My newest favoritest bestest Apple product is now Time Machine. When I saw Steve Jobs introduce it at WWDC I thought it looked cool, but when I upgraded to Leopard, I was underwhelmed. It took up most of my LaCie Rugged drive, kept spinning away at odd times (it just bothers me when my computer starts churning away on something I didn’t tell it to do), bringing up occasional warning messages about being unable to complete the backup or having to remove old backups to make space. And when I tried to find an old version of a file via Time Machine, I just couldn’t figure out how to do it.
But then my Mac crashed – it’s the original MacBook Pro from 1996, not even listed on the Apple support page anymore (at least in the memory upgrade instructions), and has been wheezing for a while (the fan has been sputtering away like an old car), and then came the screen corruption. Speckled screen, spinning cursor, and that’s all folks.
The silver lining in computer crashes is that you get to buy something shiny and new. I tried to go cheap (you know, given the life expectancy) and got the new 13″ MacBook Pro and prepared myself for the usual ritual of reinstalling everything, requesting/begging for new software licenses, and setting up my email all over again. But the second setup screen upon powerup asked me if I wanted to migrate from my old Mac via Time Machine. Hopefully, I plugged in the drive (good thing I had a Firewire 800 cable around), and some time later I’m staring at my old setup. All the apps (except XCode and Parallels), all the software licenses, even Flash (but not Unity – kudos to Unity support for getting me a new license in a couple of hours), my iPhone keychain certificates (although oddly now it seems they expired back in April) and I see in the Terminal that my shell history was preserved!
The one big thing Time Machine could offer is remote backup. This restore experience was amazing, but if my setup was stolen or the ceiling fell on it, a locally connected backup drive doesn’t help.
Now for the worst product from Apple. That darned mouse. Really, it started with that one-click mouse concept in the original Macintosh which really mean one-click or double-click or shift-click or command-click…just to avoid having more than one button on the mouse. Now the physical incarnation of that policy is the Mighty Mouse, which I would call the Mediocre Mouse. It’s heavy, supposedly you can click on different areas of the all-encompassing top button to invoke different buttons, but it’s unreliable – I end up using control-click et. al. so I really just have a one-button mouse, which I guess was the idea. Moreover, as I have the wireless version, it goes through batteries like crazy (I keep getting battery-low warnings on my screen which I often mistake for warnings about my laptop battery), the bottom cover of the mouse often falls off while I’m moving the mouse, and from a software development point of few, the Mighty Mouse has glitchy behavior which I have to special-case accomodate in my code – the mouse movement apparently catches in way that gives huge movement values. For example, in my bowling game, while I’m “pushing” the bowling ball with the mouse, the mighty mouse seems to catch and then give a huge value which propels the ball like a rocket through walls and other normally impenetrable barriers. And, again since the whole mouse is a button, it’s easy to click while pushing so I often halt the game accidently because I clicked outside the game while pushing the mouse.
I’m going back to my old rule – stick with Logitech mice.