it…out

We got a MacBook at work recently, and I’ve been playing around with it.  It’s my first experience with modern Mac hardware.  I have had my old G3 running OS 10.2 for a while, but it’s not great.  It has several i-apps installed, like iMovie, but it’s too slow to run them usably, and the mouse doesn’t always work. 

There were a few things I didn’t think I’d like but got used to very quickly:

• The one-button, gigantic touchpad.  This was a big problem at first.  I had become very accustomed to my Thinkpad’s trackpoint, both for pointing and for scrolling.  Then I discovered the MacBook’s two-finger scroll and two-finger-tap-to-right-click feature.  I haven’t missed the Thinkpad’s red dot since.

• The keyboard.  I quickly noticed that the delete key behaved like a PC’s backspace key, and I had to use fn+delete to perform an actual delete.  Then there are the non-dedicated end/home/pgup/pgdown keys — they’re built into the half-sized arrow keys in the lower right of the keyboard.  Learning to use cmd+up for pageup and cmd+right for end took only a few minutes.  Next I noticed that the function keys only behave like function keys when you hold down fn.  For example, to reload a page in Firefox, you’d hit fn+F5 because F5 by itself turns up the volume.  I actually didn’t even try to get used to this and switched it around to behave like a PC keyboard so that the function keys perform their “secondary” task (eg vol up) only when fn is pressed.

There were also some things which pleasantly surprised me:

• Insanely fast resume-from-sleep times, and almost equally insanely fast boot.  Insane!

• Volumes mounted via connect-to-server are accessible by all apps (at least they seem to be).  Take note, gnome!

• Connecting a second monitor, literally, just works.  I couldn’t believe it.  Plug it in — boom.  More desktop.  No re-configuring X.  No “extend my windows desktop.”

• iWork: Pages and Keynote are actually pretty cool, and I’ve been using them for actual work!

• The Apple remote:  good for more than just front row — it works seamlessly with Keynote, which is handy.

• Parallels Desktop:  This is actually not an Apple product at all, but it’s so impressive I’ve listed it here anyway.  Parallels Desktop is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems (like Windows) from within the Mac OS.  Where it really shines is in coherence mode which allows you to run Windows apps right alongside Mac apps.  Absolutely worth the money.

Things I haven’t even messed with yet:

• Desktop Widgets
• Spotlight
• iLife (I haven’t even run iMovie or iDVD yet)

The form factor is great.  It’s light.  It’s fast.  This is easily the nicest laptop I’ve ever used.