Macbook Pro Blog
I finally cracked. Last week I bought one of the first 1.83Ghz Macbook Pros to come into the Apple Store at King of Prussia. Possibly the 3rd one they sold. This blog entry is all about switching to a Mac from Linux as my primary platform. I have a Macmini but I use my Linux laptops all day so they are my primary platform. OK, I hear you saying I should change my domain name. No. Linux has been my friend for almost 10 years now. I still run Linux on everything but my Macbook Pro and my Mac Mini. Maybe I’ll try that someday. Read on for my reviews, suggestions, impressions and the story of a UNIX geek switch.
Experience of buying it: Man, that is a large chunk of change to hand over in one shot. Turns out my bank had a default daily limit on my account and so I had to call them and send a fax from the mall to change the limit. Luckily another guy in the store was doing the exact same thing and told me what to do. But the MBPs were flying out of the shop as they were the very first 1.83s in stock. I had 10 minutes to sort out my bank or they would sell it to someone else. Pressure, baby.
Unboxing: Like every Apple product, you can feel the love in the packaging. Seems like they were sad to see the thing leave the factory. Beautifully boxed, made me feel bad opening it up.
Initial use: This is where I love the Mac platform. I hooked up my Mac mini with Firewire, did a migration and most of my apps and data just landed on my new MBP. The apps that didnt get copied for some reason, I just copy and pasted in binary over Bounjour. Now thats ease of use. I love that. In minutes I was iChatAV-ing with a friend in Maryland. Lovely.
Initial speed impressions: The little documented Spotlight indexing is quite a hit on the machine. I was worried it was slow for the first few days, but turns out that after Spotlight sorted itself out this thing is very responsive. I only have 512MB of RAM (more arriving today) and with Entourage, iTunes, Safari and Textmate open I can feel the RAM ceiling. I hope the extra 512 sorts this out.
PROBLEMS: I have had a weird issue where the keyboard dies. Totally dead, not even the Caps Lock light will turn on. I have Apple Care and have logged this issue with them but need to wait for it to happen again before calling them up again. I was initially determined to just get a new one from them, but I’ll give them one chance on this and wait for it to happen again and then call them up.