Glenn Wolsey posted today about his experiences with migrating from a desktop machine to a MacBook Pro and how it's caused him to re-think his storage strategy. This got me thinking about my own computers and storage needs.
I'm actually very happy with my MacBook even if it isn't a 'pro'. Every time I use it I compare it to the many other brands of laptop I use at work and it confirms to me that whatever else you might think about Apple they make some of the best laptops I've used in the past couple of years. Not the cheapest. Not the most powerful money can buy, not the most features squeezed into one case, but in terms of an overall good balance of features and flexibility I think they're out there. Especially for IT pros who might need to run any number of operating systems, you can point to any other laptop you prefer out there and the Apples run all the same i386 OSes your alternatives can, plus OS X as well.
My MacBook has it's 3rd disk in it now. It's an original "Core Duo"
model and it came with the 80Gb that was standard back then and I've
upgraded 80Gb --> 160Gb --> 250Gb. I want to emphasise at this point that these upgrades have been caused by storage needs, not by reliability problems with any of the older hard drives, who are now living inside span 2.5" external storage cases and doing a stellar job of providing space for backups.
It amazes me changing hard disks is easier in the Macbook than it is in the Macbook Pro, but however you look at it, portable storage is only recently starting to chase after desktop storage. Actually even on desktops it isn't all peaches and cream. I have a Windows desktop and an Apple laptop and I'd love to get an Apple desktop to replace the Windows machine.
However, I can't really justify the cost of a Mac Pro (It's not that I don't have the money, it's just that I have more important things in life to spend it on) and the iMac is actually quite an unattractive proposition to a 'techhead switcher'.
If I purchased an iMac, I'd get a 20" monitor I didn't need or a 24" monitor that's too big for me to use comfortably built into the iMac in place of my perfectly fine 22" TFT I have now, I'd get tighter memory expansion ability than I currently am used to, which isn't a big deal for most users, after all, 4 Gigabytes ought to be enough for anybody for now, but when you mess about a lot with virtual machines like I do, you might quickly start wishing for a bit more memory headroom to share between those virtual machines...
As a PC gamer, I'd also want to play some of my old PC games via BootCamp and the current iMac graphics card options are all a little underpowered for some of the games I currently own to really strut their stuff. Actually, so are the Mac Pro options at the moment now I come to think about it, the ATI X1900 series is a great graphics card but it's not ATI's varsity any more and hasn't been for a little while. Isn't the Mac Pro line due an update soon?
Worst of all, with an iMac I'd lose the ability to stuff several medium-sized hard disks into the case that I currently rely on. If I upgrade my PC to a new one or win the lottery and buy a Mac Pro I could very easily drag all but one of my current desktop drives over to the new machine as part of switching, leave the OS drive in the old machine so I can sell it and bring my data across on the other internal drives with no mess or fuss.
A real shame, I want to switch fully but Apple aren't making it easy for me.
Now I realise that the iMac is meant to be a complete package and the fact that you can't / don't have to open it up and fiddle with the insides is actually a selling point of the product to its target audience. I'm not arguing with that, I absolutely agree with what the product is trying to do here, but there is a gap between that and the Mac Pro for a reasonable cost Apple machine, say a slightly more modest specced version of the Mac Pro that didn't come with a monitor but cost about the same as a 20" iMac.
How about it, Apple? I want to switch, I can't justify a Mac Pro and an iMac isn't what I need. With all the hard work Apple have put into their products lately and the disappointment many have felt with Vista I bet I'm not the only person thinking that. Is our money not good enough for you Mr Jobs?
As if they didn't already have a bit of a reputation in some parts, it seems the people behind MacHeist have really decided to sink as low as they can this year.
If you're involved with MacHeist in any way, I'd like to take a moment to thank you. I wondered if you were all as big a bunch of tossers as I suspected and you have now removed any doubt in my mind. So thanks.
To anyone else who owns a Mac: Please don't have anything to do with Mac Heist. Here's why...
It appears that this year's marketing gimmic for these guys was to approach several Mac web and blog sites and ask them to participate in a scheme whereby the MacHeist crew took over their websites to post whatever promotional material they liked.
Sadly, what they 'liked' was a fake "this website is hacked" page. Pretending to be a hacker named Malcor, these tools claimed to have hacked various mac community websites on the grounds that the community is too smug for its own good and needed to be taken down a peg (hmmm).
It seems that one blogger fairly quickly pegged what was going on and spotted that this was a cheap publicity stunt, but this was quickly denied by "Malcor" on "his" site. One of the "attacked" websites, MacApper, got far enough into the stunt that they posted a very strange and very angry post claiming that they were hacked, no really they were, honest.
Today, the story of the "hacks" finally breaks on the register, and the company behind the blogging tool powering Glenn Wolsey's CORRECTION (sorry about that) the AppleMatters site is forced to deny that their software is vulnerable.
I'm Angry with MacHeist and the people who went along with their crackpot idea for a number of reasons:
It's irresponsible:
We have enough computer security issues to deal with without having to chase our tails looking at made up ones.
It's inconsiderate of others:
The impact to wordpress and ExpressionEngine and their users of a vulnerability could be considerable in terms of time and expenses lost trying to patch a hole in software and deal with the damage to their reputation that being caught out this way can bring.
It is highly irresponsible of MacHeist and their co-conspirators to inflict this expense on those people and those companies for the sake of a childish joke and some free PR.
It diminishes the integrity of similar websites:
There has been considerable debate in the past about whether or not bloggers are journalists in some way. I've tended to stay out of this for a number of reasons, the chief of which being that I felt the whole question was astonishingly pretentious and that the idea that simply posting to a website on a regular basis gave you the rights and responsibilities of a journalist (such as they are) was patently absurd. However, not everyone agrees with me, or else the question would never have arisen.
If you want people to take your opinions seriously, you must behave in a responsible and serious manner. That isn't to say that you can't have a joke every now and again, but rather that you need to have limits and ethics that define your limits; what you will or won't say, what you will or won't do, what you will or will not become involved in. Remember the Microsoft "Laptops for Bloggers" scandal?
Microsoft did harm to themselves with this stunt because of how it was perceived by some bloggers, and those bloggers who accepted the laptops certainly harmed their own reputations. Ironically, if we're talking about bloggers aspiring to journalistic integrity, the "Laptops for Bloggers" stunt echoes precisely what goes on between large companies and 'old-media publisher' journalists all the time and Microsoft were simply guilty of believing the bloggers who claimed they were big boys and girls who could be treated like real journalists.
This is the problem with these sites who participated in the stunt. By taking part in such a cheap trick they have shown that they cannot be trusted to behave in a responsible manner. This might be forgivable for any personal blogs or websites that took part in this but is totally at odds with what you should expect from any other kind of site.
The sad thing is that not only have these people chosen to tarnish themselves, but also by acting in that way they've tarnished the rest of us too. I can't blame MacHeist for this in the same way I can't blame a dog for urinating on a lampost - it simply doesn't know any better. But the sites that took part have damaged their own credibility for sure, and haven't done the rest of us who operate similar sites any favours either. Thanks a lot folks.
UPDATE
Couple of other blogs with interesting opinions on this have started to surface. I'm sure we won't be the only ones with something to say. Inside stretch posts about how MacHeist seems to think its all a big joke and Robinadr's blog notes how sad it is that any of the people concerned couldn't seem to think about any consequences their behaviour might have. Too true.