Columbia Class of 2006 Blog: Switch to Apple? (Another geeky laptop-purchase post)

July 09, 2003

Switch to Apple? (Another geeky laptop-purchase post)

This is a solicitation for advice from the other geeks on this blog. After years of working in Windows (W2k for the last several years) and Unix variants -- building machines from components, installing dual-boot OSes, the whole nine yards -- I'm seriously thinking about trying out a Mac laptop for law school. There are several reasons I've avoided Macs until now, but four of these have recently disappeared:

Price: Apple laptops are super-cheap this summer, only a bit more expensive than PC laptops.
Stability: I hear great things about OS X and its FreeBSD back-end.
Configurability: You can't tweak laptops much anyway, and OS X allows a lot more poking around and scripting than the old Mac OS, and maybe even more than Windows. Windows XP, which I find troublesome and unconfigurable, is pretty much the only option for laptops these days anyway: I don't want to pay Dell an extra $100 for Windows 2000, which they'll only install on a few models anyway, and I don't want to wipe out Dell's software and install 2000 myself.
Lack of available software: I'm planning on using this laptop for basic stuff for law school -- email, web browsing, word processing -- so it would probably be for the best if I weren't tempted to install time-wasting toys on it anyway. Also, OS X has a PC emulator package you can buy if you really need to use some piece of PC software.

My reasons for buying a Mac would be:

Supporting the company: I think it's important to have a competitive personal computing OS market, and Apple is one of Microsoft's few competitors. I also dislike the corporate culture of Microsoft and its attitude toward its customers. If Macs are truly a reasonable option even for gearheads like me, I'd like to be an evangelist for them and quell other developers' fears about "switching".
Curiosity: I'll probably be buying machines and making recommendations to others for the next several years, and I'd like to know what the options are and have well-formed opinions about them. And I'm just personally curious about the interface and unix shell features in OS X.
Versatility: I like the idea of having access to Unix command-line tools on my laptop without installing a dual-boot system and without having to reboot. With the PC emulator, a Mac can theoretically provide three OS options: Mac, PC, and Unix.

Opinions? I've heard pretty good things about OS X: mostly from designer types, but even from a few real geeks. I'm at the point whereI'm willing to go on down to the Apple store in SoHo and get the sales staff to convince me. My real reservations spring from Columbia's requirements: they tell us that most of their resources (networking, wireless) can work on Macs with a little tweaking, but they also say something about our exams being administered through some PC-only system. I don't want Columbia's requirements to be a three-year headache as a Mac user. Does anyone have more specific info? Advice? Email addresses for Columbia IT support or current students with Macs?

Posted by at July 9, 2003 10:43 AM

Comments

I think Columbia uses software form a company called examsoft, if you go to their website it becomes clear that it only works on a PC. Someone posted a while back on the Columbia board that they might change software though. I do not really buy into the corporate welfare, I would only buy a Mac if it was necessary for my purposes, not to just screw Microsoft. I have never had any problem with Windows XP and find it pretty stable generally. I upgraded my Dell to Win XP pro from Home and had to wipe my HDD to do it, and the software and drivers were pretty easily reinstalled from the CD's that accompanied my computer. I do not dual boot or anything so that is up to you.

Posted by: Avi Frisch at July 9, 2003 12:16 PM

Windows XP can be made to look and work just like W2K, and as a Sysadmin, I can't tell you how much I hate Macintosh. Besides which, a lot of your more popular websites won't work well, since Mac's IE and Netscape versions don't implement CSS consistently.

I wouldn't do it: frankly, using a non-standard and non-supported OS in law school just adds one to your list of pains in the neck.

Posted by: Anthony Rickey at July 9, 2003 01:27 PM

My concerns about XP aren't its interface: they're mostly centered around issues of privacy and use of open standards. XP goes overboard on its insistence of using a MS solution for everything from media formats to firewalls. As for IE issues, I don't plan on using IE: the latest Mozilla releases work great and allow a lot more flexibility.

I'm more concerned with network problems, which Apple hasn't seemed to have worked out yet, and miscellaneous software incompatibilities. Do you know of any CLS-specific problems with Macs?

Posted by: Matt Norwood at July 9, 2003 03:44 PM

It seems like a bad time to start dealing with Macs just because Windows sets up Windows Media Player to play your MP3 files, especially when you can just switch that pretty easily. The firewall is shut off by default, and it never even insinuates that there is a real benefit to using it, and Mozilla might be an improvement over Netscape, but it still does not display all pages as well as IE6. Aside from that Mozialla is as much the product of a monopolizing company as IE, just that AOL Time Warner focuses its efforts in general away from software.

Posted by: Avi Frisch at July 9, 2003 04:37 PM

I was tempted by a Mac, but I really didn't like the notebooks when I saw them, so I went with the IBM T40. Like you, I'd like to have a UNIX style command line to play with, but I installed Apache/PHP/MySQL on my WinXP Pro system, and that's really enough for me.

There's a fairly extensive thread on the Columbia board about Mac-compatibility, and the consensus seemed to be that it was not a problem, except for the (major) issue of Examsoft, which apparently can't run on VirtualPC. If this isn't phased out, I wouldn't buy a Mac, but if it is, I don't see many reasons not to. I think there was also an email address of a Mac user at CLS, to whom you could address specific questions. OSX is cool...

Posted by: Alison M. at July 9, 2003 09:35 PM

Again, on Mozilla, I'd point out that there's a lot of sites out there that just plain break on Mozilla, especially on Mozilla for a Mac. If it's a Flash site, it's 100% guaranteed to work: but get ready for a lot of sites with Javascript navigation not to function.

Posted by: Anthony Rickey at July 10, 2003 12:21 AM

I actually think the Mac IE browsers are far superior to the PC versions. Of course, they won't be supported much longer, but they rarely have CSS or Javascript problems. Many, if not most, web designers work on Macs, so they generally ensure the sites work.

I'm also running Mozilla Firebird on WinXP, and I haven't come across any sites that don't work. On Win98 I've had some minor problems, but not on more recent operating systems. IMHO, browser compatibility won't be a major issue if you get a Mac.

Posted by: Alison M. at July 10, 2003 05:01 AM

This is from a CLS 2L. There are two main problems with a Mac at CLS. One is that you cannot use the testing software on a mac, or even any non-english version of Windows. This means that you essentially have to borrow a computer, since it's not a good idea to take the tests by hand. I know some people who do it, but it is unfair to those who write since most of us can type much, much faster than we can write. The other problem deals with hooking up to Columbia's network. You can get online, but you can't print off of the Law2 servers from your laptop, which is a real pain. You have to go to the computer labs to print, and during the high pressure times of moot court/legal writing, it could be a little bit of a wait.
For those of you who are into the anticorporate Microsoft must die! frame of mind, you might find any of the classes taught by or papers written by Eben Moglen to be of interest. He is a serious voice for the free software people. One of the most brilliant people I have ever met, but he is also, with out a doubt, the most pompous pontificating loudmouth i have ever met as well.

Posted by: Jacob Bigney at July 15, 2003 03:44 AM

I'm with Jacob: Corumbia doesn't allow Macs, though there are rumblings that's changing, for exams.

I'm also with Jacob on Eben: anyone who threatens my life at a cocktail party hosted by the dean has to be taken with grains of salt. And by grain, I mean grain silo.

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except for some games you can upgrade mac as well (apple does not support this) Xp cannot do this i have seen my sisters 3.0 ghz desktop lag to the point where nothing seems to be working.
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