Can a MacBook replace a Mac mini? Or a Linux PC?

It all began when I bought a Mac mini as a machine for mail, web browsing, watching photos and movies, and music. It became clear very quickly that MacOS X is too weak for servers or interesting programming projects, so I kept using my Linux box for the majority of my work.

After two years, it became clear that a Mac mini based on a G4 processor is not only intolerably slow, but that no useful successor would be forthcoming from Apple. They do sell an Intel Core 1 version, but that processor is completely obsolete and I won't buy a completely obsolete machine. So I basically switched back to Linux.

Now I needed a portable machine for business reasons. My old Sony Vaio with its 300 MHz Pentium 1 processor, 128 MB or RAM, and SuSE Linux 8.2 just didn't cut it anymore after over nine years of use. Try getting software that runs on CPUs older than the Pentium 4 these days...

So what should it be, another Linux notebook? Portability is key for me, and there are some very lightweight, small, and powerful notebooks around. Those I liked were all over 2000 Euro though, and I am not using my notebook that often. Linux runs very well on most notebooks these days, with occasional small unsupported features like certain card readers. (But I am completely amazed how poorly Windows works on many of them too, due to careless configuration and lacking driver support.)

But there was another option. Apple MacBooks come with modern Core 2 Duo processors, so why not solve two problems at once and replace my aging Mac mini with a MacBook? There are some advantages:

Turns out there are some disadvantages too.

My conclusion is that it is a good Mac mini replacement. Not quite as nice as a Mac mini with a similar CPU would be, but I am happy with it. And I do get the bonus of being able to detach it and carry it to work.

As for the comparison to Linux, the points made in my original article apply - Macs and Linux aren't playing in the same league, they are different solutions for different problems. A Mac is an appliance, a machine built for running a limited set of applications such as media players and content creation tools and simple network jobs like browsing, mail, and chatting; while Linux is more a tool for computer professionals with a huge range of applications and servers, built on an industrial-grade OS platform.

Linux does far more things than Macs can do, but what the Mac does, it does with style, firmly designed to make it as convenient and easy as possible for users, and omitting all the complexity that may be well-intentioned but really just gets in the way.

It's a mystery to me why only Apple is focusing on the user in this way (well, PalmOS did in its days too). My theory is that Microsoft's Windows core is such an unmaintainable and insecure gigantic pile of legacy garbage that a fresh start would translate to a loss of business. They did attempt to modernize in Windows NT, but the market forced them to backpedal in several major areas. Microsoft is not as ignorant as many people feel, but they blindly follow short-term business objectives that do not leave room for good software design. And why should they care, they have the whole PC market by the throat using marketing tactics. All successful products run into a situation where maintaining backwards compatibility, and hence the existing customer base, becomes more important than the elegance of the design. I greatly admire Apple for having so successfully transitioned from MacOS 9 to MacOS X, even though I often wish that they had gone a little further in some places (kill Mach and other NeXTstep legacies, for example, or adhere better to open standards).

Linux would have the freedom to pursue an elegant user interface design, especially since they have the best OS foundation in the race and do not have to fight the unstoppable momentum of hundreds of billions of dollars of invested user base. But there is no competent human interface designer in the Linux camp, and the KDE and Gnome people, especially KDE, have set their sights on repeating the mistakes of Windows by piling on unsustainable complexity. They often avoid individual Windows mistakes but their fundamental strategy is wrong. That's interesting because the Linux kernel people have in the past rarely hesitated to root out and replace modules that were found to have become obsolete, like OSS vs. Alsa or the various incarnations of IP tables, and damn the torpedoes.

I am abviously not the only one comparing operating systems. CIO magazine has a very detailed one at http://www.cio.com/article/41140/Windows_vs._Linux_vs._OS_X, with a detailed and overall favorable analysis of the MacBook.