MacBook report

My new MacBook arrived last night, much to my relief. Even though people in Japan do it all the time, I don’t like carrying around huge amounts of cash.

After 24 hours, here are my gripes (because I’m much better at griping than just about anything else), both about Leopard and about the MacBook.

• Time Machine doesn’t like my external hard drive. I have a 320GB external FireWire hard drive with two partitions, one for data and one for backup. I successfully set Time Machine to use the backup partition, then let it go. It repeatedly stalls a couple gigs into the backup, then one-by-one system services start being flaky. Eventually everything stops responding and I have to force reboot. Boo. (Edit: This seems to be fixed in 10.5.1.)
• The 3D Dock style sucks. Luckily you can switch to 2D style by entering defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock in the Terminal.
• Displaying folder contents instead of folder icons in the Dock is the stupidest thing ever. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• Stacks and Grid view are sort of ok, but I prefer the original behavior. Please give us the old behavior as an option! (Edit: This was sort of addressed eventually.)
• The menubar transparency is distracting. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• The new scheme for specifying individual window view preferences is beyond stupid. I shouldn’t have to say “FTFF” 7 years after 10.0 was released.
• Front Row lets you browse your ~/Movies folder, which is great. It doesn’t, however, let you browse your ~/Pictures folder; instead you’re limited to viewing the contents of your iPhoto library. That seems like something of an oversight.
• While everything is much faster than my old iBook G4, the MacBook still chokes at things that it shouldn’t—switching between resource-intensive apps, for instance. Since I can see my CPU isn’t being pegged, I suppose that means it’s swapping RAM out (I can’t hear it because the hard drive is so quiet); the stock 1GB must not be enough (I’ve got 1GB of swap without having run anything particularly demanding), but that’s kind of annoying coming from my iBook where 1GB was enough.
• The USB ports are even closer together than the iBook’s, where things were already not quite fitting in. Now I can’t have my iPod and my Logitech mouse plugged in at the same time. Obnoxious.
• In general the machine is very quiet, but when the fans reach full speed (Spotlight indexing seems to be a major cause of this) they sound like jet engines.

I’m sure I’ll think of more stuff soon.

Edit: I can’t believe there’s no way to have Front Row run on an external display without either turning on mirroring or switching main screens. Very disappointing.

Edit: A new first: My keyboard stopped working. Entirely. Across the whole system. I didn’t install or run anything weird. Fixed by rebooting. (Edit: Fixed by a MacBook keyboard system update.)