Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 21 Jan 2006 22:18:13 GMT
I’m currently somewhere over Oregon, flying from the bay area back to Seattle. This is the 6th flight that I’ve been on in the last 3 months, and the very first time that I’ve even bothered pulling my laptop out of its bag. Since the flight between SEA and SJC is only in the air for 90 minutes or so, I haven’t really seen the point–I’d rather spend the time reading, listening to my iPod, or sleeping.
In fact, the fact that it’s such a short flight factored into my shopping when I picked up a new PowerBook a couple months ago. If I’d really expected to use my computer on the plane, I probably would have picked up a 15” PowerBook, but I figured that I could cope with a few computer-free hours per month and bought the 17” model instead. I’m really happy with my choice, all things considered–the screen on the new 17 is amazing–it’s basically a 20” LCD shrunk down to 17”. My old 15” PowerBook was really most useful when it was sitting on a desk plugged into a real monitor, while I’ve never even bothered to plug my 17” into anything, even when I’ve had a spare monitor or two sitting right next to the laptop.
So, when I bought the laptop, I figured that the extra screen real estate was worth an extra couple pounds and a general inability to use the laptop while traveling. Frankly, the 15” was never very comfortable to use on planes anyway, so I doubted that I’d miss anything. If I’d really wanted to work on planes, I’d have picked up a 12” PowerBook and found a way to cope with their limitations.
Anyway, here I am, sitting on a dinky little Alaska Air MD-80 with my laptop out, and somehow, even though MD-80s are generally cramped even without an oversized laptop, somehow there’s actually more then enough room here to work. It fills up my entire tray, and it helps that my seat is reclined a bit and there’s no one in front of me (or next to me–no one in their right mind flies at 6:30 on a Saturday morning), but it’s actually pretty comfortable. I could probably get 3 or 4 hours worth of work done this way, if my plane wasn’t landing in 30 minutes.
Now back to the one remaining bug in my new Typo caching code…
Tags apple, powerbook, travel | 1 comment | 2 trackbacks
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 14:25:39 GMT
The Mac Observer has a report from an investment analyst predicting near-future Apple hardware upgrades:
- The PowerMac G5 will be upgraded with dual-core 970MP chips, giving Apple effectively a quad-processor system at the top of their line.
- The PowerBook will be upgraded to around 2 GHz, using the 7448 that I discussed last week.
- The PowerBook will get a HD screen.
- The Mac mini will get a G5.
- The iPod mini will get a color screen.
- There will be a video iPod.
Some of this seems pretty obvious–the color iPod mini has been rumored for almost a year, and it’s a pretty obvious direction for Apple. I don’t think anyone doubts that it’ll happen, it’s just a question of when. Similarly, the dual-core PowerMac G5 is Apple’s only available upgrade path for the G5 systems–if they’re going to upgrade them at all before they get dropped for Intel systems, then Apple’s going to use the 970MP.
The PowerBook upgrades are a bit more of a mystery to me. I can see a simple upgrade that swaps the current 7447 CPU for a 7448–they’re basically pin-compatible. The 7448 has a slightly faster FSB, which will help since the G4 suffers from a painfully slow bus, but it’s basically just a continuation of the current G4 line. The problem is that several rumors say that the PB G4 is moving to DDR2 memory, and that confuses me. It suggests that Apple’s building a new north bridge, which seems kind of expensive for a product that will only be on the market for 9-12 months.
The DDR2 change would make perfect sense if Apple was really swapping the current 7447 for a MPC8641 and using the MPC8641’s on-chip DDR2 controller, but as far as I can tell, the MPC8641 isn’t supposed to ship in quantity until early next year.
Engadget hinted last week that the DDR2 move was really a power-saving move, not a performance move. Since moving to DDR2 wouldn’t help performance a whole lot when even PC2100 RAM is faster then the 7448’s FSB, power savings make as much sense as anything. I don’t know enough about laptop power budgets to know if dropping 5W on the CPU and a few more Watts on the memory is enough to really extend the laptop’s battery life by a significant margin, but it suggests that Apple may be aiming for 6-7 hours, rather then the current 4-5 hours that most PowerBooks currently get.
Back to the rumored Mac mini G5–I can’t see this happening at all:
- Cost. The G5 is supposed to cost more. The Mac mini is Apple’s most price-sensitive Mac. Even a $50 price bump would probably be unacceptable.
- Cooling. The dinky little Mac mini case has many of the same cooling problems that G5-based laptops would face. Battery life isn’t an issue, but getting rid of 30W of waste heat is.
- Lineup. If Apple speeds up the mini, then it’ll have to either drop the eMac or upgrade it too. It could also cannibalize iMac and iBook sales. Those wouldn’t be a big deal if Apple could upgrade either model and get more performance, but they’re basically stuck with both of them. I guess they could build a dual-core iMac G5, but they have cooling problems with the iMac, and adding a hotter CPU probably wouldn’t help with that.
I don’t know about the video iPod–I can see a 5th generation iPod that’s capable of playing videos on the 2” display while still being optimized for audio playback, but I have a harder time seeing Apple producing an iPod with a huge display. I don’t feel really strongly either way, I guess.
Finally, on the x86 upgrade question–I’ve been wondering which Apple model will be the first to be switched, and when it’ll happen. Apple said that consumer systems would be first, and that’ll happen sometime in 2006. My personal guess would be the iMac in March or so–it’s Apple’s most distinctive system, and it would appeal to users even as a stylish Windows box. It’s not really going to be fast or cheap enough to kill PowerMac G5 sales, so that’s a safe move for Apple. The Mac mini and iBook are the two other consumer options, but I can’t see either one being part of the first wave of upgrades–they’d kill sales of the PowerMac and PowerBook. So I expect that we’ll see systems upgraded in roughly this order: iMac, PowerMac, PowerBook, Mac mini, iBook.
Posted in Mac stuff | Tags apple, dualcore, powerbook, predictions, rumors | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 06 Jul 2005 04:22:55 GMT
The AC adapter for my PowerBook died this morning. It was weird–it was working fine at home this morning, but it completely failed to work at the office. I changed power plugs and wiggled all of the connectors, all without success.
Fortunately, my office is only 20 minutes from one of the local Apple stores, so I was able to dash out and get a replacement. After 40 months, I guess I’m not really surprised when pieces die on my laptop anymore.
Posted in Mac stuff | Tags apple, applestore, broken, powerbook | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 08 Jun 2005 16:34:00 GMT
I was just wondering–what will Apple call their professional computing line once they switch to Intel? The “Power” in PowerMac and PowerBook originally referred to the PowerPC chip inside. Will they keep the “Power” and define it to mean “powerful,” or will they spit out a new prefix?
The iBook/iMac/iPod/iSight/iWhatever product lineup doesn’t have this problem, of course.
Posted in Mac stuff | Tags apple, applex86, intel, powerbook, powermac | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:23:13 GMT
Apple finally announced a ship date for Tiger: April 29th. They’ve kept the same pricing that they’ve used for earlier releases, $129 per copy or $199 for a 5-system “family pack.” Apparently they’ve added a Tiger/iLife/iWork bundle at $249 as well.
Think Secret is also reporting that new PowerMac G5 systems will show up at the NAB conference this weekend. They’re unsure if Apple will use IBM’s dual-core CPUs yet, or just stick with faster single-core processors. There’s some evidence that Apple is getting ready to release 4-processor sysetms, so systems with 2 dual-core CPUs wouldn’t be surprising.
On the PowerBook G5 front, ThinkSecret says that they don’t expect to see them any time in 2005. It’s unclear what Apple will do with their PowerBook lineup if the G5 is still most of a year away. Their current CPU is bus-starved, and cranking up the clock rate (or even using Freestyle’s dual-core G4) probably won’t give them a lot of extra performance.
Posted in Mac stuff | Tags apple, macosx, powerbook, powermac, tiger | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 18 Mar 2005 20:16:19 GMT
For some reason, the trackpad on my PowerBook started acting up this morning. Once or twice per minute, the mouse pointer just stops moving. Picking my finger up and waiting for a couple seconds usually fixes it; tapping hard on the trackpad seems to work, too. I rebooted, and it didn’t seem to happen while I was sitting at the login screen, but it restarted as soon as I logged in. So, it could be a software issue. Ugh. As it is, it’s really awkward to use the trackpad. I have a USB mouse that I bought to use with the laptop years ago, but I gave up on it after I got used to the trackpad. Now it looks like I might have to drag the mouse out of retirement, unless I can find a simple solution to the problem.
I think this is my Mac’s way of telling me to order a new PowerBook, but I’m not going to take the hint until the PowerBook G5 shows up.
Posted in Mac stuff | Tags broken, powerbook | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:43:28 GMT
The Register has a blip today mentioning that the PowerBook G5 will apparently use HyperTransport. The story that they post is a bit dubious, but they seem fairly convinced that Apple is using HyperTransport in the new PowerBook. This isn’t surprising, because the PowerMac G5 and iMac G5 use HT to tie Apple’s custom northbridge to the rest of the system, but there was no real reason to believe that Apple’s laptops would use the same bus technology as their desktops. Laptops have a lot of special needs, and what works for desktop systems doesn’t always work well on laptops.
Hopefully this suggests that Apple is getting closer to releasing G5-based laptops. Personally, I’m guessing they’ll start to show up around August or September, but that’s a complete guess.
Posted in Mac stuff | Tags apple, powerbook, powerbookg5, rumors | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 04 Aug 2004 01:36:50 GMT
I can tell that my PowerBook is going to need to be replaced before too much longer–it’s starting to shed pieces. A month or two ago, I lost my hard drive. This week’s victim is my keyboard–the left Command/Apple key broke off. It’s been having problems for weeks–one of the clips that holds it in place broke a month or so ago–but I’d hoped that it’d last a while longer. No luck–the second set of clips broke off this afternoon, leaving the key free to wander around my desktop. Since this is probably my second most commonly used key (after the space bar), it’s really hard to use the laptop without it.
I did a bunch of poking around online, and found replacement keyboards for as little as $79, but overnight shipping on one of those runs it back up over $100, and I’m trying to save money for a new Treo. So I looked around a while longer and discovered that pbparts.com sells replacement keycaps for $5. They still want over $8 for shipping, but I’m a lot happier paying $13 then I am paying $100.
While I was checking out, I noticed something interesting–the part that I was buying was labeled “command key,” not “left command key.” A quick check of the keyboard showed that the left and right command keys are, in fact, identical. So, after a brief hunt for tools, I popped the right command key off of the keyboard and swapped it with the broken left command key, and I’m back in business. There’s an ugly spot on my keyboard with no key, but that’ll go away in a couple days when the new key arrives. Until then, I have a perfectly functional keyboard with a working left command key.
Surprisingly enough, they also carry the screen release latch that died a couple months after I bought this thing. Apple was willing to replace it under warranty, but I wasn’t willing to part with my laptop for 2 weeks. I’ve mostly learned to live with the broken latch, but I’ll probably replace it sooner or later.
Posted in Mac stuff, Personal | Tags apple, broken, powerbook | 3 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 05 May 2004 02:17:45 GMT
It’s turning into a Bad Tech Day. I lost one cheap Ethernet switch today, had weird failures with another, had my wife’s Mac crash, and now my laptop drive is failing. I just love the clicking sound it’s making. It looks like I’m running to Fry’s and playing with Carbon Copy Cloner tonight.
Update (5/5/2004 10am): It’s dead, Jim. The laptop drive died hard in the middle of running Carbon Copy Cloner. I think I got all of the important stuff ($HOME, /Applications, /Library) off of it before it croaked, but this is still really annoying. I’m probably going to have to track down my Panther install CDs to recover from this. At this point, the Powerbook won’t even boot–I just get the modern version of the sad mac face.
Update (5/5/2004 12:40pm): It’s back. I let it sit for an hour, and then it miraculously started booting again. I was able to keep it running long enough to finish copying 33 GB onto the new drive. I’m now back up and running using the new 60 GB external drive, which I’ll swap with the internal drive once I finish today’s big release at work.
Posted in Mac stuff, Personal | Tags broken, harddrive, powerbook | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 05 May 2004 01:32:21 GMT
I co-worker just pointed this out. On my Powerbook (a G4/550, 768 MB, 40 GB 4200 RPM drive), running ‘find /usr’ takes around 30 seconds every time I run it:
tibook$ time find /usr | wc
48402 48402 2390367
real0m30.041s
user0m0.410s
sys 0m2.620s
tibook$ time find /usr | wc
48402 48402 2390367
real0m32.034s
user0m0.450s
sys 0m2.710s
On the other hand, one of my Linux boxes at home isn’t that much faster (Athlon 700, 384 MB, old Maxtor 5 GB drive), but it’s able to do repeated finds much quicker:
debian# time find /usr | wc
124088 124108 5869110
real1m43.631s
user0m0.680s
sys 0m1.170s
debian# time find /usr | wc
124088 124108 5869110
real0m2.090s
user0m0.530s
sys 0m0.700s
Notice that repeated finds drop from 103 seconds to 2 seconds on the Linux box, while they stay around 30 seconds on the Mac, even though the Mac has twice the RAM of the PC.
I’m assuming that OS X is restricting the amount of RAM used for disk caching, but it’s really painful in this case.
Posted in Mac stuff, Computer System Administration | Tags linux, macosx, powerbook, slow | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 29 Jan 2004 13:32:38 GMT
We’ve had a wireless network at home for over 3.5 years, and I’ve had a wireless-equipped PowerBook for almost two years. In all that time, I’ve never managed to get the laptop to work wirelessly from anyplace actually useful. This is a generic failing of the Titanium PowerBooks–their wireless antenna is inside of a big, titanium faraday cage, leaving them with a frustratingly short range. So, I haven’t been able to use the laptop from the living room couch, or from the bedroom. Instead, I’ve been limited to 30 or so feet, which draws the line somewhere in the middle of the dining room.
Until today. A couple weeks ago our second wireless access point died. It was a cheap (at the time) SMC, which replaced the original Apple “UFO” base station which basically melted itself down. I was faced with a dilemma–I could buy a high-power wireless card and antenna, plug it all into one of my Linux boxes, and then run HostAP, or I could buy another cheap AP. In the end, I decided that it was better to have a working network now then to wait for the HostAP hardware to arrive via FedEX, so we bought a Linksys WRT54G. The nice thing about this specific model is that it runs Linux under the hood, and there are a few hacked firmware loads for it that give it a number of features that Linksys never planned on. Including the ability to crank the transmitter power from a wimpy (but common) 30 mW up to 84 mW. It’s not the 200 mW that high-end stuff can handle, but it’s good enough to finally let me sit on the couch and use the computer. It only took two years.
Posted in Personal | Tags house, powerbook, wifi, wrt54g | 2 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 03 Sep 2003 01:41:06 GMT
Rant time. I’m pissed off with Linux on the Desktop.
I’ve been using Linux for a long time–since 0.97.1, in August of 1992. I re-wrote chunks of the X server to get it to work better with my video card. I wrote drivers for cheesy video cameras, fixed broken system calls, and so forth. I know Linux. I’ve been running Linux servers professionally since 1995 or so. At Internap, I ran over 700 Linux boxes, including a ton of desktops. My primary desktop system was a Linux box from 1993 until I bought a PowerBook in 2002; I’ve probably only had a Windows box running at home for a month or so since 1993.
I’ve been around Apple systems since 1983 or so–I had an Apple //e, and I lusted after their hardware for years, but I ended up buying a faster PC for way less money in 1988, and I didn’t look back until early 2000. My wife was complaining that it was hard for her to use my Linux box, because it was perpetually just slightly broken. Things like incomplete kernel upgrades, broken X servers, and flaky copies of netscape kept her away from her email. I spent all day keeping the computers at work running; I didn’t want to spend the rest of my time fixing computers at home. Plus, we’d just had our first child, and Gabe was suffering from a lack of tacky home video footage. So, Gabe and I decided to go out and kill two birds with one stone, so we bought a graphite-colored iMac DV and a DV camcorder. I added a wireless networking base station and card for the mac, and it was able to work pretty much anywhere in the house. My wife could read her mail and surf the web, and I could leave broken Linux boxes sitting in the computer room. Everyone was happy.
Sort of. The problem was that the Mac ran OS 9. No matter what Apple people claim, OS 9’s core is about on par with Windows for Workgroups, around 1993 or so. It’s awful. It’s not a modern OS by any metric, with no memory protection, no real multitasking, weird networking, and (of course) no command prompt. It tended to crash a couple times per week, plus I hated using it, just on general principles. But, it was never really broken, because I never wanted to tweak anything on it.
In late 2001, Cyn was griping about an irritating crash of something or other, and was wishing for Emacs and ssh while we were out driving, and I remembered that OS X 10.1 was shipping, and was supposed to be usable. So, we dropped by CompUSA and grabbed a copy, and it was nice. I liked it, because it was a real OS (it ships with openssh, that’s usually real enough for me). She liked it because little crashes didn’t take down the whole system. A few months later, I decided that I needed a laptop and bought a PowerBook G4. I wanted a machine that would let me (a) work (which means mostly SSH, X, and a web browser) (b) run Photoshop and (c) watch DVDs while traveling. On a PC, I’d have had to dual-boot to do (b) and (c), while the Mac could do all 3 at the same time without problems. So, since I’d spent over $2,000 on the laptop, I decided that I was actually going to use it, not just let it gather dust, and started turning off my Linux desktops at home and at work.
And, bizarrely, I was happy. I’ve avoided treating the Mac like a Unix box. I’ve limited the amount of Unix cruft that I’ve drizzled through the filesystem, although I have X and XEmacs installed. I do 90% of my file management through the shell, and I use rsync and scp all the time–I’ve not glued to the GUI, but I enjoy the working environment. Plus, tons of stuff just works, without we needing to spend hours fiddling with it. The system address book syncs correctly with my cell phone. My calendar on the phone syncs with the computer, which syncs with my wife’s at home. Some things, like iTunes, are amazingly right, while others are still a bit flaky, but all in all it’s the most usable Unix I’ve ever seen.
Which brings me, in a round-about manner, to the point that I was starting with. Under the hood, Linux is quite a bit more capable then OS X. It’s faster and cheaper, and it runs on nearly every hardware platform known to man. It’s wonderfully flexible for servers. On the desktop, though, it’s just too flexible. I build my first Linux desktop box in over a year this weekend, with Debian and KDE 3.1. After fighting the usual fight with Debian’s installer, I was able to get X and KDE working after a couple hours (missing drivers, broken dependancies in sid, nothing that I can’t handle, and most of that was Debian-related, not really anything endemic to Linux itself). However, when I was done, I was still left with a hodge-podge of mostly interoperable programs that all worked just a little differently. KDE’s web browser and Mozilla have a hard time printing to the same printer. KDE apps seem to understand the multimedia keys on the keyboard, but Mozilla doesn’t. Sub-pixel antialiasing is set up wrong, and leaves a colored fringe on letters on the cheap LCD that we’re using. There’s nothing like iTunes, which is wonderfully simple to use, yet still manages to just work. Instead, I can accomplish the same basic things, but it takes 2-3 times as much work. But, in exchange for this, I can do it in 15 different ways.
That’s not really a step in the right direction.
On Friday night, we went out for Chinese food, and I watched the waitress add up our bill on paper with a calculator. I started to wonder why they didn’t use a computer–there are tons of opportunities that a computer could help with, besides just adding the numbers right. One local burger drive-in takes orders on iPaqs with wireless cards, and beams the orders back to the kitchen, shaving a minute or two off of each order. So why doesn’t the Chinese place do this? Because it’s freakishly complex and expensive. What are the odds that their computer would work perfectly without failing all year? What happens when (not if) it dies? Can they fix it in-house, or do they need to wait for a consultant to show up? What do they do when it’s down?
After a couple minutes, it seems obvious that paper and calculators is a better approach for this place, and quite possibly most non-chain restaurants, because they can’t afford the incredible cost of keeping their computers working.
I’m not saying that buying computers from Apple would make their lives easier (although it probably would, a little), I’m saying that pretty much everything computer-related right now is too complex and too prone to breaking. And, once it breaks, it takes an expert to un-break it. Computers tend to be brittle and easily broken, and once they break, they can’t fix themselves. There’s no single fix to that, but I’ve seen a few things that help.
1. Don’t be too flexible. Understand the problem that you’re working on, find a good model, and then stick to it. My two favorite pieces of software right now, iTunes and the TiVo both succeed by making it easy to do what you want to do without providing excessive flexibility. Compare to KDE on Linux–how many ways to burn a CD do we really need?
2. Software breaks, computers break, but there’s no reason for them to remain broken. Look at TiVo, or at Internap’s reference system–in either case, the system software for each box is at least partially self-repairing. At Internap, you could overwrite system files and libraries, and odds were it would be repaired and returned to service without anyone ever knowing. Even if the box died completely, we could build a new one and restore the old data exactly within minutes. Appliances like TiVo need to behave the same way–they need to keep low-level problems from turning into high-level problems that the user can see.
3. Virtualize and separate. Something else that we did at Internap that helped was to separate different services onto different physical servers. That’s pretty common at companies that care about reliability; if one server dies, it only takes out one service. You then deploy redundant servers for each service, and things tend to keep working through hardware faults. Software faults still kill you, though. In my ideal world, software would take that even further; I’d love to manage a system made out of smalltalk-like images, where each logical service was entirely contained within a system image that couple be copied around over the network, without any external dependancies. Assembling a network’s worth of services would then become an exercise in bolting together components, and the development side of administration would be mostly creating components.
I need to practice short, coherent rants.
Posted in Linux | Tags desktop, linux, osx, powerbook, rant | 4 comments
