Of Macs and men

Over the weekend I got my MacBook, neoMac, working again after ten days of using a borrowed MacBook Pro which I called courtesyMac (after the courtesy vehicle that the garage lends you when your car needs extensive servicing). It was interesting to have an extended period of time with a MacBook Pro, as I've never used one before. However, this particular one is around a year older than my neoMac, so there were certain frustrations involved as well.

Things I will miss about courtesyMac:

• The built-in speakers. Almost a religious experience, for being built-in. (Weirdly, my cheap bus-powered desktop speakers sounded absolutely terrible connected to neoMac, so I used the built-in speakers a lot.)
• The screen real estate. I knew that I was surviving the small MacBook screen solely by heavy realiance on Exposé, but didn't realise how great it would feel being able to put one window alongside another.
• The look of the screen. I don't know whether it's the graphics hardware or the actual LCD, but colours are much stronger and lines sharper on courtesyMac than neoMac.

Things I missed about neoMac:

• The way it fits in my backpack, my desk drawer, my bookshelves, the space between my lap and the seat in front of me on the train...
• The 4 GB of RAM which I installed over summer. Together with the new 320 GB hard drive, this now makes neoMac a machine punching well above its weight. (Coincidentally enough, the new neoMac RAM was cannibalised from courtesyMac in a previous incarnation, when the owner decided it was wasteful to have so much RAM in an unused machine.)
• The battery. OMFG did I miss the battery. Here are some pretty graphs to demonstrate the point.

Nine hours of courtesyMac discharging and recharging (once while playing music¹, once without):

Nine hours of neoMac discharging and recharging (while playing music, for most of it):

30 hours of typical laptop use with courtesyMac:

30 hours of typical laptop use with neoMac:

Poor little courtesyMac. I don't blame it for being old, but its current at-home occupation (as courtesyBackUpDrive - long story) is probably better suited to its capabilities than being on the move all the time.

1 Thanks to this experiment, Bob Dylan's Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, a song for which I have no great appreciation, is now in the 17th percentile of my most-played iTunes tracks - along with greats like Mika's Grace Kelly and Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.