Macking 131

We're Safe from India
Apple isn't talking (big surprise there) but it looks like our letters and phone calls had an effect. According to the rumor sites, Apple never actually declared they were doing the move; the stories came from Indian news sites reporting on a hiring search that appeared to be Apple looking to set up a call center.
The whole move to India is turning out to be a spectacular failure for all involved. Dell is losing millions in frustrated and unhappy customers, AOL is shedding subscribers like GM is shedding jobs, and all because no one likes talking to India. I can attest to that; last week I was helping someone deal with Earthlink and the experience was singularly awful. I recommend strongly against Earthlink and I am glad Portland did not select them to provide the city's WiFi service. If you are on Earthlink, you should dump them as soon as possible in favor of a local provider that employs local techs and has actual humans, not robots, answering the phone.
To make matters worse, there are only so many Indians who are tech-savvy and capable of speaking English in a manner that can be understood over a bad VOIP phone connection. The lack of available labor has led some of the largest Indian call centers to offshore their needs... to the USA. The one I had to talk to kept saying, over and over, "thank you for providing that information" whenever I would tell him anything about the debugging steps, even though I told him specifically to quit saying that. You could tell by his comments and answers that he had no clue what I was talking about but was under orders not to admit it. Since he didn't know what a Mac was he finally gave up and transferred me to Quebec, I think, because the woman had a thick French accent but knew her stuff. The problem was with their DSL modem and Mac knowledge wasn't really necessary, but since all the Indian could do was read from a script it was just impossible for him to be of any help. That is mostly Earthlink's fault for managing their call center with such incompetence. It is possible, just not very likely, for an Indian call center to be well run. I have actually experienced it once or twice.
Oh, and since there are a lot of Indians in the USA, that difficult accent could be coming from San Jose or Vancouver, or even Stream International in Portland.

Inside AppleCare
Want a very interesting tale? Go to this site to read all about what is really happening with those people you call when you need help. It will give you a new respect and understanding and make it easier for both of you.

I Got A MacBook
Yep, I'm nuts, giving up a perfectly good 12" G4 PowerBook. Usually I am not an early adopter, preferring to let others debug Apple's new products for them and then getting the following generation.
This time, though, I became sold on the new MacBook, 2 GHz black model. I liked the screen, could live with the slightly wider form factor, and wanted the speed. Technically, this is not a new, first-generation product, but a 2nd-gen built on the experience of the first Intel MacBookPro, which is quite a different machine, and with problems not present in the MacBook.
Others seem to agree; the reviews are claiming this to be the best Mac laptop ever.
So, after living with it for a couple of weeks now, I am finding just a few minor glitches and a major performance improvement over my 12" PowerBook. Glitches include occasional refusal to wake up after being closed and moved about, which forces a restart. That has happened twice but not for over a week.
It runs hot. Really hot. My old Temperature Monitor application doesn't work on the Intel, so I got a utility called CoreDuoTemp. It shows me running between 140 degrees when mostly idle to more than 170 when busy. The G4 ran between 88 and 115 before the fan came on. Unsanity's ceepeeyou works on this chip and shows the percentage of use for each half of the duo processor. The aluminum G4 was a bit hot on the legs, but this one cooks through denim to make your thigh uncomfortable after just ten or fifteen minutes. Bare legs are impossible. I will be buying some kind of lap stand for this; there are several on the market because this has always been a problem for laptops. Right now I am using a cheese board (with the cheese cleaned off).
Rosetta, the operating environment that allows older applications that have not been upgraded to Universal Binaries to run, takes up major processor power. Since there is no update to Flash yet available, if you want to see dependent websites, you must quit Safari, select its icon and do a Get Info. Check the box marked "Run in Rosetta" and your Flash sites will work fine. The processor, however, will move from giving Safari 5% - 15% to between 95% and 120% and run your battery down in a hurry. (Since there are two processors, you actually have a total of 200% available for all processes.) There is a prerelease plugin that requires manual installation but does not work very well. Adobe knows Intel is the future, they are working with all good speed, but missing out on stuff like this is one of the joys of early adoption.
The matte black plastic looks great, but if you eat sandwiches or fries or other oily foods, you will be leaving marks on the trackpad and the case. I have read that a microfiber cloth is best for cleaning it up but have not gotten one yet. Plain cotton does not do anything at all.
One reason for the heat is that I have it driving an external 20" display. That puts extra stress on the memory, which is shared by the processor and the graphics chip. This is the first Mac since the '90s that did not have separate video RAM. This is one reason of many why you should not live with the 512Mb supplied RAM but get another gig on top of that. It is okay to have mismatched memory modules (unlike the G5). Don't buy directly from Apple; they charge almost twice as much for added RAM. But get the RAM immediately. With only half a gig the hard drive works overtime feeding virtual memory and your performance slows to a crawl. This is true of all older Macs that still have the original 512 (or even 256) they were shipped with. Enjoy a performance boost with some extra RAM. It's pretty cheap these days.
The keyboard is unlike any previous laptop from Apple. I liked the one on the G4 PowerBook, but hated the spongy ones used on the earlier iBooks. This one is fitted inside the case and is not removable, so the feel is solid even though the keys are completely flat with less than 1/8" travel.
No more AppleWorks bundled with consumer Macs. I think Apple just wants to walk away from it. You can still buy it, but if you have a copy of AppleWorks 6 now, make sure it gets migrated to any new Mac you buy. Even though it runs in Rosetta, it does not overtax the processor. All you get for bundled word processing is trial versions of Office 2004 and iWork (Pages) which expire after a month. TextEdit is useful for basic letter-writing needs, and can open and read some Word files, just not overly complex ones (which is almost all of them, due to the way it formats its documents).
The magnetic power supply is a brilliant innovation. It just snaps on and off magnetically. Never again will you risk crashing your 'Book to the floor because you or someone else snags the power cord. However, that means my old power supply is useless and I must buy another if I want to have one in my laptop bag and leave the other plugged in at my desk. Price without PMUG discount is the same everywhere: $80. The MacBook charger is a 65-watt power supply; the MacBook Pro is 85 watts. The bigger one will work fine on the MacBook.
By the way, I have never gotten less than four hours on the battery, practicing even minimal energy savings (like not running Safari under Rosetta). Probably by the time you read this there will be a Universal version of the Flash player (It took until August 2006 for them to get one out).
I have not used the embedded iSight camera for anything yet, but then I'm not much of an iChatter. Others love it as much as some corporations hate it. Some design houses won't let cameras into the building.

Time to Sell Your eMac
More and more of the eMacs made around 2004 are turning up dead. A number of them have logic-board problems caused by leaking capacitors, which can cost you $700 if not covered by AppleCare. They also suffered from weak power supplies, a problem also found in the original G3 iMacs. In both cases, the straw that burned out the camel's power supply was the plugging in of an external hard drive or other device that did not provide its own power. The added drain on the FireWire port was enough to push a marginal device over the edge.
New model Macs are pretty cheap, as are refurbs and leftovers from the PPC line. Best deal is usually a Mac Mini with a TFT display from CTR or even Dell. Fry's always has 17" and 19" displays on sale but beware: never buy anything from Fry's that has been previously opened. All too often they just restock an item returned by a customer, even if it is defective. If you can get $400 or more for your eMac, do it. Certified used eMacs are going from $599 to $749 from PowerMax, but that includes a 90-day guarantee. The rumor sites claim there will be a replacement for the eMac later this year.

Letter
Neill Barrett writes, "I'd like to point out a wonderful little utility I got for my 15" PB a while back that remembers (as long as the PB isn't sleeping) to run Repair Permissions, Remove Localized Files, and Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Unix Maintenance regularly. Called Macaroni and available from Atomic Bird, it appears as a System Preferences Applet. It's very worth the $9 (!) to register it."

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)