Got back from Japan Thursday night. Utterly exhausted after almost 24 hours of traveling, ordered a pizza, ate it, and then sat there wondering what to do. Decided to go out to the Apple Store and pick up a Mac Book Pro.
It’s a pretty sweet machine. I’ve had a Mac Mini for a couple of years, use it for my music, movies, backup, etc., and for a while while my pc was in the shop, it was my main machine, but never totally dived in fully. I was a bit surprised how comfortable it was to start working with. Previous attempts at using Macs have felt pretty awkward. I guess part of it is because I’ve been dabbling with the Mini for so long, and part because the keyboard feels so much like my pc laptop.
One thing that put me off at first was the whole one button track pad, but actually after using it a bit, I think it really works well for a track pad. On a two button track pad, I’m constantly doing the mini thumb grope for the left mouse button. The first thing I did was enable track pad clicking – so when you tap the track pad, it registers a click.
Another thing is the lack for home, end, page up and down keys. I know there are shortcuts with the cursor keys, but I’d rather have separate keys for them.
Other than that, it feels pretty comfortable. Getting stuff moved into it. I’m using mail.app for now. Considering Thunderbird though. Trying to decide if I really need to do the whole Boot Camp / Parallels thing, or just keep two separate machines. There are a few things I do need Windows for, but as cool as running dual OSes is, now that I have the hardware, I’m feeling like I just want to keep it simple and get away with a single OS if I can.
fyi on the trackpad, you can set it up so that if you tap it with 2 fingers it will right click and if you drag 2 fingers it will scroll the page, which makes it much more useful than a 2 button one.
I think that the ability to run both operating systems is great just as “in case”. I setup bootcamp / parallels on my system right away and the coherence feature with parallels makes it really nice. I don’t need windows all the time but it’s nice to have it when I do. So it might be worth setting up so if / when you do need it you don’t have to go through all the crap. =)
cool
I also have been using the MacBook Pro for a few weeks now and actually haven’t install Bootcamp or Parallels as most of my Apps work just fine on the Mac. However for my main development which is on a MacPro I have Windows as well for some applications that can’t be replaced, such as FlashDevelop.
I’ve found both Thunderbird and Firefox to be painfully slow on a mac. Still use Firefox because of all the fantastic extensions, but considering switching from Thunderbird to Mac Mail as having to wait 30secs just for it to open a blank mail message is getting a bit frustrating! I am using a PPC MacMini so maybe it’s a little underpowered, but most other apps run much quicker.
Next time I’m not sure what to do, I’ll just head over to the Apple Store and pick MYSELF up a Macbook Pro…
Paul, I highly recommend it. 🙂