I've played with OSX a few times in the past, but my last solid experience with an Apple OS with System 6 as an apt pupil in some "computer skills task force" in elementary school. We had Windows 3.1 at home, and I had plenty of fond memories with our TRS-80 and LOGO, so that old MacOS didn't make too much of an impression on me.
So why did I decide to get a Mac instead of a PC? Well, simply put, I believe that the Macbook Pro is a fantastic piece of engineering running on an elegant OS which will continue to grow steadily in market share in the coming years. I have not had a pleasant time with my latest Vista desktop, and I figured now was the time to make the leap.
The new 15" Macbook Pros are remarkable pieces of hardware. The laptop feels to be a single solid piece of equipment, and not an amalgamation of plastic pieces like a Dell machine. The 15" models now featured backlight LED displays, and I am actually using the laptop with the brightness turned down several notches just because it doesn't need to be any brighter.
My biggest complaints with the hardware thus far 1) the edge of the laptop jabs into my wrists more than my old laptops 2) the single mouse button is a little annoying (both because its a single button and my thumb brushes against it because it is raised so high), and 3) the magsafe adapter is a little too easy to trip. So far today I've tripped the Magsafe once and my dogs have tripped it twice. None of those trips had anywhere near the force necessary to drag the laptop to the ground.
In terms of software, I've been giving OSX the benefit of the doubt as I learn its nuances. Here are some of my complaints thus far:
- The Fn, Ctrl, Alt/Option and Apple keys do not seem to be logically used
- Safari doesn't enable tabbed browsing by default (it ought to have suggested it to me when I first attempted to open a link in a tab)
- If I have multiple windows of the same application open at the same time I can't seem to Command+Tab to see the other windows
- The automatic display brightness adjustment adjusts far too often instead of taking periodic measures of the environment
- My Treo 650 won't sync using iSync, even after I enable Palm support
Other than that the laptop is phenomenal and I can't wait to start utilizing the Unix underpinnings.
