Since I am feeling rather geeky today I thought I’d write about a new utility I discovered recently for my notebook and how that got me thinking about the Mac platform. If you aren’t into tech you should probably just skip this entire post. Go look at cute cats here.

One of the greatest things about a Macintosh notebook is that you never, ever need to shut it down, ever. One things Macs do really well is what the PC world calls a suspend state or in Mac lingo is Sleep. This is particularly important on notebooks because once you are done with your work, say in a library, in class, at work or wherever, you drop the lid on your MacBook and get up and go. Once you’ve got where you want to be you pull out your MacBook, open the lid and you are right back where you left off. Immediately. No boot up, no login, no restarting applications or opening documents, everything is the way it was when you last closed the lid.

You pull out your MacBook and start doing what you have to with it while people with Windows notebooks sit and look at boot-up screens resignedly and if they are running Vista you’re normally done googling, mailing or writing half a page before they hear their Windows startup sound. 

Its also fun to just close the lid and drop the MacBook into your bag and have people say “Don’t you need to shut it down?” and answer “Meh.. It’s a Mac.”

 
From here on things get geeky.

Macs ‘Sleep’ by dropping into a suspended state where the RAM is kept powered up and your applications and the OS itself is kept ‘frozen’ in the memory. When Apple moved from IBM’s PowerPC chips to Intel’s CoreDuo they added an additional step to the sleeping process that involved writing the contents of the memory to the hard disk as well as keeping the RAM active. They did this ostensibly so that one’s session would not be lost in case the battery died out while the Mac was in Sleep mode. In this case the memory would lose power and hence lose its contents but once attached to a power source and started up the system would simply reload the memory state from the hard disk and you’d be right back where you left off, albeit not instantly as the process would take a few seconds. 

Apple calls this ‘Safe Sleep’ which is the Mac equivalent of a PC hibernating.

The only problem with this is that once you have a large amount of RAM. In my case, 3 GB of it, the process of writing the contents of this memory to the disk before going in to Sleep mode takes a while. Previously, if you didn’t have the patience to wait for a few seconds every time you closed the lid on your MacBook you could disable Safe Sleep through a terminal command but you did lose the safety of a non-volatile copy of your system state if your battery died on you.

Obviously the smart thing to do would be to go into Safe Sleep mode if the battery was precariously low else just go into normal Sleep mode but Apple made the setting all or nothing (even the ‘nothing’ setting only available through an obscure command line hack)

But a few days ago I came across a brilliant little utility called Smart Sleep that gives a system preference that allows you to switch Safe Sleep on, off or let the system decide based on how much battery power remains. This should have been part of the OS itself but it took an indie developer to do Apple’s job for them.

This brings me to the second part of this post. The future of Mac hardware. Safe Sleep is a case in point.

Back in the PowerPC era you could take the battery out of a PowerBook and put in a new one and not lose the contents of the RAM. There was some sort of capacitor that would keep the RAM charged for about a minute while you swapped in the new battery.

Apple could provide this hugely useful feature only because they designed their own northbridges. With the move to Intel Apple began to use Intel’s standard northbridge design and that is the root of a lot of what is wrong with Apple’s hardware today.

With the switch to Intel came Apple’s first huge step back. Integrated Graphics. Low-end desktop systems and MacBooks all use Intel integrated graphics. The Intel GMA 950 to begin with and the X3100 later on. For a graphically intensive UI like Mac OS X that uses 3D acceleration for so many tasks like drawing windows and animations, integrated graphics by Intel are just not good enough. 

Luckily this has been remedied in the latest line of Mac portables where even the low end MacBooks get decent Nvidia GPUs. But the latest line of MacBooks and MacBook Pros have a bigger problem. Especially if like a lot of Macintosh users you do a lot of video or audio work.

Apple is killing firewire.

Firewire is much better than USB in every way. First of all it is peer to peer, you can daisy-chain devices, it doesn’t put a huge load on the CPU and it supports target disk mode which by itself has helped me fix more Macs than I can remember.

But firewire hardware is expensive or at the very least not as cheap as USB hardware which you can find just about everywhere these days. Firewire is also not very common in the Windows world that Intel designs its chipsets for and hence I fear for its future.

The new MacBooks don’t have firewire of ANY sort. So If you are a video professional you can just rule them out immediately. The new MacBook Pros only have a firewire 800 port that is backward compatible with firewire 400. So if you want to capture video from a DV camera to an external firewire hard disk you’re shit outta luck.

Steve Jobs has been answering e-mail telling people that all new cameras have USB connections to capture video which is quite true but he hasn’t taken into account all the institutions that already HAVE a lot of money invested in expensive camera equipment that uses firewire. Production houses large and small and more importantly film schools, which don’t upgrade their equipment very often. For students the entry cost for a Mac than can capture video over firewire or attach to an external audio device, has just become 2000 USD which is a stupid amount of money.

So, to end this rather long post, let me just say, Apple please don’t kill firewire.

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