Buy a new macbook with caution!

So, Logic has pretty much turned me into a mac regular, so I decided to sell my pc laptop, buy a macbook and parallels and just use my macbook to run both OSes. Sounded like a solid plan, until a friend of mine with a brand new macbook and a Canon HD camcorder complained about how imovie wasn't recognizing her camera. After more talking and research, it turns out that my horror story with having bought firewire audio interfaces before figuring out that almost NOBODY other than super expensive Apogee has drivers that truly work on Leopard. My alesis board gave me grief, my Mbox made me think my whole mac was rotten. A friend's lended MOTU interface worked, but didn't have any of the features I wanted. Wow. All dressed up and no place to go. After I bought my Tascam audio/midi interface and logic shuttle control surface, I'd figured out that I'd just have to downgrade back to Tiger. Before doing that, I used a backup Tiger image from an external hard drive, with much success.

This is the MAIN thing I REALLY love about macs. The ability to boot off of another drive, or another operating system. If a PC had a workaround like that, I'd still be a pc only person, Logic or not. But macs give you the option of making a clone with a free program like Carbon Copy Cloner, and dealing with your headaches later, granted you keep your data someplace accessible.

Back to the story before the story. So 3 interfaces and one downgrade later, I'm a happy mac user. My friend's dilemna with the camcorder made all the Leopard terrors come back to me. What Apple advised me to do is to sit around and wait for the manufacturers of most audio interfaces to figure out how to make good drivers for Leopard, and not be productive (EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of all the advertising) or through money at the problem (the usual mac solution - did I mention I only got a mac when I was rich enough to deal with how much cash outlay it requires? It's amazing how many problems money solves). Actually, I got this comment from an Apple customer relations person (which explaines my love-hate, contentious relationship w/mac and stalwart supporters) "well, I guess those manufacturers had better hurry up to keep up with us?" What, are you serious?

Well all that lead me to this creepy discovery: macbooks purchased after October 2007 CANNOT be downgraded to Tiger! So if you buy a shiny new macbook, you can't workaround Apple's Leopard limitations. You're a paying guinear pig on a still-relatively-new operating system. Works fine for average people who don't need to be productive other than surfing, checking email and writing a few word processing documents. For the other portion of creative professional, on whose backs mac has built their brand, this is unacceptable.

For pride's sake, you refuse to admit to the limitations of your Leopard product, so you're forcing people to switch from a nearly bulletproof Tiger, to a so-so Leopard? They don't have any choice or say in the matter? Are people told about this when they purchase the laptop? I wouldn't have known if my friend's problem hadn't happened first. I would've been REALLY upset with having a $1500 doorstop that I couldn't use for the sole purpose I bought it for.

So due to the timing of when I entered the mac market, I get screwed and now HAVE to purchase my mac from some random person on Ebay. Nice. Anyhow, I didn't buy it yet, so no harm no foul for me. But I wanted to let you happy shoppers who are in the market for a new mac laptop (I hate referring to mac jargon, it makes it so hard to search for stuff in Ebay, Google or craigslist - if I want some type of mac laptop, I have to search separately for macbook, powerbook, ibook, and then I also have to go lookup what the freak the differences are, vs. searching for laptop or Vista laptop at worst. Don't even get me started on trying to find help for mac "mail" in google. Could the name be any more generic?)

If you need a mac laptop for use with third party AV hardware, check first to see if it REALLY works before you purchased the laptop. Although a lot of sites says they have leopard drivers, if you do a little digging in google, you'll find out if your device ever really works for anyone.

Wish me luck with Ebay!