Travelling Mac-less

This year our family got together and rented a three bedroom villa on the beach at Playa del Coco, Costa Rica. All but one of my daughters made the trip. There were seven of us in all: Me, my wife, two daughters, one boyfriend, one son-in-law and my 2-year-old granddaughter.

The place was beautiful. Built on the side of a 300 foot cliff overlooking the Pacific, the villa was fully equipped to accommodate our extended family luxuriously. With two huge picture windows facing the ocean, two “infinite” swimming pools that created the illusion of swimming in the Pacific, two roomy balconies with comfortable outdoor furniture for watching sunsets and most importantly, two big central air conditioners. It was Central America in July after all. The place even had decent cable TV and Internet service (even though all but 4 channels were in Spanish and the Internet connection was just 2 Mb/sec.) that kept running 95% of the time we were there.

When we got there I did what I always do when traveling. I set up my MacBook Pro on the provided desk and plugged in the portable hard drive containing my 300+ movie collection. This is quite handy when traveling abroad. A person can only watch so much BBC and CNN International. I also need to keep in touch with the business world back home from time to time. The world doesn’t stop just because I’m on vacation. I don’t spend much time on business, but I do try to monitor for catastrophes. I find it amazing how a well-placed email can often avert a crisis.

Anyway, everything goes perfectly the first day, but when I woke up after our second night in Costa Rica I found my (late 2013) MacBook Pro covered in water droplets. The desk in the villa was placed directly below an A/C vent. That night the vent decided to drip condensate all over my $3000 computer. In a panic I immediately powered it off, dried it with a towel and placed it on the floor with a hair drier blowing into the rear vents. I left it drying for 4 hours. I couldn’t remove the bottom of the case because I didn’t have the goofy pentalobe screwdriver needed to do so. (WTF Apple? Pentalobe? Really?) Anyway, my efforts were fruitless. My beautiful, new MBP was dead on arrival. I would have to make it through another ten days of vacation with only an iPad Air and iPhone 5.

The first thing I missed was the ability to get photos off the Nikon DSLR. I have a camera kit for the iPad, but the 32 GB model just didn’t have the space. The 12 megapixel Nikon creates large photo files and you can forget the movies altogether. While I was able to offload a couple hundred photos, the (32 GB) iPad just doesn’t have the storage to hold enough even if I were to take almost everything else off. Also, while the iOS version of iPhoto is a very good photo library manager, I’m stuck on Aperture. Aside from Aperture’s far superior pro-sumer tools for editing and organizing, my Mac has a real user-accessible file system allowing me to upload pics to my library and keep copies on the hard drive.

Also, because of the huge amount of storage needed, my 300 movie library (~ 450 GB) resides on a portable USB 3 (WD My Passport) drive. They might as well have been locked in a Swiss Bank safe deposit box. With no Mac, there’s just no way to get them onto my iPad for viewing. 1.) Even though I have a USB - Lightning adapter, the iPad won’t power the Passport, 2.) The WD Passport is USB-powered only and 3.) There was only enough space on my iPad to hold a couple of movies anyway. I was left with choppy, low-res Netflix and YouTube or mostly Spanish television.

Next, I really missed a real keyboard. I’ve had an iPad since they went on sale in 2010. My iPad Air is my third. One would think that I would be fluent with the on-screen keyboard by now. Not so. Oh, it’s OK for responding to emails, making notes and creating contacts and calendar events, but when I try to sit down and generate 1000 words I fail miserably. I usually get so frustrated by typos and slowness after 300 or so words that I just give up. I may be unusual in this respect, but it’s true for me nonetheless. I do own a number of bluetooth keyboards that work well with the iPad, unfortunately they were all 1500+ miles away. I seldom pack one when I bring my Mac. It’s redundant.

Also, I’m a professional geek. I need geek tools like Terminal and network scanners and sniffers to do my job effectively. A couple of years ago when my iPad 2 was jailbroken, I had all these goodies installed and they did a pretty good job. After a while though, I got tired of playing the never-ending jailbreak chase game. You know, the one where you have to decide whether or not to update your iOS device and lose your jailbreak whenever Apple releases an iOS update. I know Apple is looking out for the average user’s best interest by not allowing more powerful (albeit much more dangerous) apps, but I’ve always felt like there should be some sort of user override ability where third-party apps are concerned. Knowing Apple the way I do though, that will happen right after Jesus makes his encore appearance. So, I wound up in a foreign country with a dead Mac and an iPad Air with a near-empty toolbox.

Lastly, my Mac is my toy. Even when I was young my parents would allow my brother and I to bring one with us on vacation. Even during an action-packed trip like this one to Costa Rica with diving, fishing, sailing and tons of touring, there’s gonna be some downtime. That’s when I like to play with my Mac. In my case playing means monkeying around with Xcode ( I’m currently studying Swift ), editing, commenting and filing digital vacation photos in Aperture and writing for this blog. While the iPad is a marvelous machine and I love reading the Times and surfing on it, it doesn’t do any of the more “meaty” tasks very well in my opinion.

The good news: The day after returning from Costa Rica I took my MBP to my nearest Apple store. Five days later, it was returned to me with a new logic board and new display. It is a late 2013 model so there were several months of hardware warranty left. Even after I told them what had happened with the evil Costa Rican air conditioner, they fixed it for free! Try taking an HP back to Best Buy under similar circumstances. My bet is the outcome would be much different.

Just one more reason why I love Apple. Even though I love my iPad for some things, there’s just no replacement for a Mac.