Last week I bought an eee 901.
This is a fairly major departure for me - the last time I bought a non-Apple computer was about 1987 (an Amstrad CPC 128).
I already have a 15” MacBookPro supplied by work, but that tends to stay at home, tethered to an external monitor, keyboard, and external usb drive used for Time Machine.
I do occasionally move my MacBook round the house, but I’ve started to realise that increasingly I can’t be bothered (unmounting the usb drive is a particular pain since it often involves waking the machine up and entering a password just so that I can put it to sleep again). I also rarely leave the house with it. It is too large to fit into my normal bag, and quite heavy anyway. All of this is in marked contrast to my old aluminium 12” G4 powerbook, which used to go everywhere with me.
So basically I was in the market for something small, rugged, and not too pricey - in other words a netbook. I am a Mac programmer and fan of course, but Apple don’t make netbooks. Bugger!
So I started looking into going down the Hackintosh route - ie get a generic PC and hack it to run MacOS X (or rather, hack MacOS X to run on it).
I also realised that these days I rarely have time for much in the way of hobby programming, and a lot of what I would do if I had the time would be Python/Django based. Other than that, what I wanted this machine for was note taking, surfing, and that’s about it. So actually the need for a Mac suddenly seemed a bit more remote.
Hence the choice of an eee 901. Its small, I’ve got a solid-state drive so its rugged, it came with Linux installed so I didn’t have to pay anything for a copy of Windows that I’d never used - and a lot of people already have experience hacking it to hell, including running MacOS X.
So far I’ve only had it for a few days, so these are very initial thoughts:
Size
Its small, and pretty light. At first I thought it was feather-light, then I realised that the battery is disconnected when it ships. Lifting up the battery I realised that it weighs about as much as the rest of the machine!
Keyboard
The keyboard is very useable. Yes it is small, but even my fat fingers can cope quite well. I wouldn’t want to write a novel on it, and I’ve made quite a few mistakes typing this.
Once you’ve spent enough time trying to type on an iPhone, the eee feels positively spacious though.
Trackpad
The trackpad sucks. It feels innaccurate, and the buttons require way too much force. The driver situation for them also seems a bit iffy, but that’s my own fault for throwing away the built in OS and installing…
Ubuntu
So I trashed the built in system, but rather than going straight down the Hackintosh route, I thought I’d trying living in Linux first for a while. I develop for Windows and the Mac at work, and sometimes for consoles too, but its a long time since I’ve used a Linux desktop.
So far I’d have to say that it’s “fine”. I haven’t been blown away, but for what I’ve done on it so far, it works. There is a certain geeky pleasure to be had in installing a custom kernel and tweaking file system parameters for optimised SSD performance, but frankly all of that stuff can be done on a Mac too these days (its Unix with nobs on, basically).
Conclusions
Its too early to tell how much use I’m going to get out of this machine, but for £250 its certainly a considerably smaller outlay than a new, smaller Mac would have been, and it’s quite a lot of fun feeling that I can trash the OS whenever I feel like it, or perhaps try risky hardware mods that I wouldn’t attempt on a bigger machine.
I probably will try to get MacOS running on it soon, just to see how the performance compares with Ubuntu. I’ll probably also get some more RAM, and maybe upgrade the SSD. And perhhaps paint it a silly colour or cover it with stickers. Fun :)