Well, as posted earlier, I recently decided to get my own Mac rather than wait for my company to replace my other Mac. Unfortunately, I feel a little guilty regarding the other laptop as I believe it’s downfall was due to abuse on my part. Mainly in the fact that I think it was dropped from the back of our car on a ski trip.
So, rather than wade through the paper work of corporate and spending hours convincing my boss that I need a new laptop when we have several perfectly good DELLs, I chose to forgo all of the hassle and get my own. This way, a) I’ll tend to baby it (so far so good) and b) I can do just about anything on it without the guilt that I’m using a corporate asset for something other than, corporate minutia.
Here’s how it’s going so far. Can you say FUN and FAST. The first week was excruciating as I did not have enough RAM. Since I’m known as a tinkerer and horde and use lots of software, acquiring more RAM was crucial. So, I ordered an extra Gig and now with 1.5g of RAM, it rocks.
Now that the pinwheel is far and few in between, I’m able to get a lot done. Since I tend to write a lot, IM a lot and bounce between a variety of applications for both personal and business use, this extra RAM was a god-send.
Besides the speed and general rock solidness of the hardware, there are a few extra features that are by far helpful and well, down right fun.
• First: the built-in iSight is down right addictive in a a narcissistic sort of way. It takes a little getting use to, but once you’re past seeing the wrinkles and pock marks, it can be fun to take different icon pictures for your IM friends as well as actually using it for video phone calls.
Even Dylan discovered the fun with the built in iSight. No, wait, that really is how he looks most of the time.
• Second: the screen is way brighter. After spending 3 years on an earlier generation PowerBook (and… loving it) the first thing that jumped out at me was that the screen is extremely bright and very crisp.
• Third: the back lit keyboard during low light scenarios is also both cool and useful. There’s nothing like sitting on a plane banging out your notes from the meetings earlier in the day and being able to see the keys. I also tend to work at my desk in the basement in the dark now that I can see the keyboard.
• Fourth: heat. Okay, while the rest of the community is complaining about the heat (consistently between 125 and 145) I’m actually finding the warm palms as a positive.
• Fifth: light and thin. The updated design is down right awesome. It’s about a 1/4 of an inch thinner than the G4 PowerBook and maybe it’s just my imagination, but it feels lighter in my pack-pack carrying case.
• Sixth: Speakers. I don’t see anything on Apples site about updating these, but I believe Bose secretly put their tiny version of speakers in the new MacBook Pro. They sound great. I usually have to turn them down to about 50% of what they slider allows. On my old PowerBook I usually cranked them to sorta hear the music.
• Seven: I’m not sure if this is software or hardware, but the track-pad truly does determine incidental contact. The PowerBook did an okay job of detecting incidental thumb contact, but on occasion during a long writing session I’d find the cursor in a location on the page that I did not want. Now, I have banged out 3 very long documents this past week and not once have I found myself typing in the wrong place.
• Eight: Battery life seems to be better. It’s running at around 3 hours before needing a boost.
There are a few things missing, but I haven’t noticed one bit. Apple in their marketing wisdom has figured out that many of the little things like 800mb Firewire and a modem are either items very few use on a laptop and or if they even know what a modem is any more.
So far nothing has changed even if the processor is an Intel.
-Shane
