Month: March 2006

Josh Marshall entertains switching

This on the heels of David Pogue’s roundup of response to a Dell support parody he ran (some folks thought it was too close to reality to be parody) . . . .

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall March 2, 2006 12:10 PM:

(March 02, 2006 — 12:10 PM EDT)
After I did the post a couple days ago about my terrible experience with a new Gateway Computer (actually with the computer and the support and pretty much everything else about the experience), I got a number of emails from Mac owners basically saying, ‘Switch to Mac. We all live in computer paradise.’

So I thought I’d answer the question on the site.

I must say that from my casual experience, Mac’s always seem to work better, be more intelligently designed, have a nicer screen interface and a bunch of other stuff. And honestly, after this most recent experience, for the first time in my life I’ve seriously considered switching.

So, why haven’t I, and, probably, why won’t I?

I think it basically comes down to two reasons.

First, I’ve been using PC-based computers for about 20 years. And over the years, I’ve invested a serious amount of money in software and various gizmos, all of which are PC-based. That in itself is probably enough to keep me shackled down in the Wintel universe.

Second, I’ve got a decent amount of know-how invested in PCs. I don’t just mean that I’d have to become a computer newbie again. But I can open up my PCs and install things and actually do a certain amount of maintenance on them. Not sure one can do that with a Mac, at least not to the same degree. In the background, I guess there’s also that concern about having ones whole computer set-up and data tied to one company.

Third (okay, I said two, but it’s my site), I’ve become very dependent on using a tablet PC for a lot of my note-taking and loose-leaf type record keeping. (If you’re a journalist or anyone else who takes a lot of notes or does a lot of research, I seriously recommend checking them out. I couldn’t live without one.) And I don’t think they exist in the Mac universe.

In any case, those are the basic reasons holding me back. (I know the hardware tends to be more expensive. But I pretty much live my life online. So I don’t think the cost in itself, if not too much more, would hold me back.) But I really do sort of secretly wish I could use a Mac because they just seem like they’re better machines. So I’d be very curious to hear from readers. Not just Mac users. In fact, not even primarily Mac users. Who I’d really like to hear from are former PC users who’ve switched to Mac. What have your experiences been? Any major downsides? Either in the final experience or in the transition over — moving your data over, etc?

Let me know. I’d be much obliged.

— Josh Marshall

Clinging to Windows because you know how to fix it like keeping your horse tack after you sell the horse and buy a car.

more thoughts on the mini and GarageBand

<updated below>

I recently acquired an iMic 2 to experiment with GarageBand (I bought the Monster iStudioLink with the same end in mind).

Some issues emerged, most if not all due to the anemic innards of mine. I realize GarageBand is a RAM hog, so these are artifacts of it not having enough memory to do even one thing at a time, let alone two.

  • Playing multiple tracks while recording another doesn’t work reliably. The audio will just drop in the track being recorded. And the signal processing never shows up: you get unprocessed guitar (in my case) instead of whatever you asked for.
  • There is often a delay between the sound you make and the sound you hear. This can be fixed by mucking around in the iTunes prefs and toggling back and forth between the buffer sizes.
  • Garageband
  • There’s some magic there that flushes the buffer and resets the driver. You may find you need to do it, oh three, four, many times. You may also need to twiddle the settings in the Sound Preference Pane: I think I may not have needed to do that, but hadn’t yet isolated the issues with the buffer size.

So I think my bottom line is: more RAM. The little bugger only holds 1 Gb, so I hope that’s enough. I’m sure the resale value on these is dropping through the floor, with the new Dual Cores coming out. Possibly faster disk: if I have to crack it open to add RAM, I’ll do the disk at the same time.

<grumble>
An update. I did reinstall the OS on an outboard disk, a speedy 80 Gb drive connected via FireWire @ 400Mbits. It seems somewhat faster but I think GarageBand won’t be happy w/o a lot more RAM. I still get the same issues with the audio dropping out and I have to assume it’s a resource issue/