OS X Thoughts

I purchased a Macbook Pro a few days ago as my old laptop was terribly slow.  Don’t get me wrong, old laptops have their uses but over the years I’ve been taking more photos and video and when I travel I need a laptop that can be used for the purposes of managing, storing, and editing content.  My old laptop used to take 2 hours just to copy 4GB of content whereas my new laptop takes around 5 minutes.

As far as I’m concerned there’s very little difference between operating systems.  Linus Torvalds has mentioned something similar in the past in that end users care very little about the OS; users tend to care about the UI and apps.  The applications is one of the reasons I selected the Macbook Pro.  There are a wide diversity of photo and video editing applications but the most important are:  Lightroom, Photoshop, and Final Cut.  The three aforementioned applications provide me with a video editing base.

The Macbook Pro also has a fast processor which is required when editing photos and rendering video.  The Intel Core 2 Duo in this machine isn’t the fastest but it gets the job done and results will be posted shortly to demonstrate that fact.  That the processor is an Intel also holds special meaning as the capabilities of this laptop are greatly enhanced in one particular area:  it can run Windows.

Yes, while most OSX users hate Windows I don’t particularly care about the OS aside form…the applications.  Windows development presently takes up a significant portion of my day to day programming life.  The game that I’m working on requires XNA which presently won’t run under Crossover but will run under Windows proper and that’s where Bootcamp becomes useful.  Bootcamp is a utility which allows an Intel based Mac to run multiple operating systems.  The utility is generally straightforward and doesn’t require much technical knowledge to use (but that knowledge is useful).

Having both OSX and XP on the Macbook goes a long way towards satisfying my development needs but there’s one little last item that needs to be resolved:  Linux development.  I know what the Mac-heads among you are saying:  “OSX runs BSD you can do all your development on that”.  While that is true the situation is more complex (just slightly).  While I can run Apache (comes with OS 10.5), install PHP, install MySQL, and a whole bunch of other applications it isn’t the right way to do things.  I need to make my development platform closely mirror the production platform.  My production platform is Debian so installing all the above applications on OSX isn’t the best route to go.  Perhaps running Bootcamp into Debian is the best route.  That’s sounds yucky and complex as now whenever I need to do any web dev I’ll need to boot into another OS.

Presently I share some folders on my Debian dev machines to my Windows machine and edit all the scripts on Windows and do all the testing through web browsers on Windows.  It’s the best route as I don’t need to switch operating systems and I can continue to use all my chat applications and email as well as switch to playing TF2 (video game) whenever I’d like.  So dual booting (triple booting) in this case is a major break from my current dev style.  Fortunately Parallels provides the solution.  Parallels is an application that runs a VM of an OS within it.  In this case I’m running Debian which has all the applications I need running internally and sharing (via Samba) the folder where I need to make changes.  It’s a win win situation as I can do all my development without booting into another OS.  Windows development still needs to be booted into another OS but I’m more focused on a single task there and it’s worth the “pain” of switching operating systems.

From a development point of view the Macbook Pro meets the requirements I have for comfortable software development.  What else does it have though?

Well, it’s fast, it’s slick, and…I think that’s about it.  It is well designed (the Apple way) and from that end it’s fairly impressive.  The laptop is light, simple to use, looks good, and for the most part well designed.  The most bothersome part is that the screen doesn’t recline past ~ 110 degrees.

I maintain my position that Apple products are reasonable.