Macopinion

MacBook Air Announcement Narrows System Upgrade Roadmap

Now that Macworld Expo has come and gone, and the new Apple subnotebook turned out to be a seriously handicapped machine that doesn't interest me in the slightest with regard to owning one (although it's a fascinating engineering exercise) I'm back on the horns of my dilemma as to what to do about upgrading to a MacIntel machine.

I've managed to hold out, quite happily I might add, in Power PC land for these first 24 months of the MacIntel era and haven't until recently felt in the slightest inconvenienced, but the inevitability is finally setting in that it's time to make a move at last. The provisional tipping point for me was always going to be when I needed to run a software application that wasn't supported by Power PC, and that has arrived in the form of MacSpeech's forthcoming new Dictate dictation software based on heretofore PC-only Dragon Naturally Speaking. DNS is the widely acclaimed gold standard standard of dictation applications, and outshines anything that's previously been available on the Mac to a degree at that even veteran Mac enthusiast and advocate David Pogue, who depends heavily on voice recognition due to repetitive stress injury, has opted for DNS on a PC for most of his workaday transcription needs.

I am somewhat dependent on dictation software myself, and would have been forced to either switch to a PC or go out of business as a writer a long time ago had it not been for the availability of MacSpeech's iListen dictation application for the Mac, especially after IBM lost interest in the category and terminated development of the Mac version of its ViaVoice dictation application in 2002. iListen, which is based on the Philips Speech engine, as a very good program, but most reviewers who are familiar with both iListen and Dragon Naturally Speaking pronounce DNS the better of the two by a substantial margin.

Now with MacSpeech's new Dictate application, introduced at Macworld Expo last week, where it incidentally received the 'Macworld 2008 Best of Show' award, the point will be moot, since Dictate brings the DNS speech engine to the Mac platform. MacSpeech will continue to support iListen, but stopped shipping new copies to distributors last week. I anticipate that Dictate will be a superb product, but the fly in the ointment, so to speak, is that, Dictate only supports the MacIntel platform, and my fleet is still solidly Power PC.

If I want to use Dictate, the bottom line is that I need a MacIntel box, and I do want to use Dictate. A second "tipping point" circumstance is that while OS X 10.4 Tiger performs superbly on my PowerBook G4, OS 10.5 Leopard, unhappily, does not. It works, and I've been using it most of the time for a couple of months now, but it is buggy, slow, email performance on my dialup Internet connection is abominable, and it's in general the most un-Mac-like experience with a new Mac OS version since, I guess, System 7.5.2. Perhaps Leopard performance on my old PowerBook will improve with incremental version updates, that I suspect that most of the refinement and optimization effort is being channeled into the Intel version of the OS, so the proverbial handwriting (or dictation) is on the wall. It's time to get serious about making a move.

I had been waiting for Macworld to see what would emerge in the form of the much-anticipated Mac subnotebook, but the MacBook Air is a big disappointment for me in the context of my own computer needs, and not a machine I would remotely consider as a new workhorse system. What I had been hoping for was something along the lines of an updated and Intel-based 12-inch PowerBook - a full-fledged computer with a full range of connectivity, reasonable expandability and memory capacity, and definitely a user-replaceable battery. the MacBook Air fails on all these counts, so I'm counting it out. It may find a market, but not with users who need a subnotebook that can serve as a primary machine.

So the ball is back in the MacBook/MacBook Pro court, and frankly I'm having great difficulty deciding between a middle model 2.2 GHz white MacBook and the base 15-inch MacBook Pro.

Actually, if money were no object, I would go with a 17-inch MacBook Pro in a heartbeat. I've been extremely happy with this 17-inch PowerBook, and moving up to the Intel version would suit me just fine, but alas it's just too expensive. The 15-inch MacBook Pro has the same 1,440 x 900 display resolution as my old 1.33 GHz 17-inch PowerBook, albeit on a physically smaller screen, but then I preferred the 12-inch 1,064 x 768 display in my iBook to the same resolution 14.1-inchers in my Pismos, so that should be to the good, and the 15-inch model has an LED display backlight while the current 17-incher doesn't.

The MacBook's big advantages are its seven hundred dollar lower price and it's easy-to-swap hard drive, neither of which is to be sniffed at. I also like the tactile feel of polycarbonate cases as opposed to coldly (and hotly) metallic aluminum.

Where the MacBook falls short is with its smaller display, a 1,280 x 800 unit available only with a glossy finish while you have the option of glossy or matte with the MacBook Pro. Another argument against the MacBook is its IBM GMA X3100 integrated graphics, which annex 144 megabytes of system RAM for video support. I'm also dubious about the MacBook's keyboard. I've tried it experimentally, and it seems OK, but I'm very sensitive to keyboard action, and I know I can live happily with the keyboard used in the MacBook Pro. Of lesser importance is the lack of an ExpressCard slot, which I have no particular use for in the short-term, but expandability is always good to have, and I don't doubt that there could well be in the future some Express Card 34 add-on I'd like to be able to use.

Shifting focus to the MacBook Pro, even the base model has more than ample power for my anticipated needs, and it has a real NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor unit with 128 megabytes of dedicated video RAM as well as an ExpressCard 34 slot.

The keyboard is quite acceptable and a known quantity, I prefer to have at least 900 pixels of vertical resolution, and LED backlighting is the wave of the future. While the MacBook Pro doesn't support more RAM than the MacBook (both can be expanded to 4 GB), it comes with two gigabytes which facilitates more flexible upgrade options and cancels some of the MacBook's price advantage, since I would want at least two gigabytes of RAM on any Intel Mac.

Both units come with 120 gigabyte hard drives, but the MacBook Pro gives you the option either a matte or glossy display surface as previously noted. My problem there is I'm not quite sure which I prefer. The MacBook Pro is also only .4 pounds heavier and not a whole lot physically larger than a MacBook, so that's not a big comparative consideration.

So, if you think this sounds like I'm leaning toward a 15-inch MacBook Pro, you're correct, and if I were to go with an Apple Certified Refurbished unit, that would cut the price gap to four hundred dollars (actually $250 once a second gigabyte of RAM is added to the MacBook. I'm not completely decided yet, but that's my inclination. Stay tuned.



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cmoore@macopinion.com


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