So today as a kind of a reward for working hard and kind of I’ve always wanted one, I bought myself a MacBook Pro. It’s a 15.4”, 2.4ghz, yada yada, brand new MacBook Pro.
I took the train in to town (after being placed on hold for 10 minutes) and, thanks to Google Maps’s wonderful position of Next Byte (saying it was on the southern side of Rundle Mall when it was actually on the northern side), I accidentally stumbled into the store whilst looking for it. The guy who served me was more than happy to go upstairs and get one… but when he returned the serial number didn’t match. So he went to get another… and the serial number still didn’t match! Each time taking about 3 minutes. Third time lucky, he came back and said “I know this is in the system”, and I bought it on the spot.
It’s now two hours after I’ve gotten home. It was weird at first having a perfectly good computer in front of me and not knowing what to do with it, but once you play around with it for a little while things (simple and not so simple) become obvious. The dock is probably my favourite feature so far, even if I did have to make it about 33% of it’s original size. I’ve also managed to install Git!
The downloads box is another good feature, but it needs some more notification, like what the Colloquy window has when someone says your name. I love the way you install programs, so non-fuss. I click once on the downloaded file and it’s already there for me to use.
If the ambient light is bright enough, the keyboard keys are not illuminated and the screen gets brighter automatically so you can see in lighter conditions. There is a certain limit to how dark the screen gets, so you’re not going to be adjusting the brightness if you’re sitting in a dark cave somewhere.
The magnetic power plug is good too, and I know full well the damage that can be caused to a laptop when you trip over a cord that’s plugged into one; I recently destroyed the headphone socket when I tripped over the cord coming out of my Toshiba laptop. I know that if I trip over the Mac’s power cord, it should come out right away. The annoying thing I find about it is the light… but I guess I’ll get used to that.
The terminal was originally hard to find (I am/was/will be a Mac Noob), but eventually I did. I love how the commands are so unix like, such as sudo to do stuff as root and… just about any unix command you can think of.
Another nice touch is having the menu bar at the very top of the screen rather than the application, so whatever application you’re in it’s always in the same spot and generally the menus seem to be laid out the same way.
All in all, a very nice system and worth the money.