IPs) but I'm not absolutely sure because I can't get names working reliably yet. Then you enter smb://IPAddress/, but it doesn't work, so you go reconfigure your Windows box, but it's Windows Home so group policy isn't an option so you have to edit the registry to set LmCompatibilityLevel to 1. Then, finally, your mac can see your PC, and you happily open your media directory and load a picture as a quick test, and then you see an SMB error dialog and file sharing quits working and you have no idea how to fix it or troublshoot it and you want to throw things and you give up and you go to bed. So far, I have successfully viewed one picture of me being silly at Halloween served from Windows to the Mac, but trying for a second picture was pure kaboom.
To be fair, if I was upgrading from a Mac, the installer has a nice copy-your-files option and I'm sure it would have been a grand experience. Also, setting up networking on Windows is not the easiest of things. But, on Windows, I am at least able to do it, and once I get it done, it works and doesn't get stuck with error message windows that don't even pop to the foreground and get hidden behind other windows.
* Apple 1, Windows 3
Apparently I have different goals from your average user - wanting to replace your livingroom TV-and-web-browsing Windows laptop with a livingroom TV-and-web-browsing Mac laptop does not seem to have been an intended use case. I'm sure if I just wanted to hook up a camera and edit photos and make movies and play with an ipod the mac would be a pleasant satisfying experience. But, well, so far, it's frustrating. Very, very frustrating.
I'm hoping it will grow on me, and I can figure out the file sharing, and once I hook up an ipod and a camera it will be lovely. I hope.
Initial goal: Replace my normal hulu/netflix/youtube/video watching laptop in the living room.
a) Beautiful unboxing / initial setup experience. It's pleasant and friendly and nice. It even came with a charged battery. There are so many nice touches - even the battery charger is the nicest battery charger I have ever seen. The touchpad is actually a joy to use. Apparently I need to learn gestures now, but they are apparently fantabulous.
* Apple 1, Windows 0
b) Hit up the Apple Store to get a mini displayport to HDMI adapter. It feels like a magical place with some sort of secret that I don't know. What are all those people doing in there? Should I be one of them? What is a genius bar? I feel on the outside looking in; I snuck to the adapters wall to get what I needed, eventually found the laptops with credit card readers to pay, and snuck out, feeling like I was intruding on a domain of cool where I didn't quite belong.
* No clue how to score this one. It might just be me, feeling odd and left out.
c) Spent half an hour of unplugging, replugging, rebooting, power cycling, installing OS updates, and googling to get HDMI adapter to work. What finally worked was either an OS update, or else the following ritual: Plug in HDMI adapter but not HDMI cable to laptop, turn on TV, plug in HDMI cable to TV, once everything is on and plugged in, plug in HDMI cable to adapter. From google, other people were not as lucky as me.
In contrast, the Gateway just worked. Plug in HDMI cable, done.
* Apple 1, Windows 1
d) Spent an hour trying to learn how to maximize one window (2nd screen) while using another window (1st screen), so that I could devote the second screen to watching stuff. Macs have a 'zoom' button, but no standard-across-the-OS concept of 'Maximize' or 'Fullscreen'. Nothing like 'Alt-Enter' on Windows. So, you get to learn app specific tricks.
Netflix is somewhat easy: There is a 'maximize' button. When you hit it, Silverlight is supposed to prompt you if you would like to stay maximized. It did not do this prompting for me at first; I suspect it is related to silverlight having just installed itself? Eventually closing the browser and re-opening the browser got the full screen prompt, but oddly enough I didn't think to try that until after I had googled unsuccessfully for half an hour.
Hulu is much harder: There is no maximize button. Google says command-F goes full screen, and it does, but Flash loses fullscreen the instant you click on another window. On windows you have two options: Use Chrome or Firefox, Pick the 'pop out' mode on the site, and hit F11 so you are technically running in windowed mode but taking up the full screen; or else hex edit the Flash binary to remove the lose-fullscreen-when-you-lose-focus feature. On Mac... I can't find a link to tell me how to hex edit the mac binary. I googled a bit and found Hulu has a desktop app, and command-F goes full screen in that (although I can't find it on a menu anywhere) - but for some reason it overexpands a bit and runs part of the video off the bottom of my screen. I'm going to try Chrome and pop out and F11 next.
This was frustrating. Eventually I got Netflix right, but Hulu is still not perfect, and I haven't even made it to Youtube yet.
* Apple 1, Windows 2
e) Tried to load a file from my windows box on my Mac. This is -hard-. The mac has to be reconfigured to use smb file sharing, and networking has to be configured for WINS, and I think you have to pull tricks like entering your PC's IP address as the WINS server for names to work right (instead of IPs) but I'm not absolutely sure because I can't get names working reliably yet. Then you enter smb://IPAddress/, but it doesn't work, so you go reconfigure your Windows box, but it's Windows Home so group policy isn't an option so you have to edit the registry to set LmCompatibilityLevel to 1. Then, finally, your mac can see your PC, and you happily open your media directory and load a picture as a quick test, and then you see an SMB error dialog and file sharing quits working and you have no idea how to fix it or troublshoot it and you want to throw things and you give up and you go to bed. So far, I have successfully viewed one picture of me being silly at Halloween served from Windows to the Mac, but trying for a second picture was pure kaboom.
To be fair, if I was upgrading from a Mac, the installer has a nice copy-your-files option and I'm sure it would have been a grand experience. Also, setting up networking on Windows is not the easiest of things. But, on Windows, I am at least able to do it, and once I get it done, it works and doesn't get stuck with error message windows that don't even pop to the foreground and get hidden behind other windows.
* Apple 1, Windows 3
Apparently I have different goals from your average user - wanting to replace your livingroom TV-and-web-browsing Windows laptop with a livingroom TV-and-web-browsing Mac laptop does not seem to have been an intended use case. I'm sure if I just wanted to hook up a camera and edit photos and make movies and play with an ipod the mac would be a pleasant satisfying experience. But, well, so far, it's frustrating. Very, very frustrating.
I'm hoping it will grow on me, and I can figure out the file sharing, and once I hook up an ipod and a camera it will be lovely. I hope.