MacPrices.net

Due For A System Upgrade But Waiting For Some Excitement

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

by Charles W. Moore

It’s been more than two-and-a-half years since I upgraded my production system. My target interval in theory between system upgrades has been three years since I first thought of replacing my first Mac, but I’ve rarely achieved that objective in actual practice.

Based on history rather than good intentions aspiration, my average interval between major system upgrades has then just short of 29 months, as follows:

Mac Plus: November 1992 - January 1993 - 14 months

Mac LC 520: January 1993 - November 1996 - 46 months

PowerBook 5300: November 1996 - January 1999 - 27 months

Power G3 Series WallStreet: January 1999 - October 2001 - 33 months

PowerBook G3 Pismo: October 2001 - January 2003 - 15 months

G3 iBook: January 2003 - February 2006 - 37 months

17-inch PowerBook G4 - February 2006 -

There have also been a UMAX SuperMac S-900 tower, a PowerBook 1400, and a second Pismo in the mix, but none of those was ever my main production workhorse, serving rather as auxiliary and backup computers.

Approaching the 31 month mark with my current 17-inch PowerBook, I’m now past that milestone even though the G4 PowerBook, purchased as an Apple Certified Refurbished unit, was intended from the outset to be a transitional machine to bypass the inevitable bumps and hiccups of the early days of the MacIntel revolution. I had actually expected to move on to a Mac Intel unit long before now. But here I am.

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There are at least a couple of good reasons why I haven’t made a move. First and foremost, this G4 PowerBook has been a rock - solidly dependable and generally delightful platform to work with. It has given essentially zero trouble over the past 31 months, and still provides decent performance for my needs, although it’s been showing its age more since I upgraded to OS 10.5 Leopard last fall. If a computer ever epitomized the old Apple “It just works!” slogan, this machine is it. Upgrading through several versions of OS 10.4 Tiger to OS 10.4.11 was painless with no issues or problems encountered. However, Leopard has been a somewhat different story - not a disaster I hasten to add, and I’ve continued to use it, almost immediately hooked by two features in particular - Spaces and Time Machine - as well as smaller improvements like the smarter spellchecker, QuickLook, and somewhat improved Spotlight performance - but there have been frustrations as well, which have not entirely been addressed by the three updates released so far. POP 3 email performance in particular remains dismal, and the old, 1.33 GHz G4 processor really works for a living trying to keep up with Leopard’s demands. I also miss not having Classic Mode support, although not nearly as much as I thought I would. However, I can’t really complain about stability since the 10.5.4 upgrade. I recently went 27 days of full-tilt production work without a restart, which is a personal best for me with any version of OS X (I managed a couple of times to last three months between reboots with OS 9, but that was admittedly in less-intensive, although still daily service).

Secondly, I have to say that 33 months after the first 15-inch MacBook Pro was unveiled at Macworld Expo 2006, No MacIntel notebook has yet really grabbed me, inspiring a “gotta have one” dynamic and undermining my content with the big PowerBook. The 17” MacBook Pro probably comes closest, but it’s far enough out of my price range as to not pose a serious temptation.

Indeed, there are several aspects of the MacIntel genre that I find off-putting; they run hotter than my G4 machine which results in a lot of cooling fan cycling - even worse than the PowerBook, which is plenty bad enough in this department. They have no internal modem, and I’m stuck with dialup Internet for what could be as long as a year or so yet. I dislike external modem dongles, which aside from being cumbersome, in the way, too easily misplaced, and costing an extra 50 bucks - also eat up one precious USB 2 port. As for aesthetics, the MacBook Pro machines are near dead-ringers for my PowerBook G4, and the MacBooks look an awful lot like my old iBook, so while they are all attractive, there’s not any new excitement there, although if the rumor mills aren’t just blowing a lot of hot air that factor may be about to shift.

Then there’s the reliability aspect. Apple’s MacIntel ‘Books haven’t been truly awful, but that have had issues, and then has been some evidence recently that things may actually be getting worse rather than better in that context, with posts from several MacInTouch readers chronicling serious reliability lapses with recent MacBook Pros.

One 17” MacBook Pro user says his first machine failed the short diagnostics about 70% of the time. He got it replaced under warranty, but the new one also failed the diagnostics out of the box, after which Apple acknowledged that this is a known problem with some MBPs.

Another MacInTouch reader reports problems with Macbook Pro mouse input. The button on the trackpad, tapping and connecting an external USB mouse do not perform a left click. (To be fair, I’ve has trackpad issues with the 17” PowerBook as well, especially when it gets very hot, although I use it most of the time with an external mouse and keyboard anyway, so this hasn’t been a super-bad aggravation for me).

There also seems to be a distressing frequency of optical drive failures with MacBook Pros. One MacInTouch reader says his failed after just four weeks, then the motherboard crapped out, and then while he was on a trip to Europe the hard drive died with complete data loss. He also reports that three of his friends experienced MacBook Pro hard drive failures around the same time. Apple techs blamed excessive heat, and after a wrangle, Apple replaced the MacBook Pro. Unhappily, four months on with the replacement machine the optical drive failed and the case has warped so badly from excessive heat that it will no longer close properly.

Less serious, but still unacceptably frustrating, another MPB user reports that BlueTooth stopped working, and found lots of similar complaints on the forum boards.

Not cool, literally and in some cases figuratively.

For more detail, visit here:
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macbookpro/index.html

These are of course anecdotal accounts, and I don’t doubt that most MacBook Pro owners are happy with the service they’re getting from their machines, but how much of a dice-roll is it with the MacBook Pro? It’s hard to tear myself loose from this (so far) reliable as the proverbial anvil PowerBook.

However, after 31 months I’m testing the limits of the 80 GB Toshiba hard drive in this machine, although it’s been otherwise flawlessly satisfactory, and is still nice and quiet. About a month ago I was down to about 4.5 GB of free space on my main hard drive boot partition after a fresh reboot, and precious little room for expansion left on the other two partitions, making the bother of repartitioning not worth the effort. After taking the time to do some judicious weeding, I was able to increase that to 9.25 GB, so the immediate heat is off, but there: is no longer a comfort zone of unused HD space. I could of course upgrade to a larger capacity drive, but that’s not a trivial project on the 17” PowerBook, and it’s really time for me to get serious about upgrading my system to an Intel ‘Book, and I’m beginning to run into roadblocks with certain software I need to review not supporting PowerPC, and O 10,6 Snow Leopard is coming, all but certainly without Power PC support.

So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a rumored major revision of both the MacBook Pro and the 13” MacBook will manifest something that will provide me with a more compelling reason to upgrade than I’ve encountered so far.

Probably the most sensible choice for me would be a current-generation MacBook, new or refurbished, the white middle model, which arguably offers the best price/performance/value profile of any Mac notebook ever, and a MacBook will definitely be on my shortlist, but I do have some misgivings about going back to a machine with just 800 vertical pixels, which makes rumor speculation about a redesigned MacBook with among other things a very thin aluminum case taking its styling cue from the MacBook Air and a 1440 x 900 13” display - the same resolution as the 15” MacBook Pro and my old 17” PowerBook - more than a bit exciting. The pixels would be awfully small, but I’ve lived happily with that before with my 12” iBook.

Then again, having another provisional policy about not buying revision A of any computer system, I could very well be inclined to hold off until revision B of any new MacBook models that materialize next month, or with not a little irony end up with one of the current Penryn-based machines if the new models aren’t up to what I’m hoping for.

We’ll just have to wait a little longer to see.

CM