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Post by Big Blue on Jul 31, 2017 10:57:28 GMT
Just before I went on holiday my 2009 MacBook Air fried its motherboard, so apart from having to spend £15 on some SATA cables to recover stuff from my hard drive I needed a new laptop.
The MacBook Air is effectively a forgotten product as the current MacBook is lighter, faster, has a better chipset and a better screen so I got a 12" MacBook. I only do mundane stuff on it, aside from RAW photo editing so it behaves the same as the last one but the Retina screen: OMG. Fucking gorgeous.
I should (if eBay is anything to go by) get about £150 for my old Air sans hard drive so that takes some of the pain away. Here's to the next 8 years of reliable service.
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Post by racingteatray on Jul 31, 2017 12:58:21 GMT
We bought a 13" MacBook Pro in Jan 2015 as a replacement for the trusty 2006-vintage Sony Vaio that you met. We confess that still two years on, we both loathe using the Mac. I use it to surf the net and access my gmail account (banned on my work laptop) and that's it - trying to do anything else just drives me demented. My wife, who was the one who insisted we get a MacBook, barely goes near it and on the rare occasion she does, the house is usually promptly filled with a rich stream of Italian invective.
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Post by PG on Jul 31, 2017 13:18:17 GMT
We bought a 13" MacBook Pro in Jan 2015 as a replacement for the trusty 2006-vintage Sony Vaio that you met. We confess that still two years on, we both loathe using the Mac. I use it to surf the net and access my gmail account (banned on my work laptop) and that's it - trying to do anything else just drives me demented. My wife, who was the one who insisted we get a MacBook, barely goes near it and on the rare occasion she does, the house is usually promptly filled with a rich stream of Italian invective. What is it that particularly annoys you about it? Mrs PG is the same about her iMac. Yes it looks great, the 27 inch screen is great. But she's never "bonded " with it. |
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Post by grampa on Jul 31, 2017 13:29:12 GMT
I think it largely depends on what you first started using - a Mac was the first computer with a GUI I ever used back in 1991 (£15,000 for the computer, £2,500 for a decent monitor!), and every time I've used a PC over the past 25 years, it just drives me nuts - how anyone can use one for more than 10 minutes without throwing it out of the window is beyond me.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Jul 31, 2017 14:24:05 GMT
I think it does come down to what you're used to. I was shopping for a new tablet and as I prefer Samsung and Android I gravitated towards their offering. Mrs. Sacamano has one and it has a lovely screen and I really like using it. Then I remembered the frequent phone calls from my mum about her iPad (I really have no idea why she bought it) as she uses me as some sort of IT helpdesk and how frustrated I get when trying to talk her through a product I really don't know much about. So I bit the bullet and bought an iPad and after a few days of frustration and muttered oaths I started to get the hang of it. It doesn't feel quite so intuitive to me but I'm getting there.
Of course now my mum has discovered Facetime... I got back late from Aberdeen last week so was having a lazy Friday morning she pops up on Facetime. Full of the Anglo-Saxon work ethic but never actually having worked since 1964 she wanted to know why I wasn't at work and was I ill? "I'm just leaving the house" was my reply to which she replied "So why have you still got your Spiderman pyjamas on then?"
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Post by Tim on Jul 31, 2017 15:21:14 GMT
Mrs Tim bought a Samsung tablet last year and hates it.
Sometimes I fear for its survival.
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Post by Big Blue on Jul 31, 2017 15:40:58 GMT
Ha ha, the aged parent IT Helpdesk syndrome. I get it all the time (I have TeamViewer on her laptop which helps).
I agree that some things on a Mac are not as easy as MS products, so I have Office 365 which keeps my familiarity with the products my employers use. Excel and Word are so prevalent that any other word or numbers package is so alien that it's not worth the bother of changing.
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Post by racingteatray on Jul 31, 2017 15:45:50 GMT
I have Office 365 too, but some things just nevertheless don't work the same way and they are invariably maddening.
I fear I may just have to pay for a couple of lessons from an Apple geek so that we can work out how to use what is otherwise at risk of being a £1,000 paperweight.
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Post by PG on Jul 31, 2017 15:52:20 GMT
I have Office 365 too, but some things just nevertheless don't work the same way and they are invariably maddening.I fear I may just have to pay for a couple of lessons from an Apple geek so that we can work out how to use what is otherwise at risk of being a £1,000 paperweight. This + 1000. Why things don't work the same is hugely maddening. If you tell an Apple geek you use Offcie 365, they'll refuse to talk to you. ; -) |
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Post by michael on Jul 31, 2017 16:21:39 GMT
Having the right click function enabled on a Mac makes the world of difference if you're coming from a PC. What is it that you're finding difficult or different?
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Post by racingteatray on Jul 31, 2017 16:29:17 GMT
Right click is enabled... I had them do that in the shop before we even left.
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Post by Big Blue on Aug 1, 2017 8:26:57 GMT
Here it is. Hard drive from a MacBook Air awaiting cables to connect to new MacBook  Nero cup to demonstrate size. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 1, 2017 8:45:46 GMT
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Post by Big Blue on Aug 1, 2017 9:05:20 GMT
Regular.
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Post by grampa on Aug 1, 2017 9:08:45 GMT
Having the right click function enabled on a Mac makes the world of difference if you're coming from a PC 'right click'? WTF is 'right click'?  |
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Post by Big Blue on Aug 1, 2017 9:14:51 GMT
Having the right click function enabled on a Mac makes the world of difference if you're coming from a PC 'right click'? WTF is 'right click'? Ha ha. I have it on my mouse for when I'm using Citrix windows application but not on my trackpad in any way shape or form! |
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Post by PG on Aug 1, 2017 15:14:23 GMT
Having the right click function enabled on a Mac makes the world of difference if you're coming from a PC. What is it that you're finding difficult or different? From memory - as I avoid using the Mac like the plague for excel if I can - some are - Pivot tables set up on a PC that don't work the same A file that has print margins and page breaks set up ion a PC that prints all to shit on the Mac (and printing generally on the Mac for multi-page spreadsheets) Formulas and functions - quite a lot of the commands that I know as keyboard strokes on a PC don't work It is mouse driven - as a multi-year spreadsheet user, arrows and keystrokes are far quicker - so my view is that it is not for complex users Some of the commands seem to be on different menus etc etc ! |
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Post by Alex on Aug 1, 2017 19:15:10 GMT
Mrs Tim bought a Samsung tablet last year and hates it. Sometimes I fear for its survival. I was the same about three years ago. I bought a Samsung tablet as it was a full 10" screen for a shade less than an iPad mini. I then got my iPad mini from work and the Galaxy tablet has been in the loft ever since. The iPad was just a step above, even if it's got a smaller screen. I've not really used a MacBook so I wouldn't wish to comment other than that my dad moved across from a windows pc about 5 years ago and loves it. He bought a Mac Mini originally but now has a full fat iMac. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 2, 2017 6:42:27 GMT
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Post by Big Blue on Aug 2, 2017 8:24:16 GMT
Update: last night I completed extracting mail data from the hard drive using a connecting ribbon and a tiny board purchased from Amazon, this after finding the box files in the hidden file structure. In the main I am happy that I still have enough manual IT skills to remove a drive, buy some bits, connect them with my fingers and recover my own data.
As I now have 1Tb of cloud space and 6Tb of home cloud back ups will be more frequent!
I shall now advertise the old Air on eBay as spares and repair sans disk. Should sell as I have the box and will throw in the case I had as a new one was purchased for the MacBook.
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Post by Tim on Aug 2, 2017 11:16:57 GMT
We have an iBook G4 (laptop) bought in 2005 that still works, albeit slowly.
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Post by Ben on Aug 2, 2017 13:43:42 GMT
I currently use a MacBook Air, my first Mac after years of Windows. I found the transition relatively painless, in part because I got some experience from work (where the magazines are laid out on Macs and I've had to learn some of it), in part also because the newer Windows (8 and 10) are maddeningly complicated as compared to previous versions.
It's ironic that I find Mac easier to use than Windows now, whereas it was the opposite less than a decade ago.
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Post by Big Blue on Aug 2, 2017 14:07:41 GMT
It's ironic that I find Mac easier to use than Windows now, whereas it was the opposite less than a decade ago. This. I have an ASUS in the home office and I upgraded it to Windows 10. What a fucking mistake. Horrible doesn't begin to describe it. On the other hand their (MS) office products shit all over Mac stuff. |
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Post by michael on Aug 2, 2017 14:14:39 GMT
I think we've hit the issue here. Macs are good for people who use some packages and windows are better for others. Excel and Mac do not go just as Windows and Illustrator do not go.
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Post by Ben on Aug 2, 2017 18:48:45 GMT
In any case Mac has their word processing and spreadsheet equivalent in Pages and Numbers, which work just as well (IMO) and have Word/Excel cross compatibility. So no issues for me on that front too.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 3, 2017 6:11:15 GMT
The last Mac I used was the 2e but once I figured it out was happy enough. Having lost their native architecture for PC products they have lost a lot of their individuality.
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Post by Big Blue on Aug 3, 2017 9:27:38 GMT
In any case Mac has their word processing and spreadsheet equivalent in Pages and Numbers, which work just as well (IMO) and have Word/Excel cross compatibility. So no issues for me on that front too. Numbers is unusable shit compared to Excel but the files sizes seem to be more efficient. Pages is a problem for some of the mega-templating that legal documents are based on so that's a big no as well. |
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