Mac RIP

For a little over three years, I’ve had the Mac laptop.  Little shiny white affair: small for a modern laptop, but the sharp screen quality compensates for that, by enabling me to read much smaller print than is comfortable on a desktop machine.

Much to my surprise, I never liked the MacOS user interface very much: much of it seems to be a generation behind the Linux world, simple operations like cut&paste are a faff, and above all there’s the screaming inadequacy of control of windows and focus.  So I wouldn’t choose it for the desktop.

But on the laptop, the defects have been more than compensated by hardware (and drivers) that just work.  Minor conveniences like that great Mac power supply.  Much more importantly, none of the kind of flakiness and perpetual need to take it apart and jiggle some internal connection that characterised its predecessor, a Dell Inspiron that was just plain shoddy.  Decent build quality matters on a laptop!

But last night it suddenly died.  First some ticking, then in less than a minute it froze up with a spinning ¨busy¨ cursor, none of the open apps responded, and it refused to reboot.  Took it in to the local Mac shop this morning, and they extracted the hard disc and found it dead – ouch!  They can replace the disc for sixty squids, but it means I´ll have to faff about with reinstalling lots of apps, setting up prefs, etc.  Fortunately there is (I think) only a few hours of actual work on there with no duplicate, but I´m now down to one copy of quite a lot of important stuff, so spending this morning on a spot of backup!