RE: [linux-audio-user] To MacBook or not to MacBook, that's the question

From: Ivica Ico Bukvic <ico@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Sun Mar 18 2007 - 06:26:16 EET

> > allow purchases with an unconditional 30-day return policy; my
> suggestion is
> > use this as an opportunity to make an informed decision).
> >
>
> Maybe you can explain what you meant here a bit more?
>
> The don't listen to individual experiences, seems to contradict the do
> your own research?
>
> Plus IMO the individual experiences are going to be the majority of
> research one can do on a product after it has been out for a while, and
> while I believe they must all be taken with a grain of salt(Yours and
> Mine both included) you can find trends in things, for example...

See my last sentence in my paragraph. Namely, get an eval for 30 days,
road-test it and then make your own decision.

> > 1) I can't keep it on my lap since it is scalding hot as soon as the
> laptop
> > reaches its operating temperature. Heck, at times I cannot even keep my
> > wrist on the computer as the left side gets uncomfortably warm. FWIW, I
> also
> > run a fan applet at all times which keeps fan running at constant speeds
> of
> > 2000+ RPM. Let's just say this does not help much.
> > 2) There is a CPU whine which according to some reports can pollute
> > recording even if it is only recording internal "silence" (no mic
> internal
> > or external).
>
> Those are both easily verified by individuals reporting their
> experiences. But also as a side question for you personally, apple
> released a firmware upgrade that addressed I believe it was the heat,
> but may have been the whine, I can't remember which right now. Did you
> ever apply that?

All the latest bells'n'whistles here and no change. I upgraded to 10.4.9 the
other day which also elegantly broke Max/MSP, after which I had to do combo
reinstall of 10.4.9. 300MB later I think I have everything up and running
again. Since I have automatic updates enabled at all times, I get all the
latest goodies (including those which tend to hose my system ;-)...

> As a side question, does ANYONE on this list happen to know how well the
> Airports in the MB and MBP work with linux? Do they run off the reverse
> engineered Broadcom driver that runs the airports on the PB and iBook?

My MBP wireless ran ok in Linux while I test-drove Ubuntu on it (unlike OSX
it does not lose connectivity for no reason with non-Airport access
points--granted this has been mostly fixed by the latest 10.4.9 OSX update).
Come to think of it, I had built a nice version of the backlit keyboard
daemon which would dynamically adjust the backlight by reading light
conditions, and it would do so with a nice fading action, but now I wonder
whether I wiped that stuff off before I got to back it up... DOH!

But I digress... Regarding the wireless, I unfortunately can't remember for
sure if it was native or not. IIRC it was atheros chipset driver (FWIW, I am
not running Linux on it any more due to inherent EFI problems with having
more than 4 partitions on the drive which makes installing Linux next to OSX
and Bootcamp kludge-like triple-booting solution--I'd wipe the MBP clean but
I need OSX+Bootcamp for my teaching; hence I resorted to a dedicated Linux
notebook, rather than the triple-booting inferno).

Best wishes,

Ico
Received on Sun Mar 18 08:15:01 2007

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