Where art thou Mac alternatives?

Alex Kidman | Feb 18, 2009 4:11 PM

Alex Kidman gets a feel for life on the road during his quest to find the ultimate in portable Mac alternatives.

Notebooks – they’re really portable, right? I decided to take this theory into the practical world this month, taking my Macbook on the road (almost literally) and checking out how well a Mac can actually go away from its usual home on my writing desk.

I’m only a lowly journalist (cue: mournful violins), so the heady heights of a Macbook Air elude me; I’m just talking a Macbook, 2006 generation here. Portable, no doubt, but not a light weight on one’s shoulder. One of the things I really quite like about OS X is that it comes, out of the box, with quite a bit of creative software ready to go.

Sure, you can pump that creativity up (depending on your field of imaginative pursuit) quite a bit with, say, Photoshop (or Aperture, or whatever) if that’s your thing, but you don’t have to.

The nice thing there, in a portability sense, is that a lot of the applications that I want to use are built in and work rather well, whether it’s quickly uploading photos, a dab of simple writing, or even cutting together an impromptu holiday video.

I wasn’t so much fussed on the applications front, but for a working writer, there was a more pressing need to address – reliable internet access.

Now, it’s true that the state of free and/or easily available connectivity took a big boost recently with the news that McDonald’s is rolling out free wireless across its “restaurants” nationwide.

It’s probably not good news for the arteries of those who desperately need an internet fix, but it also doesn’t discriminate; if you can work out how to link up a Mac, PC or Linux box, you’re essentially away. The Maccas solution didn’t suit me for two reasons.

Firstly, there’s the security aspect; while I’m not silly enough to start doing my Net banking beneath the golden arches, I’d hate for some wacky security flaw to reveal any of my info to anyone snooping – and all you’d really need to do is buy a strawberry shake and sit there scanning for long enough, if you were of a criminal mindset. That might be getting into paranoid territory, but the more pressing issue that Maccas does bring to mind is of sticky, greasy food.

Just as Macbooks don’t need cups of coffee or inadvertent dunking into olive oil on a regular basis, they’re also not likely to respond well to having gherkins or shakes implanted onto them.
In the end, for reasons of speed, coverage and security, I went with a Telstra Next-G dongle.

Yes, I know, they’re horribly expensive in comparison to other mobile broadband options (see November 2008, page 62), but, in line with accepted Mac theology, they do just work.

And on the routes that I was travelling, the Optus and Vodafone signals were, to put it mildly, weak to non-existent.

I clearly wasn’t the only Mac aficionado with this kind of holiday idea; while wandering through a South Australian shopping district I spotted another Mac user with a highly cabled and festooned online Mac, although in her case it was an older G4 iBook which needed, amongst other things, a web camera awkwardly placed on the top.

The thought did strike me that I could perform many of the functions I most critically needed with just an iPhone, and undoubtedly that’s a big reason why Apple’s not in the netbook space.

The iPhone problem, however, comes down to the lack of tethering – which still has me scratching my head, as it would be a cash windfall for the telcos that allowed it, given the stupid state of wireless data pricing – and the lack of a keyboard I could type at a proper speed on. Or, in other words, I’m still waiting to buy a iNetbook, Apple. Are you listening?