Ping's 12" mac laptop

[yesthattom]

On Saturday Ping and I went to the Apple store to purchase her 12" mac "AlBook". The salesguy acted like he couldn't care. It was really disappointing, considering that I was expecting more of a Saturn approach to computer sales than anything else.

When we got to her place I installed a ethernet card in her PC, connected them together, and soon I was transfering all her old files to her new Mac.

The amazing thing is that I don't know much about Windows networking, and zero about Apple networking. It just worked.

It just worked.

Sure, I popped into a UNIX shell and did the copy that way, but everything else was purely using Mac-style software.

It was a dreamy experience. Using the most awsome user interface to do things with networks that would take me hours to do, and yet being able to "pop into Unix" for things that I wanted to do. Even obscure Unix commands like "rsync" are included. I hardly expected that!

I can't wait until I get a mac myself.

--tal

P.S. rsync doesn't really have a way to skip files that it can't access, or that have errors, so I wasn't sure it was properly skipping her swap file and other things that Windows file sharing wouldn't let it access. So I re-copied things with this terribly inefficient command: (this is from memory, so it may be off)


find . -type f -exec rsync -avR '{}' '/the/new/place/{}' ';'


Sure, it only copied one file at a time, but it created the subdirectories as needed and didn't recopy things when I re-ran it.

Comments

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

...see, nobody every believes Mac users when they say this. "Pshaw," they retort, "How could using a computer be simple and just kinda work, without having to mess around with it for fifteen minutes or an hour to get simple things like copying files over the network to work? I mean, network settings are complicated, and then you need to share the drive, and make sure you're using the right protocols on both systems and..."

Then they see this Mac thing in action, and are floored. I'm sure you knew this was going to happen anyway, but, uh, wasn't it a nice surprise?

I'm totally happy with MacOS X. I liked MacOS 8 (and had a lot of problems with MacOS 9, so I put 8 back on my audio workstation), but always kinda wanted to be able to do unix shell things. OS X is the best of both worlds...

Have you decided what you're going to do for your own laptop yet?

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Fun thing to do with OSX Macs is to swap back and forth between networks rapidly. Turn off Airport and hook it to ethernet and it just goes "huh, I gotta talk out that port now. Well... sure!" and starts spitting bits out the ethernet port. Then turn Airport back on, and if you've set it as the preferred network, it'll start using that instead.

I've got a 12" iBook at the moment, and will be replacing it with a 12" PowerBook shortly, but the iBook has tickled me pink ever since I got it. I like it more than the big PowerMac I got this year.

I know a good number of die-hard unix/linux users who are getting Mac laptops. And they all are very happy and very impressed with them.