As an owner of the first generation PowerBook G4 (which is essentially the case design that all modern MacBooks are descended from), I must agree. They were made of titanium, but not a nice strong titanium alloy, but pure titanium (as far as I can tell, for marketing reasons).
Unfortunately, pure titanium is neither hard nor strong and has poor thermal conductivity.
That laptop developed three fractures, had display issues, had the logic board replaced twice (apparently due to overheating) and developed a warped casing which caused the CD drive stop working. Mind you, all these things were covered under warranty because apparently, they were defects. I have never had a computer that spent more time being fixed than that one.
My 2002 Powerbook G4 (nicknamed ‘Rasputin’ for reasons that will become clear in a moment) finally died last year. It was a music server in its last five years but up to that point it was my one and only computer. Used it for everything.
Keyboard and optical drive each replaced once; battery, twice; hard drive, three times. Survived multiple falls, one a four-foot drop, on its side, on a ceramic tile floor. The WiFi card in the Cardbus slot was destroyed along with the Cardbus slot itself but everything else kept humming along just as smoothly as the day I bought it.
Thirteen years. That laptop lasted thirteen years and it was a practical personal computer for most of them. That’s how great Apple’s OS design and development was.
I do not think so.
They simply used the standard grade of titanium used in industry, which is used, inter alia, for making plating tank baskets and replacement hip joints. It works fine for watches where the sections are reasonably thick, but the material is designed for easy welding and corrosion resistance, which is why it is pure. It is in fact quite strong and hard compared to aluminium. At the time the G4 came out I had been having a bit to do with titanium and I concluded that the case probably wouldn’t be satisfactory, so didn’t buy one, but then I was on the far side of an ocean and a continent from the Jobs RDF, whereas Apple employees weren’t. Aerospace grades of titanium are hard to machine and, I suspect, wouldn’t be available at a sensible price or possibly in sufficient quantity, but in any case, designing it to avoid stress concentration and cracking in a computer case, regardless of the alloy used, would, I suspect, have been beyond the Apple technology of the era.
Since then titanium alloys which have better mechanical properties have become available in quantity at sensible prices, which is why you can get flexible spectacle frames quite cheaply. But aerospace aluminium alloys turn out to be much better for making cases. Also (I suspect) aluminium has the useful ability to react with the stuff that comes out of a ruptured lithium ion cell. I increasingly wonder if the trend to sealed cells and Al cases is entirely due to safety, but the manufacturers don’t want to advertise this because it would put doubts in people’s minds.
FYI, it is pretty easy to upgrade the drive in a Macbook Air if it is an SSD. It is freely accessible once you take the bottom case off. It is one of the easiest things to replace - not much more difficult than replacing RAM in a PC.
You can make scrollbars always show by going to the General Control Panel.
Apple fixed a lot of the problems with mid-2002/late-2002 versions of the TiBook - most notably they changed the display hinge (which is where all but one of my fractures happened).
Only when you compare it to pure aluminum. They used the purest form of titanium they could get (and advertised that they did heavily), CP Grade 1 (99.5% Ti). It is the softest form of titanium It has a yield strength of 170 MPa and a ultimate tensile strength of 240 MPa.
When they switched to aluminum, they almost certainly would have used (and possibly still do use) 6061-T6 since it is cheap and widely available. It has yield strength of 270 MPa and ultimate tensile strength of 310 MPa.
Frankly, I can’t come up with a good reason for them to have used unalloyed titanium over an aluminum alloy that isn’t marketing related.
I haven’t run Linux on a laptop in more than a decade, so I can’t help at all on that front; I’m running it on desktop machines, which traditionally (back then) were better supported. I understand that most laptop hardware is better-supported now, but I’ve not tried myself.
In terms of syncing music to an iPhone, I haven’t actually done that since switching over to Linux for my daily use. I’ve noticed that when I have it plugged into USB (for charging), my iPhone does show up in Rhythmbox’s sidebar, and I believe I once curiously checked whether I could play music from my iPhone (which I believe worked), but I’ve never actually tried copying music onto the iPhone via that interface. Can’t vouch for this for serious use, though. Websites seem to suggest that sync from Linux is still problematic.
I have a good friend who went there 1.5 years ago. He’s looking for his exit now. Apple suffers from the same problem Microsoft did back in the day. It is led by committees, people aren’t empowered to make decisions, and (unlike Microsoft) people are kept in the dark or not allowed to communicate even with other departments about their work so there are no synergies. He’s tired of it.
Linux won’t be successful until Xwindows (as a server) is replaced with something modern and a unified interface with a set of APIs that evryone can reliably use replaces the windows managers. I’ve tried running Linux full time (and have used it on and off since the 90s). Every app behaves somewhat differently. Many have problems being installed unless you hand massage them. Then there are things like hand editing config files just to get a fairly standard trackpad to work even halfway correctly. All hardware is a unique adventure in the Linux world, just like all apps. It is like rubbing your body with sandpaper every day to see if a given app will work right on your particular system.
I’ll be over here in denial about the newspaper-size fondleslab being a bad thing. Oh Yeah! I’ll uh, just be toying around on that decorative brownbrick berm out back then.
This. I can’t even run X11/GTK apps nicely on my OSX, because the default is a terrible ‘Impact’ style bold thin font…but tried editing every file under the sun, GTK Theme Changer, etc. Nope.
It’s stuff like that which keeps me with OSX, as buggy and as bloated as it’s getting. Love to switch to Linux, I run VPS and Pi and Virtual Machines that are various Debian/Ubuntu flavours…but it’s the UI and lack of industry support / software that stops me.
I love that when I mention that, the fanboys say stuff like ‘you could use GIMP’…yes I could also use an abacus or a acoustic decoupler 2600 baud modem. That shit aint Photoshop, as much as I hate Adobe. Terrible UI, again, reminds me of PaintShop Pro and that’s not a good memory…as fiddly as Adobe CC is getting, it’s not as reliable, compatible nor usable as Photoshop. Those who say otherwise use it for minor things, not professionally unless say, you work for Canonical The rest of the industry uses that or Scratch or something that isn’t on Linux.
And WINE is flaky as fuck, on OSX anyway…I’d not run full paid software on it (emulating to use critical software? Asking for trouble :-/)
I use OS X. I have VMware when I need to fire up a Linux or Windows virtual machine. Every now and I then, I boot up a Linux laptop that work also gave me or I use my headless Pi’s as servers. That’s it. I can’t bear the thought of running Ubuntu or Arch or something every day and having to literally look at those apps and to try to get the UI (or even shortcuts) to do what I want. I envision months of fiddling with config files only to have something not work the next time I upgrade or what have you. Forget about it.
I worked at Microsoft for 9 years so you can’t pay me to run Windows anymore. I got so sick of it (and it has been ten years since I left).
Hardware-wise, I agree that you have to do your research (or enjoy gambling). For Linux to become more widely adopted, hardware-makers are going to have to buy-in on the idea. I recently bought a Dell laptop, and even though it’s a model that they sell with Ubuntu preinstalled, it still has the odd (annoying but fixable) issue. If replacing X will give us a more consistent UI experience, I’m on board with that too.
But I haven’t seen the software issues you’re describing on Linux (was it that you were building from source?) Applications on the various (mainly Debian-derived) distros I’ve used long-term have never given me any particular problems to get installed and keep running (that said, I use a pretty basic set of GUI apps and spend most of my time working in a terminal, with virtual machines…so ymmv!)
In fact, the thing I most notice about Linux these days is that most of the people I know who use computers as general-purpose tools (i.e for internet, email, documents, photos, music, and videos) wouldn’t even notice if you switched out their current machines with something running Linux (minus issues such as syncing iPhones–vendor lock-in is bad ).
For total geek-out, I’ve found that I can use Ansible to document and configure the setup my macOS and Linux machines. This allows me to version-control the config files, and install and enable the specific set of apps/config files/driver fixes required by a given machine.
Yes, I realize that this is a silly idea for most people’s requirements .
Except that doing something the second time isn’t quite the same thing as doing it for the first time, which along with other such potential complications, in the context of something as mind-smashingly complicated as a modern computer, can yield decidedly counter-intuitive results.
People buy Asus because it is cheap. People buy apple because it is a premium product at a premium price. There is a pride element in being an apple customer, so they are going to take more heat for not doing it better than the other guys (well, maybe their customers will be happy to look the other way?)
The rest of the industry uses that or Scratch or something that isn’t on Linux.
).
.
