I have been using Apple laptops since about 2002 when I bought my first 1GHz Titanium PowerBook G4. At the time, my needs were very small and I fell in love with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. Following my TiBook, I had a couple different Aluminum PowerBook G4s and finally got my first C2D (Core 2 Duo) MBP (MacBook Pro) in November of 2006. That C2D MBP treated me very well for the last 2 years and my only real complaints with it were:

1. As it aged the screen dimmed (common with CCFL backlit displays). It really was only dim while it was heating up but it seemed to take longer to get to full brightness than when it was brand new, and the brightness was uneven during the warming-up period.
2. The battery life was awful, and before you go tell me to go buy a new battery, I already did that. While running Boot Camp, I was lucky to get 1:10 out of the battery. This was just not enough time for me while I was out visiting clients and attending meetings that are frequently longer than 2 hours.
3. The case was not very solid and slightly bulged out around the latch and Express Card area. This never caused an actual problem, nor did it ever actually fall apart, but it just looked horrible. I’ve never really concerned myself with this problem too much though since I’ve always had this problem with my PowerBooks/MacBook Pros.
4. The hard drive was a PITA to swap out. With the type of work I do, I need it to be easier to swap the hard drive out of my laptop and doing this with a MacBook Pro takes at least 10 minutes. For an inexperienced tech, disassembling can take over a half hour or more.

Even with those complaints out on the table, I loved my C2D MacBook Pro as my day-to-day Windows Vista laptop. With my own tweaking of the Boot Camp drivers I had absolutely everything working perfectly; even the things that people normally have problems with like the video card drivers and proper scrolling gestures (another post to come on that some other day).

With all the success I had with my previous Apple Laptops I had really high hopes for my new Late 2008 MacBook Pro. Let’s look at all of the improvements:

1. New unibody construction. The new MacBooks are much more solid and thinner than their predecessors.
2. LED back lit screens are standard on all MacBooks now.
3. Better battery life from the now bigger battery.
4. Extremely easy access to the hard drive.
5. Updated keyboard design.
6. Magnetic latch.
7. All of the connections have been moved to one side of the computer
8. Faster speeds standard.
9. 4GB RAM standard.

It looks pretty promising, but no computer is without its faults and here are some of them for the new MBP:

1. Lack of choice in screen finish; i.e. no matte screens.
2. Still no docking station.
3. Inability to add larger capacity batteries (but we may never get this with Apple laptops).

I’m personally not too concerned with any of the problems listed above since none of them affect me, but I know that some things, like the lack of a docking station, are deal breakers for others. With that said though, there was a serious deal breaker with my new MacBook Pro that has me thinking I may have to return it. Before I delve into that, I think I need to explain my absolute favorite MacBook feature, Boot Camp!

Trackpad in Boot Camp

I was ecstatic when I heard Apple was releasing Boot Camp close to the release of the Intel Macs. I finally would be able to have just one computer for everything; I could use a MacBook for testing OS X and then use Windows for my day-to-day work and IT troubleshooting. The biggest problem with Boot Camp all along on the Apple laptops has been Apple’s lack of proper support for their trackpads and I’m sad to report that Apple has done worse than ever with the new Late 2008 Mac Book Pro. The new trackpad is rendered unusable while running Windows with the latest Boot Camp driver (the ones that come on the new MBP OS X disc).

The problems with the trackpad were immediately apparent. The buggy trackpad shows itself in the following ways:

1. Dragging/Highlighting doesn’t work: If you try to click on the physical trackpad button with your thumb and use your index finger to drag or highlight text/files, the dragging/highlighting will fail randomly. It is impossible to do either of these tasks in the trackpad driver’s current state.
2. Clicking: Using your thumb to click on the physical trackpad button is impossible because depressing the button with your thumb causes the mouse pointer to move erratically. Basically the driver needs to be programmed to not be so sensitive when a finger is first placed on the trackpad.
3. Right-clicking: Currently, right-clicking requires using 3 fingers. 2 fingers have to be placed on the trackpad while the 3rd (the thumb) has to be used to press depress the physical button. This is clumsy and ridiculous since right-tap-clicking doesn’t work.

The thing that upsets me most about this isn’t that Apple wouldn’t refund my laptop without a restocking fee, or that Apple denies that this problem exists, or even that Apple obviously doesn’t hold Boot Camp as a very high priority. What upsets me the most is that Apple is pushing these new laptops with false advertising saying that they run Windows just as well or better than most PCs. It just seems criminal to me when you consider that there is no reason for there not being a working mouse driver other than pure negligence.

The problem has been discussed in the Ars Technica review of the new MacBook Pro (starting in the second to last paragraph) and over on the Apple Discussion Board.

Virtualization as an alternative to Boot Camp:

Anyways, so here I am with my brand-new $3000 laptop that can’t fulfill my most basic need of running Windows natively. I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to do, but in the meantime I’m using Parallels to run Windows XP Professional SP3 for Office 2007 and QuickBooks which are my must have Windows apps.

In the meantime, I’ve been impressed with Parallels 3, but not so impressed with VMware Fusion 2. VMware Fusion 2 has a buggier “Unity” mode when compared with Parallels “Coherence” mode, but Parallels also has a problem when in shared networking mode of not flushing the DNS cache when switching networks (VMware seems to have a script that auto runs in the background to take care of this). Anyways, all of this talk about virtualization on the Mac could be saved for another post.

At least in the meantime, the mouse is working well in OS X, but it isn’t perfect. I’m experiencing a problem where frequently OS X stops responding to the trackpad. When the trackpad stops responding, I’m forced to just keep tapping on the trackpad until it starts working again. This seemed like a minor inconvenience at first, but it has quickly become annoying as I’ve used the computer more and more. I’m not going to go to much into this bug other than to mention that it was mentioned over on TechCrunch/CrunchGear and on Apple’s Discussion Board.

Summary:

Today, I’m just debating how long it is going to take Apple to pull their heads out of their asses and write a working x86 and x64 mouse driver for Windows; a couple weeks, a month, 2 months, 6 monts, a year, never?