Terry Jones

I’m trying to work. But right now I’m not working, I’m writing this.

Q: Why am I writing this instead of working?

A: Because my MacBook Pro has decided to spend 2 minutes showing the spinning color wheel in the application I was trying to use.

I used to have a 17″ G4 Powerbook with 2GB of RAM. When people asked me what I thought of it I was always very positive and enthusiastic in my reply. Then I got a 17″ MacBook Pro, and I hate it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Every single day, probably half a dozen times, I’ll be using some application (in this case Aquamacs, a version of Emacs for the Mac) when, for no apparent reason, the mouse cursor will change to the spinning pizza wheel of death, and remain that way for up to a couple of minutes. This happens to me in Firefox too, so it’s definitely not an Emacs thing. It probably happens in other apps too, I haven’t paid as much attention as I probably should have.

I’m too busy swearing at the machine.

Anyway….. what the hell!? I wish I could just throw this piece of junk away and get something that just works. I’m planning to head back to Linux next time around. I can’t believe that this machine could have made it out the door. But I need it too much to be able to just send it back, so I’m stuck, and I resort to cursing and blogging.

I have other complaints too. I run a make clean that removes a bunch of files (around 20M of stuff, not that many files). Sometimes the rm command will just sit there for 15 or 20 seconds before completing. What’s it thinking about? I run unit tests on Python code all the time. Sometimes the python command to run the tests will just sit there, the other day it was taking almost a minute to launch python. Yes, I know, I can go look at what’s going on on my machine, and I do, and sometimes, yes, it’s busy. But this is just ridiculous. I’ve been using UNIX for 25 years and I haven’t had to wait for things like this since the early 80’s (and then on a machine I was sharing with up to 128 others). It’s infuriating to have the expensive latest and greatest laptop and then have it perform like a dog.

FWIW, the machine is probably a year old. Probably these seem like small problems, but I think Apple really screwed up, and there’s plenty of complaints online about problems with these laptops. Blast them to hell.

Now back to work – if I can manage to get a cursor in Emacs, that is.

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