The Unpacking Experience: PC vs. Mac

I wrote that I recently purchased two 13-inch (mid-2010) MacBook Pros as gifts for myself and my wife. Late last week I also had to unbox and configure a Dell Inspiron 1750 (reviewed by PC Mag here and on Amazon here).

There is a significant difference in pricing between the two laptops and it wouldn't be fair to bitch about things that are primarily pricing differences. On the surface, there are several similarities that would make little difference to the end user; four gig of RAM on both, they both have webcams built in, they both have ports for external video (although the Mac isn't standard and requires a $30 adapter purchased separately), disc burners, etc. Most people, the vast majority, won't care about the manufacturer of the RAM, the brand of burner, or for the most part (unless it's really really bad) the resolution of the built-in camera.

The differences that really slapped me in the face were due to the differences between operating systems. This is something that is very much in the control of the manufacturers, regardless of the pricing of the laptops and the included hardware for the most part. Every time I cursed because I hit another roadblock to overcome was another "papercut" that makes me hate the hardware and software just a little more.

The Mac started up with a nice little flying welcome and music score before asking me some questions for basic setup. It took a few minutes before I was at the Finder desktop. Then I proceeded to run system updates; despite the system being introduced, literally, a week ago, it had two somewhat large updates (a little north of a hundred meg of downloads as I recall). Two reboots, done. My system had iWork already installed and I then proceeded to download some software that I planned to use (OpenOffice, FireFox, etc.) and all was well. I literally had a system ready for my personal use in about an hour or so, not counting the long process of copying my personal data from my old drives to the new laptop.

Not everything was gummy bears and rainbows. For my personal use, I wanted the laptop to run with encryption. The Mac uses FileVault for built-in encryption protection of your files, which is fine (aside from scary stories of the disk image now used for your home directory becoming corrupt; if it gets corrupted, you lose your whole home directory, not just a few files).

I also wanted backup protection. For the longest time I was very much a manual-protection person; I ran a script that synced my hand-created directory structure for personal data to external drives. I kept my photos in a folder structure I made to my own specifications, I kept my documents neatly organized, and if something happened I would just rebuild the computer from a clean install and copy the "files" folder from my external drive to the new computer. Fairly simple.

The Mac encourages...strongly...using a feature called Time Machine. It is really snazzy in that it creates hourly snapshots of your data to an external drive and has a neat almost Dr. Who-like flying-through-space interface for browsing your data as it changed over time. Just plug in an external drive and the Mac pops up asking if you'd like to use it as a Time Machine volume and from there handles the backup details in the background.

The problem? Use FileVault, and it will only back up your data at logoff for FileVaulted users. And you can't restore individual files from the Time Machine interface if you use FileVault, only the whole home directory. Ouch...

The process of enabling FileVault and Time Machine together on the Mac wasn't one hundred percent smooth either; the first time I enabled Time Machine, it said I was backing up about 150 gig of data (everything I read said this wasn't possible, as about 140 gig of it was my home directory and that wouldn't work until I logged off). Hmm...I think I'll log off to help it.

When you log off of a FileVaulted system the Mac will go through a process of recovering space on the disk; it's shrinking the disk image used in the background for storing your home directory data. Usually it doesn't take too long (unless you created and deleted a huge file during your session, I suppose.) Here, it did. It was going on ten or fifteen minutes before I made the decision to kill the machine from the power switch.

Reboot, came up, logged in without error (disk check revealed no problems). I did a reformat of the drive I was using for backup so I could start from scratch. Then I let Time Machine do its thing, this time staying logged in while it ran the first time. It told me it was backing up around 150 gig. Chugged along, and all of a sudden said it was done. Apparently it backed up the system and quit once it found the FileVault home directory image.

Logged out, and this time it recovered disk space in just a few seconds and the prompt changed to "backing up..." with a progress bar. Hours later (hey, it's USB...) it completed without issue. Definite user friendliness issues with how that was implemented, despite the somewhat scary warning that comes up when you turn on Time Machine with FileVault enabled.

Thinking back over the past week or two that's the only thing that really stood out as an operating system issue in migrating a brand new out-of-box system to my primary workhorse so far.

The work laptop running Windows 7 was in my experience far more frustrating.

Turned it on and the system asked me a few standard questions for configuration. Nod nod, yeah yeah, click click.

Next I was going to install our licensed copy of Microsoft Office. Usually it's pretty standard, but I had the slight irritation at having to remove the "trial copy" that was on the Windows 7 system first. I hate it when makers license "trials" of crap. It's a trap for users; they think they own the software or it came with the system, only to have it pop up errors a month down the road asking them to purchase it if they want to keep using it.

Then McAfee popped up with notices for updates and advertising. Another big peeve of mine related to what I just noted, because the user thinks they have antivirus protection when really it's a limited trial that will bug them to purchase further protection down the road. Users really don't think about these things and remain largely ignorant of the topic, right up until it stops protecting them. Errors pop up but the user just typically clicks through them until something goes really wrong, takes it to their resident geek, and he finds that the computer hasn't had updated virus definitions in six months and the user assumed it worked because they had McAfee (or another vendor's software) installed.

Uninstall uninstall uninstall.

Next I tried to put it on the domain. Guess what? Whoever purchased the laptop bought it with Windows 7 Home. Windows 7 Home won't connect to a domain. Another peeve of mine; artificially crippled software. I know it's a licensing issue and Microsoft has every right to do this with their software. It explained that this version of Windows is unable to join a domain. It's still a pain in the arse that I threw into my curse-pile after having to uninstall trialware crap.

I next had to uninstall a Dell wireless utility. On our network for reasons never fully explained the Dell utility for wireless interferes with the ability to connect to our Cisco wireless access points. Delete the utility, let Windows manage the connection, generally there's no problem after that (although now that it can't connect to the domain, I suppose the point is somewhat moot). I deleted the utility as we've done with countless Windows XP systems. Suddenly the system conveniently forgot it had a wireless card, period.

A big sigh and a dig through the box yielded a Dell Resource Disc with the drivers (ALREADY INSTALLED, it proclaimed). I inserted the disk and it prompted me to run a setup program first. Huh?

Okay...run install. Then it prompted me to remove the disc and reinsert it. Okay.

Then it popped up an error that I had the wrong volume in the drive.

Told it to continue twice and it suddenly decided it was okay. It ran a program that detected my hardware. Okay, I think, this is a turn for the better because now I don't need to guess the hardware!

It popped up with the Inspiron 1750 page and gave me an option of installing one of four or so drivers for the wireless card. Um...aren't you supposed to have detected it?!

I ran the first one. It told me that hardware wasn't installed.

Started running the installer to the second one. Suddenly Windows detected the wireless card, installed driver support (while the second installer hadn't run yet, it was just finished extracting files). So Windows now had the driver rediscovered and working, apparently, as it now had it in the device manager again.

That resource CD was a waste of time, and who knows what the installer littered on the drive?

The Mac doesn't have this issue because Apple hardware is tightly integrated with the operating system. If you buy OS X as an upgrade, it will have drivers to update all the hardware that it is known to support built right into the operating system.

What I don't understand is why Dell goes through the trouble of creating a separate utility that rides on top of or supersedes the Windows wireless utility. If it works fine for the purpose I'd far prefer having the built-in system over a third party utility. When I sit at the Mac, I know what to expect when I want to change settings, whether it's my system or a friend's system. On Windows, there's the Windows utility and there's a vendor utility or there's a manufacturer's utility (do I use the Dell configuration program? Windows? Intel?), and sometimes they work or they goof each other up.

Confusing, and definitely not user-friendly.

Not to mention that adding additional layers of software for redundant functions adds complexity, and with complexity comes more possibility for failure or bugs.

In the end I'd prefer that manufacturers stop adding trialware crap to entrap clueless users and stop adding software with redundant functionality. Unless you can genuinely add functionality to the system, I don't need a utility to join wireless networks when Windows has that function already built into Windows, and it's a real boon for the neighborhood geek when he doesn't need to know the ins and outs of each manufacturers crap utility just to join a laptop to a home router. Worse, I don't need to have two or more utilities that fight each other for access to the hardware and in the process can disable settings that were put into one program and now won't work when switching to the other program they ran intuitively (what do you mean I wasn't supposed to run the Windows network settings to join the network? Windows told me too, dammit!)

Overall these little papercuts in the process of configuring the system started having even minor things like the wallpaper, a series of upside-down boomboxes for reasons I haven't yet figured out, really grate on my nerves after the fourth reboot for updates and configuration settings.

I'm sure there are apologists that will point out that the circumstances were different between unboxing my system and unboxing the Dell. I'm aware of that. And I'm sure that there are good points that I'm overlooking. The point is that there was a lot more friction in just getting this Dell system configured for even basic use than I encountered on the Mac, and it was almost always due to problems and peeves that were under control of the manufacturer, right down to the gawdy and irritating upside down boombox wallpaper (c'mon...what the hell is that?? Look at the links at the beginning and see if you can see in the screenshot of the product for the reviews the wallpaper I'm referring to.)

There are people who will be anti-Apple no matter what. There is an "Apple tax" for their hardware; and it purchases less irritation for me. The hardware integration with the operating system simplifies things and standardizes the interface and removes the need for two different ways to turn on my wireless networking, and I don't have to go through and delete trialware from the computer to clean it up. It's not perfect by any means (why can't they use a networked Finder, like X? Or workspaces that allows me to rotate a cube or slide the screen for multiple desktops like I can with Ubuntu's desktop? Yes, I know it has Workspaces, but I always found the Ubuntu enhanced GUI features a little easier, if not glitchy at times, to work with, but maybe that's just habit speaking right now.)

What it boils down to is that I am an Apple fan because despite the money I have to spend on their hardware they generally treat the customers right. They remove friction, for the most part, in using the system. Their walled garden is expensive to get entrance into and has a few bees hovering around. It simply seems that the more I use Windows 7, OS X, and Ubuntu, the more I appreciate the differences and enhancements each offers.

To tell the truth though I'm still looking for the enhancements Windows 7 has over Ubuntu and OS X...anyone? Honestly?