Since it's apparently impossible for me to keep a laptop longer than six months, I am now the semi-proud owner of a ThinkPad X100e. This is part of what I'm calling Lenovo's "experimental" line, joining forces with the ThinkPad Edge. How are these experimental? Well, they have far fewer LEDs, to start. They don't have the rubberized paint applied to them. They have curves and bevels. They look like they were designed some time in the last ten years. This is new territory for the ThinkPad lineup, and I applaud the effort, though I miss my ThinkLight (but love that there's still a TrackPoint).

What is the X100e? This is the first 'netbook' type of ThinkPad, but it skirts the edge of the former 'subnotebook' classification. Instead of a 10" 1024x600 display, it's an 11.6" 1366x768 display, and instead of a single core Atom, there is a dual core Athlon Neo L625 hiding inside. You also get a Radeon HD 3200 instead of GMA 500 or something equally lame, so it's a very peppy, portable little machine. I really dig it.



The hardware is mostly good. It has the hard drive protection system, that kills the spindle when acceleration or movement is detected. The keyboard, though a departure from previous ThinkPad models by being more Sony/Apple style, is fantastic, with beveled and differently shaped keys with great spring action compared to the MacBook I had before. The multitouch trackpad is generously sized for the small footprint of the machine, and the TrackPoint buttons are large and easy to find. Getting access to PCIe and memory is much easier (if that was possible) than easier models, with six screws to remove on the back panel before the whole thing comes off.

Two things stand out as ridiculously horrible, though. First off, the wireless card, manufactured by Realtek. I had been conditioned that "ThinkPad Wireless" was a nice Atheros card, as it's been since the T4x series, and was elated to see it on the order sheet. When it arrived, it was a Realtek 8192SE bgn card, with awful signal, an unstable connection, and was even more worthless in Linux with dropped connections and crashes using WPA2 Enterprise. I waited for a month for anything to improve, but obviously Realtek doesn't care at all, so I managed to find an Intel 5100 abgn card, in half height, Lenovo-branded form, for a very small price on eBay. I am now enjoying semi-reliable wireless, which is better than nothing. Second is the battery life. You'd think with a fuel-sipping-in-comparison-to-a-C2D Athlon Neo and a six cell battery, you would get more than three hours of battery life. Haha! No, fool, you get three hours if you're lucky! It seems weird that I got better life out of my 2.2 GHz MacBook Pro than this machine, but at least I have something that approaches portable.

I've been trying to use Linux on this machine, as my primary development language is Perl, and having a UNIX environment is really handy. I use it at work, but I have very defined tasks, so it's easy to deal with, especially compared to Windows XP. For my home laptop, the variables get bigger. My Mac OS X desktop machine acts as my primary, with my photos, music, and all of the data I've ever collected, where my laptop just becomes a satellite machine, so it gets a little easier. That said, I have to use VMware to use Office 2010, as OpenOffice sucks. I'm stuck using Thunderbird as a mail client, which has improved significantly over the years, but is still crippled by horrible, focus stealing UI. Media players aren't great, though they're improving, too. I also can't do Cocoa development on it anymore, not that I've had any time. I don't have any serious complaints, I think I'm just used to OS X still, and can't get over not using it. If Apple realizes some day that some people want more portability (that you can install your own software on and has a keyboard, ffs), or more resolution (take that screen from the iPhone 4, put about 16 of them in a laptop), maybe I'll go back to them for hardware.

Or, maybe Haiku will become useful. :)

Not entirely sure why I wrote this entry. Maybe I just needed to talk it out.

Twenty-five years ago today, January 24th, 1984, Apple offered the first Macintosh for sale to the public. Released with a huge amount of fanfare using arguably the first high-budget "Super Bowl Ad" during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22nd, Apple aimed to change the computing marketplace forever. Contemporary personal and business computers used a command line driven interface to operate, and programs written for these platforms followed the same type of functionality. IBM's PC, Commodore's 64 and 128, even Apple's II series all followed the same idea, and few computers on the marketplace tried to change that at the time. The big contender, Apple's Lisa, was a market flop, mostly because it was sold at over $10,000, 5x the amount of the average business computer at the time. Macintosh offered a 32-bit processor (on a 16-bit bus, but let's not get caught up in the technicalities), 128k of RAM, a high resolution monochrome screen, and a mouse to control one of the friendliest user interfaces at the time. $2,499 was very steep in 1984, but it took the world by storm, and became the envy of every platform.

We got our first Macintosh in the fall of 1986, a smoke and fire damaged Macintosh 512K Enhanced, complete with an Apple HD20 (20mb hard drive!), a LaserWriter Plus printer and an Abaton Scan/300 sheet-fed scanner. My grandmother's house had burned to the ground, and her basement tenant and friend was getting into desktop publishing -- this was her machine. My dad took the machine in while she was relocating, cleaned the smoke damage out of everything, and powered it on. I remember hearing the chime the first time and watching it power up, and it was completely different than the Commodore 64 I grew up with. My dad let me play with MacPaint, and I was hooked. It wasn't until years later that I realized my dad was letting me play on a setup that was $15,000 when purchased new in 1985.

That machine lasted me until 1993 as a full time machine. I learned Pascal, HyperCard, and MacBASIC on that machine. I did the best looking school papers and projects on that machine, using the scanner to include maps and other data, and using the laser printer to provide crisp, clean printouts. I had Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word to create brochures, flyers, and homework. I ran a BBS off of WWIV/Mac for a couple of years. I tried to squeeze System 6 and MultiFinder in the scant, un-upgradeable 512K of RAM. I got into the first BBSs with MacTerminal, and later, ZTerm, all with my Racal Vadic 1200 baud modem, and later, my generic Hayes-compatible 2400bps modem. I really, really used that poor machine with the warped, fire damaged vents.

To this day, that machine boots, hard drive and everything. The LaserWriter Plus and Abaton scanner were sold off by the next owner long before.

The machine taught me about typography, user experience, software development, and the appreciation of a great graphical user interface. I've had many PCs and Macs since, and they are exponentially better than that poor little FatMac I used to have. Without Apple's leadership with that little machine, though, the computing world would be a far different place.

I just had to share.

Happy 25th anniversary for your crazy creation, you guys. Thank you.

Sure enough, they didn't call me by the end of the business day, so I called them. They found one of the screws wasn't set right, and it's a known problem from the factory, so they ordered a new bottom case from Apple. Estimated shipment is tomorrow, so I guess we'll see. Maybe I'll have a new MacBook from them in parts. *sigh*

I forgot to mention, my MacBook went into the hands of Apple for the, uh, fourth time on Thursday, due to random kernel panics and kernel_task going insane once in a while. After arguing with the genius on what kernel_task actually does, they agreed to take it and run 'diagnostics' on it at the local store. They said it would be about three days.

So, here we are, four days later. I give them a call and ask to see what the status was. They weren't sure, really. I had reinstalled the OS, but evidently they did it again to no avail. They're going to put in a new logic board tonight to see if that helps, and give me a call tomorrow with some kind of status update. Maybe. If they get a chance to do the logic board replacement tonight.

I keep telling myself that I really like Macs. I kinda wish they'd just give me a credit for a different one, because honestly, it seems MacBooks don't like me at all.

This MacBook, as attractive, svelte, and powerful as it is, is probably the worst Apple product I've personally owned. Tonight, I'm going to head back to the Apple Store from which it came, box in hand, and demand a replacement MacBook.

1. The MacBook is narcoleptic. The machine will not faithfully go to sleep when it is closed, nor will it wake up when it is opened. If it does go to sleep, as you leave it there, it will randomly wake up. The logs will tell me every time it woke up, but not why -- it's just random. My ride to work seems to consist of my MacBook wardriving for me, completely without my knowledge.


2. I have never seen so many kernel panics. This is amusing, because I've been using Mac OS X since Developer Preview 2, and DP3 would kernel panic if you plugged the wrong USB device in. I think I get one a week now, and I don't really need to do much to get it to happen, but I don't know exactly what to do to make it happen.


3. Applications hang, then hang, and then hang some more. I'm not sure if this is memory, hardware, or a buggy OS, but my beigebox PC running the hacked Intel OS X was more stable. Applications beachball out of nowhere. And no, not just Rosetta apps, that's a different story. Regular old Intel compiled universal applications will just die. And then spring to life. And then die. Programs quit unexpectedly. I've sent 25-30 reports to Apple, just because. I never send those damn things, and now it's fun.

Those are the big items, I suppose. I'll let you all know how it goes. All one of you. :)

My coworker had a strange issue where his MacBook Pro would boot up, run just fine for about 30 seconds, and freeze up. The cursor would still move just fine, but you couldn't access anything. SSH sessions into the machine would stop as well. I was baffled, trying to remove Parallels Workstation, thinking that kernel extension had issues, but to no avail.

Turns out that Security Update 2006-003 on Intel managed to mess around with a few services, causing them not to work properly, or abort. In this case, RemoteDesktopAgent would hard freeze a system as soon as launchctl would start it. Remove it from /System/Library/StartupItems, and all is well again.

I wonder how long til Apple releases a Remote Desktop update, or if this is something that is "fixed" in the 3.0 paid upgrade of Apple Remote Desktop.

sigh.