My first & last Macbook

I started writing this post some months ago back in September but never got around to finishing it. At first this post was going to be me singing my praises for Ubuntu and how well Ubuntu supports the Macbook Pro. Unfortunately in that time I’ve now moved to Mac OS X…

I ran Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro seemlessly for just under 3 months before upgrading to Intrepid Ibex. The upgrade went smoothly, except for my office printer no longer working. This lead to Ubuntu’s demise on my MBP. After re-installing the driver 3 times I decided I’d remove CUPS in case there were left over configuration files causing issues. Unfortunately I stupidly marked all CUPS components with ‘remove completely’ via synaptic. I then watched synaptic systematically remove nearly all my system packages… nautilus, firefox, gnome, the lot. My bad.

After 3 days of recovering my data and failed attempts to re-install, and have my Macbook boot Ubuntu without live CD assistance, I gave up and installed Mac OS X. This in itself is no fault of Apple or Ubuntu. Apple never meant for Macbook’s to run Linux.

Two issues arose when I moved from Windows Vista running on Bootcamp to native Ubuntu.

1) Rewind to mid-August, after reading up on hardware compatibility, and how to put Ubuntu on my Macbook Pro, I wiped my Windows Vista and OSX partitions and installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy). That was a whole lot of fun – only realising Apple had crippled my “Superdrive” with a firmware update, I couldn’t read my Mac OSX Leopard DVD (I’m not the only one – £400+ for Apple to fix it, no thanks!) and only able to occasionally read the Ubuntu installation CD.

I managed to overcome these hurdles with a trusty 16GB Rally 2 USB stick and a WD Passport external USB hard drive. I even splashed out on an external DVD-RW to make future re-installs easier.

2) In early September I noticed when running on batteries my Macbook Pro would switch off after only 5 mins. No prompts about low battery, no shutdown sequence, nada. Just power off immediately. At the time I put this down to poor power management by Ubuntu. Just last night however (running OS X) it did exactly the same thing. So it looks like another hardware fault on my £1350 MBP.

The firmware upgrade happened some months ago, possibly autumn 2007 but having no reason to use the DVD drive for months, I never noticed until I switched operating systems. The instant-power-off-with-no-warning issue has only manifested since August. Co-incidentally just as my 1 yr of Apple Care expired.

So despite it’s low profile form factor and decent performance, I vow never to purchase another Mac again. It’s a regular PC laptop for me next time …