A few weeks ago, Gadget Lab’s own Brian X Chen moaned about his dreadful experience using a hackintosh netbook for six months. The poor poppet whined on about the case falling apart, the Wi-Fi simply dying on him on a trip abroad and a whole range of other petty niggles.
As Chen mentioned, I agree on one point: The trackpad on the gen.1 Wind is truly atrocious, a tiny square of plastic with almost unusable buttons that you, inexplicably, need two hands to press. But on almost everything else, I disagree. Sure, the Wind isn’t perfect, as either a Windows or a Mac machine (although the Ubuntu Netbook Remix would be almost perfect if the Wi-Fi would work). But it has some great advantages, and a few tweaks down the road I have a tiny, portable machine that has proven very useful.
First, the obvious. The thing is tiny, and it’s a Mac. I don’t want to get into the whole Mac vs. PC thing. I just prefer to use a Mac, I’m used to it and everything is second nature. Now that the problems with certain drivers have been ironed out, it behaves exactly like my bigger Macs, even to the extent of switching automatically to line-output when plugging in headphones. The Mac OS has been rock solid on this machine since the very beginning. Maybe that’s because I didn’t steal my version off the internet.
Then there’s the battery. I replaced the truly awful three-cell that shipped with the machine with a huge, wrong colored nine-cell. It’s not pretty, but I get a true seven hours of use from the computer, and I still have the old one for an extra hour or so if I need it. This alone is reason to own a netbook, Mac or Windows, as it means you are no longer tied to a power source.
I took the Wind (actually, a Wind clone from Medion) on a weekend trip to Rome. I threw it in hand-luggage along with an external hard drive and turned the whole thing into a portable photo backup device. That there was neighbor-fi in the apartment helped, too, for checking out tourist spots, but for the main task — to clear my CF cards every day and do some basic editing (yes, it runs Lightroom, even with just a gig of RAM) — the netbook was perfect.
There’s more. At the kind of parties I host, there is always a need for the internet and, of course, music. The Wind acts as a great wireless front-end to iTunes sharing and Airtunes streaming, and you can pass it around the drunken guests without worrying. Sure, $400 is too much to lose to a spilled gin and tonic, but it’s better than $1600 for a replacement MacBook.
If you are aware from the beginning that a netbook is a cheap, low-spec, low-rent kind of computer, with the cheapest, most plasticky parts, then you won’t be disappointed. And if you hack it to run OS X, and you have similarly low expectations, you’ll actually be pleasantly surprised. I love my hackintosh netbook. It’s not perfect, but is sure is damn useful.
Six Months With a Hackintosh Netbook: It Ain’t Pretty [Gadget Lab]
It Lives! Gadget Lab’s Netbook Running OS X Leopard [Gadget Lab]
Photo: Charlie Sorrel
