iMac, 2006: can it compete with an M1 iMac?

In 2017, my 2006 iMac’s hard disk started making clanky noises. Bad sign, I thought. And it was.

My old 2006 iMac was a “second car computer”. It was useful for basic work that needed a larger screen than my 2012 MacBook Pro. Soon after the iMac’s clankiness began, we started a series of house moves. The iMac went into a storage box. Five house moves, four years, three years in storage, two countries and a global pandemic later, I can finally see my iMac again, in all its chunky glory. And I’ve missed it. But it was obviously still in trouble and I didn’t feel like paying to have someone install an SSD in it. And I love it too much to mess it up myself. So, for fun, I attached an old external hard disk to the iMac, dug an original Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD from another storage box (DVDs are so useful) and installed it on the external hard disk to see if I could boot it that way and save myself the cost of installing an SSD in a fifteen year old computer. It worked and the speed is very acceptable - maybe because it's running on FireWire 400 instead of USB 2.0? Apple still do software updates for Snow Leopard online, so three reboots later, I was fully up to date, so far as 10.6.8 was concerned. 

The external drive installation worked so well that I ordered a copy of Lion from Apple a few days later (Apple made Lion a free download a few weeks later - oh well). That rolled on smoothly in about 35 minutes. It doesn't feel quite as sharp as Snow Leopard but it works and it’s a year or two closer to the current version. If I upgraded the ram from 2.5GB to 4GB, things would probably improve (although only 3.3GB of the 4GB would be accessible, but that's another story involving general 32-bittiness). Lion needs 2GB ram, minimum, though so more would definitely be good.

And thus, three years later, I finally have an iMac again.

Rebuilding my 2006 iMac happened while the world was still going berserk about the 2021 M1 iMacs. I must admit, they're very nice looking. But if I got a new iMac, I'd have to get rid of the old iMac. My home office  isn't big enough for two iMacs and a working from home pc desk. It's one iMac or the other. And the iMac lives on the floor most of the time anyway.

On one hand, the new iMacs are gorgeous.

But on the other hand, I thought, really, what would I do with the new one that I don't do with the old one? I don't do 4K video editing or music production or other data intensive stuff that the top tech influencers on YouTube do. Most of my computing is done in generic consumer apps: writing, family photos, listening to music (often on CDs), looking at YouTube or Netflix, email. “Faster” doesn’t help thinking or typing or listening to music or watching a DVD. I do run Linux VMs as a hobby but I don’t need to do that on the iMac.

Which led me to thinking...

In Notes, I have a note entitled Rules of Life. One of them is "Use what you have". The idea is not to buy something if you already have something that can be repurposed. I've often ignored this rule, often to my regret, but let's apply it. What would I use the new iMac for that I couldn't do on the old iMac?

Let's make a list. I love lists.

Writing. iMac 2006 has TextEdit, Bean, iWork 09 and I've an old MS Office Mac  on DVD somewhere if I really want that.

Spreadsheet? I have Numbers and... that DVD of MS Office somewhere.

Photos. I could use iMac 2006's iPhoto so long as I save all my photos in jpeg format (I tend to use raw a lot).

Video. I don't create videos.

The Web, YouTube, news. There's a browser called Firefox Legacy for Lion that's based on an older Firefox. It's still maintained though. And having a relatively recent browser brings Google Drive and things like SimpleNote into play, adding to other writing tools mentioned above. In reality, I wouldn’t go online for long with a ten year old operating system, though. It’s there for emergencies. Plus, I have other computers. I don’t need the iMac to go online.

Social media. Apart from Youtube and commenting on news sites occasionally, I don't do any social media. And I have the MacBook for it.

Email. I do most of my email on my iPad so a new iMac wouldn't make much of a difference.

Facetime, Zoom, Skype... I can mostly do it on my iPad.

Netflix. I've a third generation AppleTV, so I mostly do Netflix on an iPad in bed or on a tv downstairs.

Printing. My printer is almost as old as the iMac. A new printer would be an issue, probably.

Scanning. See printer above.

DVDs. I have some.The iMac 2021 can't do DVDs unless I buy a Superdrive. iMac 2006s can do DVDs natively. And I've a set of Harman Kardon SoundSticks that add to the sound quality if I really want it.

Backups. TimeMachine!! On Lion! Yes, really. I’m backing up to a second FireWire 400 disk. Or I just use a memory stick.

Am I missing anything? Don't think so. If the iMac dies (graphics card malfunction, maybe?), I would probably replace it with a new one or a Mac mini. Then again, maybe not. A pre-2012 24" or 27" would be fun... Just connect those external disks and I’m off. Or a used Mac mini, as I have a 24” screen for my work pc.

Downsides to a 2006 iMac? Sure.

Software. Finding software can be a problem. The Mac App Store arrived on Snow Leopard 10.6.something. But you won't find anything there for Snow Leopard or Lion now. If you kept a bunch of old DVDs, this is your moment. I have Snow tLeopard, iLife, iWork and MS Office all on DVD, so that’s pretty much everything a non-professional user would probably want.

Security. These machines are old. Vulnerabilities are present. You can reduce risk by doing the following. Don’t stay online any longer than necessary. Don’t do anything requiring authentication (banking, passwords). Avoid dodgy websites - in fact, stick with very well-travelled websites. Switch on the Mac's firewall and use the best browser you can find. Do some research before choosing a browser for your elderly Mac. Switch off Bluetooth as well, if it’s present. The less you network, the safer you are. Basically - stay offline.

Cloud storage. Forget about using OneDrive or Dropbox or probably other services. Their software almost definitely requires a newer operating system than your pre-10.8 example. That’s a real problem when using Office365. But having said that, you can access Google Docs (and maybe Office365) via Firefox Legacy if you have to. Maybe iCloud as well.

If you stay offline, a 2006 iMac can do 80% of what the 2021 iMac can do. And I already own a working one.

"Rule #1. Use what you have."

Postscript

Having said all that above about how everything was blooming in my garden of ancient Macs, I switched on my iMac and found that the backup disk had died. No problem. It was an ancient 80GB Fire wire disk. I'm not really using the iMac for anything serious.

Two weeks later, it wouldn't boot off the main external drive, which is a much newer 500GB Firewire and USB drive. I booted off the DVD (see, they are useful) and the disk looked okay. But it still would not boot. I reinstalled Leopard and Snow Leopard and for various reasons, I've left it on Snow Leopard for the moment.

What caused this? I don't know. What I do know is that the first rule of computing is that All Hard Disks Die. And at inconvenient moments. Like when you're going to take photos for a blog entry. 

So if you're not backed up, back up now.

Hang out with yourself

Or, how to get disconnected for productivity.

I'm not the first person to ever say this, but it needs to be said aloud in this house occasionally. We're all online too much (me included), looking at what's there: Youtube, news sites, social media, forums. Games, in some cases (games are a waste of processor cycles but that’s just me). Our computers are mostly for consumption or play. They're something we watch. TV with a billion channels.

And here's a heresy: this isn't what computers were for. Computers were creativity tools. Obviously, they still can be. Ads for phones, tablets and computers all show what you can do with your device: photography, video, writing, music, coding. Nobody ever advertises a tablet as something to curl up with to catch up on Instagram for three hours. But increasingly, that's what they're being used for.

I started writing this post on a pretty elderly Mac - a 2002 iBook. In between, I’ve updated it on an iPhone, a 2003 PowerBook and I'm writing these very words on an iPad 3.

Writing on the iBook and the PowerBook felt more like getting back to what computers were for originally. Doing disconnected, "distraction-free" stuff on computers can be liberating. Like writing. Watching a favourite DVD with a mug of tea and a slice of cake - and nothing else. no second screening. Listening to music while writing. I really like hanging out with myself on the computer, if you know what I mean, without needing to go online to catch up with the rest of the world. Sitting in front of a disconnected computer is like sitting in front of a sheet of blank paper with a pen. There are no real distractions. I can write something or I don't. I can play a bit of music in the background if I want. Keep looking at the screen. Say something. Write something. Do something.

That's how computers used to be, before the internet boom. It was just you and the cursor. Almost everything you did on a computer was creative in some way.

It was also often a single-tasking experience. For one, because your consumer-level computer possibly only ran one program at a time (on operating systems like CP/M and DOS) or didn't cope well with too many programs at a time (1990s versions of Windows and MacOS). If you wanted reliability, you ran 2-3 programs, max, because that was most of what you needed. You had a wordprocessing package, a spreadsheet and a few games. This was true of everything from the slowest computer you could buy to some of the fastest. People didn't know you needed twenty browser tabs. Or what browser tabs were. And software was expensive then, so you thought carefully about what you bought.

And this is an interesting thing about vintage computers. If you have one that you use regularly, say a 15-20 year old one, it's probably used for creative work of some sort, unless you're a gamer. Because they aren't up to what the web needs today. In my way, I'm often at my most reflective when I'm playing around on a vintage computer. There are few distractions (partly because I'm not a gamer, like I said).

I wouldn't go back to those days. Online tools are just too useful for everyone. Just having Wikipedia alone...  But once I'm on the web, time leaches away.

So what am I saying? Don't use the web? No. But if you're not doing anything in particular on your computer (tablet, phone....), switch off the wifi. It's that icon there, look. Switch it off, now, just for a moment.

Well done. Now, prepare to close your browser. Read to the end of this page first and follow the instructions.

When you have, open a new text editor document or a photo editor. Or an art package. A spreadsheet, even, if you're that way inclined.

You're now facing a creativity tool. Staff offline. No quick reseaching "ten top places to visit in Peru" or "How to cure writer's block". Not allowed.

Sit there.

Make something. Draw something. Design something. Stay offline.

Create.

Write a blog entry or make some notes for a script or a novel or a new business or where you want to travel to next. Review your CV/resume. Make some music. Edit some photos. Try black and white or an xpro filter. Edit that family camcorder footage and make something with it that you can show your kids' friends or partners when they come over.

Hang out with yourself for a while.

See what you're capable of, creatively.

Offline.

Okay. NOW, CLOSE ALL YOUR PROGRAMS... And create.

Bye.

Chrome OS: the new mainframe

It's funny how a thing you've never really thought about can change the way you see a lot of things when you do.

Let's talk about the cloud. 

I'm not much of a cloud user. However, something has happened which is making me think about the way I manage my files. That's making me think about what I might eventually buy to replace my 2012 MacBook.

Up until now, a new computer would probably have been another Mac, although I'm not happy about the way that most new Macs can no longer be upgraded or even easily fixed when things go wrong. But given a choice of PC or Mac, I'll choose Macs. Generally.

Last Christmas, though, on impulse I bought a small Chromebook at the John Lewis Christmas sale. It's nothing special: a basic, blue, Asus C201P with an 11.6" screen, the usual 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, etc, etc. Very standard Chromebook. Lightweight and cheap.

You probably know enough about Chromebooks. They run ChromeOS which uses Google's Chrome browser and depends heavily on cloud-based storage, either on Google Drive or elsewhere. Chromebooks are effectively terminals into the great cloud-based mainframe of apps and data that's grown up around us.

Despite my long attachment to Mac hardware and locally installed apps like iTunes, Photos, iMovie, Pages, Numbers, MS Office and others, I've really taken to ChromeOS and this little laptop. It's simple and it's been bulletproof. It just works. And it's made me reconsider my whole locally-installed apps and data storage ecosystem.

Could I just move everything to the cloud?

It turns out that I have three kinds of data. Some of this data is cloud-friendly; some isn't.

1. Personal information and data: email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes (on iPhone Notes). This is already accessible via the cloud. Mostly it's in iCloud. And much of it is generated on my iPhone. 
2. Documents and spreadsheets - created locally on Word, Pages, Excel, Numbers and a small few created online on Google Drive, Office365 and Simplenote (which I also use on the iPhone). This could all go in the cloud and some is there already. I use Dropbox for storing documents, mostly as a way to write something on one machine and pick it up on another. Some of the documents go back years - I still have files in Apple Works format. There might even be some files in WordStar format. With Dropbox, though, you still have local files. 
3. And then there's "multimedia", which comprises photos, family videos, books and music. Some of the photos are scans of 35mm or medium format prints. Most of the music is on CD. The books are on Kindle. The videos are all family video shot on various camcorders, digital cameras, phones. 

I could upload categories one and two to the cloud very easily. Much of it is already there. The problem is the third type of content.

Music first. I tend to play music on my iPhone, sometimes from iTunes on my MacBook and occasionally on a stereo. I still have a lot of CDs. I'll need a way to transfer music from my CDs to my phone and computer for the foreseeable future. My MacBook can do that. A MacMini just for home use could also do that. An old Mac could work as a music jukebox. A G3 could do that. The Chromebook can't. You're probably saying Spotify and iTunes Music and so on. I don't need Spotify to give me what I already own, although it's a great app and I use it occasionally. And I don't trust the iTunes Store. I've bought music there and it doesn't show up everywhere. CDs are real and they're platform independent. They are compatible with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Linux, the stereo in the kitchen. You can also play them on any computer with a CD drive and speakers (that excludes Chromebooks, by the way, even on external drives). Once you've bought CDs, you own them. Think what you like; CDs work for me. :-)

Photos/video: this is probably the sticking point. I'm deeply uncomfortable about putting family and personal photos of my life online and my wife is just as uncomfortable. I've photos going back years. Before I was married. Childhood photos. Photos from my twenties.  Grandparents' photos. I've thousands of photos and while about half of them are rubbish, some I really don't want to lose.

DVDs. I have some. Not a lot. I've the same reservations about iTunes (will it always remember what I've bought?).

If my obsession with backups sounds odd, consider that I've had a major house fire in my life and I lost a decade's worth of photos from the 1990s as well as everything else I owned. Never again. So where do I put photos and family videos for safety? And that's before I start editing photos, tweaking them and sometimes publishing to Flickr.

Add that to the fact that much of my photography is from cameras, not the phone. I scan old stuff occasionally. That might change, but it's also an issue.

Once I set music and photos/video aside, though, the Chromebook can access everything else on the cloud: email, contacts, calendar, docs, notes, etc.

So my next Mac might be a MacMini that's mostly for photo/video editing, (category 3) with a Chromebook for writing stuff (category 2) when I'm out and about or sitting in bed.

The Mac's key selling point is becoming its media editing ability. Everything else I do, though, can be done on any hardware using web apps. And if it can be done on any hardware, why do I still need a Mac? Only data category 3 is really keeping me here now.

And I didn't see that coming.

Freewrite? It's a reincarnated Tandy Model 100!

There follows a stream of consciousness rant about Tandy 100s, Alphasmarts, the new Freewrite word processor and the virtues of very old Macs as bargain, stand-in, distraction-free writing environments for those who want or own them.

So.

To begin.

Astrohaus have done it. With their pretty new Freewrite, they've reinvented the Tandy Model 100. And they're not the first to do so.

In the beginning, there was the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 - the Trash 100 to its fans (see pic at end). The Model 100 was the first cheap, lightweight laptop. It could store six or seven pages of text, there was a modem to transfer text with and Bill Gates (that Bill Gates) wrote the operating system, in Basic. There were a few widget style apps but unless you knew Basic, the 100 was a hardware wordprocessor. It had a tiny 8 line by 40 character screen. You could type faster than the machine could think. Tandy followed it up after a few years with an mild update: the 102. The 100/102 was so good at what it was designed to do that Tandy sold six million of them.

It was gloriously simple. I wanted one. I had to wait.

Tandy followed it up with the WP-2 (see pic at end). I did have one of those. Great machine. Much the same spec as the Trash 100 with an outstanding keyboard. Loved it. Still have it in a cupboard somewhere (in a bag with a Tandy 102 that I bought 3 years ago, just to have one).

Other companies built competitors: the Cambridge Z88, Amstrad's NC-100 and Alphasmart (see pic at end) among them. They all weighed one-two pounds (half to one kilograms, say). They all had limited connectivity, 4-12 line screens and ran for days or weeks on 2-4 AA batteries.

As a concept, I loved them. Mostly because you could write all day on them and I was spending a lot of time commuting on trains, so great battery life was far more important than your megahertz or pixel count. This was all pre mobile internet so mobile computing was a distraction free space anyway.

As processors and price improved, these simple little word processors disappeared.

Laptops got lighter and cheaper, word processors like the 100/102 disappeared. Then netbooks appeared, as did tablets. Tablets almost came full circle. A 10" iPad running WriteRoom or Notes with the keyboard displayed in landscape mode looks remarkably like a Tandy 100, which predated the iPad by around 25 years and the Freewrite by thirty.

The difference between these early Tandy laptops and tablets is the difference between focus and distraction. A Tandy 100 or an Alphasmart does pretty much one thing: text editing. An iPad does everything from text editing to painterly art to movie editing to programming to YouTube, social media and blog reading (ahem). Unless you're out of signal range and have no wifi, your opportunities to distract yourself from writing when working on a connected mobile device (and they're usually all connected) are infinite.

Now, here’s the thing. Some of us lack discipline.

Some of us just like doodling around on our phones serendipitously.

Some of us have obsessions - car reviews on YouTube, PowerPC blogs, Kardassians... Whatever.

In this environment, hard thinking suffers.

Using low distraction software, like WriteRoom, has its place. But you're always just a swipe away from Safari. Having Safari and good wifi is like Tindr for the mind of a horny singleton.

Using a aged Tandy or an Alphasmart is another option. The Alphasmart is the most flexible option as it links up and transfers text to a PC or Mac over USB as quickly as I'm describing it here. Ha! You guessed it. I have an Alphasmart in the same bag as those Tandys.

All these computers are old to ancient, although banging in text was always easy work for even the most brain dead of 8-bit computers. However, to go back to the start of this post, you can now opt for the very new Freewrite, a 21st Century Tandy 100 homage that - in the very best traditions of the Trash 100 - offers nothing but text editing and document transfer to something bigger. Mashable calls the Freewrite "pretentious hipster nonsense" but it is following closely in the tradition of some seriously legendary, cult, minimalistic tech. I like the idea of the Freewrite. I probably wouldn't buy one (that bag of word processors in the cupboard is quite full) but I like the idea. Many people like the idea.

It is pleasurable to see that people are still trying to provide a way to "just write" which suggests that people still struggle to avoid distraction. Obviously, 8-bit computers wth little storage in the 1980s and '90s were built that way because it was the cheapest way to build. I'm sure Tandy would have added wifi had it been available. The Freewrite would be more of a conscious choice, albeit an expensive one.

You can buy a Freewrite, a Tandy or an Alphasmart (and other models) on Ebay. But there are other options.

You could just use a very old Mac, like my much-blogged iBook G3, whose ability to web surf varies from limited to non-existent depending on the browser and the availability of Ethernet. Any old Mac will do, from a battered Classic onwards.  Any old pre-G4 Mac can take all the text you can throw at it in a variety of mostly distraction-free writing environments - SimpleText, TextEdit, BB Edit, TextWrangler, Emacs, vi, Pico or your text weapon of choice. Newer old Macs, you know what I mean, can play trancey. soothing music on iTunes to put you in writing mood as well. And obviously, with an iBook or older PowerBook, you'll out-hipsterise anyone in Starbucks with your fine example of retro-hipster-nerddom running Mac OS 8.6 or Tiger. Live the dream, people.

So where am I with all this? I don't know. Just thinking back to the sheer fun of focussing on one thing on a Tandy WP-2 and thinking how this stuff goes round in circles and how many more times in the next thirty years I'll see the Tandy 100 reinvented by hipsters and writers desperate for fewer distractions.  Give it 5-10 years and I'll get another blog post out of it, I'm sure.

Keep typing.

Links

Tandy 100/102; Alphasmart 3000 (for $19); Cambridge Z88; Freewrite

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What's below? The word processor collection. Clockwise from left: an iPad, a Tandy WP-2, a Tandy 102 and an Alphasmart 3000. RIP, Tandy word processors. Best of the best.

iCab to the Rescue

I was using my iBook G3 for the first time for a while at the weekend. One of the things I noticed (apart from Dropbox's little RAM sucker) was that TenFourFox seems to grab as much RAM as it can. This makes sense, but does it allow the little Mac to do anything else while browsing? Admittedly, browsing tends to grab the processor too (I use Activity Monitor a lot on the iBook), but does it really need all the RAM?

I poked around online. TenFourFox is probably the only browser being maintained for PowerPC Macs. Camino, Safari and a bunch of others are all either not supported or the websites have just vanished as project developers lose interest or move onto other things. However, an article on LowEndMac pointed me at iCab, a browser I'd seen before but never really stuck with.

iCab has been around for a while. It now has an iPhone version, so that's worth a look. But meanwhile, it seemed to run nicely on the iBook. It's quick to load and sites display quite quickly. I tried a few simple sites, like LowEndmac and Longform. All successful. Then I tried The Guardian. If anything's going to make it crash, I thought, the Guardian's massive homepage should kill it. But no. iCab took its time, but it loaded. And 25% of my 640MB of RAM was still showing as free, so I loaded TextEdit (Activity Monitor was obviously running as well) to make a few notes. This reminded me that TextEdit's never beeen my favourite, so as iCab seemed happy enough, I downloaded TextWrangler and looked to see if Notational Velocity was still going. It was, but the download link is broken at present. iCab purred along on the inside lane of the information superhighway (as we called it back in the mid 90s).

I was surprised. It was usable. I wouldn't open ten tabs and load six or seven heavy sites. But I could use it.

The iBook still surprises me. It's an occasional machine, for sure, but it's still fun to use and a pleasure to write with.

Speaking of surprising, my iMac is ten years old this year and it's still in weekly use as my main desktop. But that's another story.

DropBox's Little Hold-out

Infamously, within the Mac PowerPC community at least, DropBox no longer supports us. DropBox kept my little iBook G3 up to date. No matter where I wrote something, I could get to it. Once PPC support went, however, I uninstalled the app.

I've not used the iBook in a while. But at the weekend, I dug it out. I have a longstanding challenge to myself to get the iBook to talk wirelessly with my BT HomeHub - a UK wireless hub/router. As ever, I didn't succeed but I did notice that the iBook seemed slower than usual...

The iBook has 640MB of RAM (its max) and runs Mac OS X 10.4.11. Even from rest, it seemed to be using 50-60% of RAM. Hmm. I poked around. Nothing obvious. On a whim, I looked at my login startup items. And there it was. A Dropbox helper. I deleted it and rebooted. And lo and behold... Much less ram in use. Well under 50%.I should have taken more notes in the process, but didn't. But it looked like a difference of maybe 50MB. Which, on a 640MB machine, is quite a bit.

So. If you have ever used Dropbox and have less ram than you'd like, make sure you don't have any startup items you don't need. It all helps.

MacBook Pro mid-2012 versus ThinkPad X220

A PC on G345?!

I know, I know! And a MacBook Pro is hardly an old Mac (not by my standards).

So... I recently bought a cheap secondhand ThinkPad X220 as a generic laptop on which to play with Linux and Windows 10 (whenever Microsoft decides to let me have it). It was an impulse buy from The Laptop Centre in the UK, who often have interesting machines for sale. I had a couple of ThinkPads back in the late 90s - a 340 CSE, I think and then something else - and really liked them before I got my hands on Mac OS X 10.1, as it was then. Bye-bye, Windows.

How would a ThinkPad feel now? Could it compete with the mighty MacBook Pro, my fastest machine? Would it feel better than the generic HP family-owned laptops I've used occasionally over the past few years? If it's a Windows versus OS X shootout, it's a foregone conclusion for me.

The Facts

	MacBook Pro Mid-2012 (non-Retina)	ThinkPad X220 (2011?)
Processor	Intel i5, 2.5GHz.Dual core (virtual quadcore).	Intel i5, 2520M, 2.5GHz. Quadcoe (real? virtual?).
RAM	4GB (max 16GB) * User upgradeable on this model.	4GB (Max 8GB). User upgradeable.
Storage	500gb (5400rpm)	320GB (7200rpm)
Ports	2 x USB3. Thunderbolt. Firewire 800. SDXC card port.	3 x USB2 - one powered. SDXC card port.
Screen/s, display resolution	13.3". 1280x800, 16x10 ratio. Can drive external screen with resolutions up to 2560x1600 via Thunderbolt or two external screens via Thunderbolt but no internal screen.Various other options involving USB and port adapters.	12.5" TFT/IPS. 1366x768, 16x9 ratio. Displayport and VGA ports. Can drive external screen up to 2560x1600.  Various other options involving USB and port adapters.
Networking	Ethernet, wifi, Bluetooth.	Ethernet, wifi, Bluetooth.
Expansion	Thunderbolt - external expansion only (storage, displays, etc).	54mm Expresscard (possibly add Firewire or SSD). PCI Express Mini Card slot (WLAN or SSD). SIM card slot available to enable 3G connections using WLAN.Docking station.
Battery	7 hours.	7 hours. Up to 23 hours with larger battery and docking station.
Weight	2.06kg / 4.5lbs.	1.6kg / 3.5lbs with 6 cell battery. Other battery options may increase weight.

* Apple's maximum stated RAM for the MacBook is 8GB but OWC and other vendors say 16GB and 16GB is working fine in the MacBook. It's overkill but I'm planning to keep the laptop a long time so I may as well max it out). All data above is the best I could find. Do your own checking and your model may vary. 

Things I noticed quickly

Design

The ThinkPad has a soft touch feel about it. The MacBook is a cold chunk of metal, most days. Both machines feel very solid. However, I dropped the MacBook some time back and dented the undershell. I was able to hammer the dent out gently with a small ball-hammer but it's affected the DVD drive slot, which I still need to fix. I don't think this would have happened with the ThinkPad. Although such a drop might have cracked it instead. Hard to tell, really.  But I was surprised that the MacBook was so fragile. My old iBook G3 took a lot of punishment and never cracked.

The keyboard

The ThinkPad keyboard is lovely to use. I liked the keyboards in my two old 1990s ThinkPads and this one is equally sweet. The keys are slightly concave, well-spaced and can be lit by a small light above the webcam.The Escape and Delete keys are extra-large, which makes them easy to just stab at. The peripheral keys are often too small on laptops. I also like the dedicated buttons over the arrow keys which work as Back/Forward when in a browser. And possibly elsewhere.

Comfort

The MacBook is made of lovely shiny aluminium. Aluminium is a metal. Metal is damn cold in winter so if you want to put it on bare legs - in bed or wherever - be aware of this. MacBooks are COLD in winter.

Weight

I've had three Mac laptops over the past 13 years and all have had DVD drives. This lightweight ThinkPad with no DVD drive was quite a revelation. I can see why so many people are using MacBook Airs. And I haven't missed not having a DVD drive. Yet.

Expansion

Back in the olden days, Mac laptops of a "Pro" nature (called PowerBooks then), came with expansion bays that could contain extra drives batteries or other peripherals. A lot of people really liked Mac PowerBooks for their expandability. The mid-2012 13" MacBook Pro doesn't have any internal expansion options, unless you want to use an SD card as a RAM disk or something. The user can also add more ram and change the hard disk or the battery. The mid-2012 MacBook Pro was the last machine that could be upgraded to this extent by the user. More recent Pros are harder to work on.

Meanwhile, the ThinkPad is like Lego. You can add two SSDs internally (using the PCI Express Mini card and the 54mm Expresscard option) as well as a hard disk, or 3G functionality or a pile of other things. All these options can be carried out by the user, quickly or with a bit of patience. Having two internal expansion ports is impressive. Meanwhile, the range of ThinkPad battery options is mind-boggling to a Mac user. And then there's the Thinkpad's docking module...

Operating Systems

So far, I must admit, the ThinkPad is winning. Lighter, smaller, expandable... For a computer hot rodder who likes to max out everything, that's a joy. But then, there's Windows. I've worked in IT and with techies for years and while Windows is a great operating system for business, I don't think it makes any sense in the home, where access to one's own tame techie may be absent. I abandoned  Windows with my first Mac and I've never regretted that. It's just so much less hassle. But I must admit that Lenovo's X220 is a distracting little beast. And that was a surprise for me.

Syncing

iTunes works on Windows, but iCloud doesn't, if you don't have Outlook. I can read iCloud mail and access calendar, notes and other iCloud apps via the browser at icloud.com, but OS X just makes this so much easier. And it works without an internet connection. DropBox and Microsoft's cloud work on both machines.


Longterm

I don't know. I haven't picked up the MacBook since getting the Thinkpad. It's really hardware (ThinkPad) versus software (OSX) here. There's no winner - but if Lenovo started selling ThinkPads with OSX, I'd be hooked. This is probably where I should start thinking about a dual-booting Ubuntu installation. Which was the whole purpose to begin with.