The Setup

My wife and I both use Macs; she's a scientist (defended her PhD dissertation on cancer biology last month), and she uses her computer for presentations, writing, and analysis. She's had a MacBook Pro for almost two years now (her TiBook died the week the MBP came out), but now that she's done with her dissertation, she's ready for a smaller machine.

We decided to get her a new MacBook and send her MBP to a friend. We buy the machine with no trouble (I decided to get my 4GB of RAM from Crucial for $119 instead of paying Apple $150 to upgrade the 1GB to 2GB or $850(!!) for 4GB) and take it home. Now, my wife has defended her dissertation, but she needs to make a few changes before it goes to the publisher, she still has a paper to polish up in order to graduate, and I'm about to leave town for three weeks. Clearly, this is not the time to upgrade her operating system, so we decide to just move her hard drive to the new machine and keep her on Tiger.

The New MacBook

I crack open her MBP (not trivial, but nothing compared to an HP server, ugh), extract the drive, and drop it into the new MacBook, then I put the MacBook's drive into the MBP. I set up the MBP with no trouble, adding all the goodies like Growl, QuickSilver, Colloquy, iTerm_, and what-not.

The Macbook is having real trouble, though. First, it refuses to admit that it has a trackpad -- the darn thing works, but you can't use any multitouch like two-finger scrolling. We update to 10.4.11, which seems to fix that, but the brightness buttons still don't work and not only will it not go to sleep, if you try it will kill its network and not return it until you reboot. Note that the function keys are laid out differently on this MacBook, but that's the only difference that I can tell between it and my black MacBook (other than, of course, the color, and obvious wear and tear).

I spend some time futzing with it and can't figure it out. I check to see when we can next make a Genius bar appointment to get some personal help, and no slot is available until slightly before the heat death of the universe, so I decide to call their tech support. Yay. (Of course, I spent plenty of time looking on line first, to no avail.)

Apple Support

I tell the guy what I did, and he immediately tells me 1) I've voided the warranty on the MBP by swapping the hard drive and 2) he can't help me with the MacBook because they don't support third party drives in their computers. I tell him to ignore the MBP, because I'm not asking for help on that, that he's wrong about Apple not supporting third-party drives, and that anyway this is the Apple-branded drive that came with the MBP. He also says that this MacBook can't run Tiger at all (even though everything's working except the brightness buttons and sleep). He continues with this diatribe, so I ask to speak to a manager. He tells me it'll be half an hour, I don't care.

I wait my half an hour and get a relatively reasonable person. He maintains that I've voided the MBP warranty and I ask him if I really couldn't get support if I called about an issue clearly unrelated to the hard drive or hardware. He relents and says, fine, I'd get help. Then we continue to the MacBook. I ask him if the hard drive is user-serviceable and he says of course, so I explain he needs to educate the flunkie I had first talked to.

Then we start talking about running Tiger on this thing. Remember here that Leopard has only been out since October. It turns out, if you buy a computer from Apple right now, it is only supported with Leopard, and it actually doesn't work. At least, not well. As far as I can tell, this is just a small driver problem, but Apple clearly doesn't care.

So, either we keep the MBP and send off the macbook, or one of us is running Leopard before we're ready to upgrade. This just seems insane to me -- I have to choose between finding old hardware or upgrading my operating system (the guy on the phone even said Apple's solution to this problem for enterprise customers is to help them find old hardware, rather than just, you know, supporting the older -- by three months! -- operating system). This is pretty damn ridiculous, and my only other choice is to eat the restocking fee by bringing the stupid thing back, but the guy I'm sending the MBP needs something, and neither of us wants the bigger machine.

The Upgrade

Since I'm a bit more expendable than Cindy, I decide I'll give her my black MacBook, take the white one, and upgrade to Leopard. I swap drives, stick the install CD in, and lo and behold, it tells me I have to reformat my hard drive to upgrade (I need to be using a GUID partition scheme). I do some looking online, and it turns out that Intel machines require a GUID partition scheme, and PowerPC machines require a different, Apple scheme. See, the weird thing is, this drive is the one from my black MacBook, which, clearly, is an intel box, and it worked dandily there. Yet somehow it won't work in this new machine.

Ok, crap, now I have to wipe, repartition, reload, and then do my archive and install. Fortunately, the drive in the MBP is large enough to store a disk image of everything on my drive (I have a 160GB drive, but not much more than half full, and the MBP has a 120GB drive). Making the disk image and repartitioning goes fine (it turns out that the drive did have an Apple partition table, which they apparently decided not to support on intel with Leopard), but when I try to restore from the disk image to the other drive (with the MacBook booted up as a Fireware disk in target mode, it's going slowly. I mean, like, it's going to take 9 hours, which is ridiculous.

Eventually I decide to skip the whole thing, install a fresh OS on the new machine (with the new partition scheme), and manually move all of my stuff over. This goes smoothly enough -- install everything (including manually doing the developer tools, since I couldn't find it as an option), and manually copy my home directory and music over (I keep my music in /Users/Shared/iTunes Music, so my wife can use it if she uses my computer, and also because it's more than 10X as big as the rest of my home directory, so this makes backing them up separately much easier).

So, I finally have a functional computer with most of my settings retained (stupid iTerm seems to have lost all of the colors I set up), and I have to install all of the other apps I need (mostly the ones above, plus fink, which I'm trying again). All told, I probably spent about 5 hours on the conversion, but it was five painful hours. This is why I'm not a sysadmin any more, and why I'm trying to get rid of computers rather than add new ones.

Leopard Commentary

Overall, Leopard seems to look much better, but it doesn't really seem to behave much differently. Probably the biggest functional change for me so far is the switch from VirtueDesktops_ to Spaces. Virtue has always been a bit hackish, and it especially deals poorly with floating not-quite-windows like palettes and errors. So far, it doesn't look like Spaces is going to be any better for that -- when Firefox pops up a window, Spaces has actually popped the window up in a different space, switching me over to type things in, then switching back when I close the window.

My biggest complaint about Spaces is that it doesn't allow me to assign arbitrary shortcuts to space changes. I have been using Command, Control, and the home row, which is much more natural to my vi-friendly fingers (e.g., Cmd-^-H moves left). This is already a pain, and it's probably just going to get worse.

Also, MailActOn is still only in Beta (although it only worked about 70% of the time, my fingers are still used to trying to use it), and my signature generation plugin just up and stopped working (strangely, after generating a single signature and leaving it in place). These things are both annoying, but not the end of the world.

Conclusion

I think most people are wondering at this point why the heck I still use Macs if I have this kind of trouble (and I often have trouble). I first must say that I'm a software hater; there is no software that I will not hate on. If you think I'm complaining about this, go read some of my Linux diatribes, or just ask me about playing MP3s on Linux some day. I certainly hate all of the current operating systems. It's painfully embarrassing that our best, most modern operating systems are just skins something 30 years old, and operating system choice is pretty much a choice of what kind of torture you'd like to go through. All I see is what it could do and doesn't, which just makes me constantly angry.

The main reason I stick with Macs, though, is that once or twice a year I spend one day fuming, frothing, pissed at Apple, and yelling at employees (I cussed out the manager of the local Apple store 18 months ago because I gave them a laptop with 2GB of ram, they gave me one back with 512MB, and they pretty much told me to bugger off -- I got the RAM back eventually, thanks to the intervention of my kind wife).

The thing is, I spend the other 364 days a year not really noticing my stupid computer, which is what I want.

This is compared to Linux, where I still can't find a tolerable mp3 player, I notice the computer nearly every single day, I can't easily sync my contacts to my stupid phone, there's no equivalent to QuickSilver or Growl (both of which are indespensible to me), and so much more. I spent one day a year pissed at the author of each of the major apps I used on Linux, but that's like 500 apps, which meant that I was pissed every day, or sometimes just spent the whole day pissed.

It's true that Apple's hardware is also not exactly awesome -- it could be lighter, more powerful, and they could be willing to provide some sort of schedule of hardware upgrades -- but it takes literally zero configuration to make the damn thing sleep. This isn't the "zero" of the linux world, where "zero" is actually 4 hours and required a kernel rebuild, but the literal zero where I install the stupid operating system, close the lid, and it sleeps.

I understand Linux is moving quickly -- KDE 4.0 is supposed to be teh awesome, Ubuntu is apparently really nice now, and just last year freedesktop.org finally provided dynamic monitor handling (a mere 15 years or so after Apple had it). Who knows, I might even try it again one of these days. But I'm not exactly optimistic..