It has been about a week since I got everything set up on my new MacBook, and I thought I would write up a quick post to let everyone know how things are going with the new system.

Hardware setup

First, let me briefly describe my setup. For hardware, I have my new white 2.0ghz MacBook, with 100GB HDD and 2GB RAM. I connect it to a 23″ Apple Cinema Display at home, and a 17″ Sony LCD at the office with monitor spanning between the MacBook screen and the external monitor (ie. two monitor setup, not mirrored). I also use an external mouse/keyboard in both locations. I chose to keep the larger display at home because I tend to handle a lot of managerial / business stuff at the office, and do more intensive coding at home. As with all Macs, the MacBook does a perfect job switching between different monitors and peripherals, remembering resolutions and settings for every location. A docking station would be nice, but I can live with plugging in 3-4 cables (power, monitor, USB, audio) at each location.

Software setup

For software, the MacBook is running Mac OS 10.4.6. I have Flash MX, 2004, and 8 installed for Mac, as well as PhotoShop and the Mactel native Flash Player 8. Using Parallels virtualization software, I am also running Windows XP Pro SP2 with Flash 8, FlexBuilder 2 and the Flash Player 9 beta. I would definitely recommend reading the at least the Quick Start guide if you plan on installing Parallels VM – not all of the options are entirely straightforward.

User experience

Thus far, everything is working exactly as I had hoped. I use Flash 8 under Rosetta emulation in OSX for quick/simpler tasks, where the IDE and player run adequately fast for this kind of work (I’d say a bit faster than on my 1 ghz 12″ powerbook). When I need more speed or Flash Player 9, I boot into XP in Parallels. It is quite fast – at least on par (if not faster) than my developers’ 1 year old PC laptops. FlexBuilder 2 also works without a hitch, though it is pretty RAM hungry so you’ll definitely want to assign a lot of RAM to the VM if you want to run it (and install extra RAM in your Mactel). Also the boot time is great… XP in Parallels boots in 20 seconds exactly (interestingly, this is the same amount of time my MacBook takes to boot OSX – cool that I can boot OSX and XP in well under a minute). In my experience this is a lot faster than using the suspend/resume features in Parallels, which take almost 45 seconds. I attribute this to assigning 1 gb of RAM to the virtual machine (suspend basic saves the RAM state to disk afaik, so more RAM equals more time to suspend/resume).

XP actually seems more pleasant to run in this environment, though it could just be due to the fact that I know I have no real investment in the OS, so I can poach the virtual harddrive with no problems if I pick up any virii or spyware. I like that the two finger trackpad shortcuts works in XP under Parallels. I also like the small fact that my Logitech keyboard’s media keys can control iTunes in OSX even when I’m working in XP. I definitely don’t think I’ll be installing Bootcamp any time soon.

It’s also worth noting that the virtual harddrive Parallels uses automatically expands and shrinks as you use more or less space in XP. To me, this is a definite advantage over Bootcamp (which uses a drive partition).

From a hardware perspective, my MacBook remains pretty much flawless – no dead pixels, the external temperature gets hot, but not excessively so (no more than my powerbook), no staining (though I rarely touch the trackpad), and no whining or buzzing. I have noticed the “mooing” sound some users have complained about, though it sounds more like pigeons to me. Anecdotally, it seems like the fan management doesn’t have a temperature tolerance range, so if you push the machine just hard enough it will spin up the fan, cool the system slightly, turn off the fan almost immediately, heat up again, rinse, repeat. This leads to a slight intermittent cooing sound, which is probably only obvious because of how quiet the system is otherwise. I’m guessing it will be fixed with a firmware update in the future, but it’s not a major issue imho.

Problems / wishlist

I have encountered a few minor irritants beyond the fact that I have to boot XP at all. Parallels isn’t very smart about switching between different monitors, or with multi-monitors and full screen mode. It’s not a major issue at all, but it frequently requires me to adjust the display resolution in XP when I switch displays (sometimes Parallels will handle this automatically, other times it won’t). I’ve also experienced some minor issues with shared folders in Parallels (basically faux-network drives in XP that give you access to all of your Mac files) – they are often surprisingly slow to open (10-15 seconds), and I’ve had them stop working until I rebooted XP on one occasion. Once open they work perfectly, so I’m guessing this is just a beta bug.

I love that the clipboard is shared between OSX and XP – I usually have documentation open on one monitor in OSX, and copy/paste code snippets into XP on the other – but I really hope Parallels adds drag and drop support for files similar to Virtual PC. It was really handy in VPC to be able to drag a file from the OSX desktop into XP, edit it, and then drag it back to OSX. I’d also love to see integration with the OSX dock – VPC showed all your open PC apps in the dock, which helped to integrate the guest OS better. Considering the price ($50 pre-order) and relative newness of the Parallels VM, I can’t complain.

Photoshop is a little slow to start in Rosetta under OSX, but once started I don’t notice any major problems with speed. It helps that I only use it for digital work, so I rarely touch a PSD larger than screen resolution. All of the universal binaries (ie. Mactel native applications) I’ve tried are screamingly fast of course – I can hardly wait for the UB versions of PhotoShop, Flash and Flash Player!

This would be a great time for Adobe to extend their EULA to allow you to install your secondary licenses cross-platform. We have enough licenses to go around in the office, but if I was a PC user buying a Mactel, or a Mac user running XP, I know I’d *really* appreciate the flexibility to install a single license on both OSX and XP.

Summary

Overall, I’m really happy with this solution. It’s wonderful to own a single laptop that can go everywhere with me again. It’s very cool to be able to boot both OSX and XP, and even cooler that I can run them both simultaneously. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do the trick just fine until a UB version of CS3 / Flash 9 is released.