This weekend, I came home. Home to the Mac that I left years and years ago. I'm now the proud owner of a MacBook Pro. OK, well, technically, it is my wife's MacBook Pro but she lets me use it.
It is a technically superior product in many ways to my Lenovo Thinkpad which actually cost me more money at the time I purchased it. The trackpad on the Mac is probably the single best thing about the MacBook Pro. Apple really has perfected the device and it works better than any trackpad I've ever used. Did I mention I hate trackpads!! For me to rave about it is saying more than most will probably ever know. The two finger and three finger gestures are fantastic.
The funniest thing is that from the moment the unit was turned on, it was easier to access the files on a shared PC on my home network than it ever was on a Windows PC. How ironic! Windows could really learn a thing or two.
Now, the bad part is that I'm still not sure what will be best for actually working with it. My wife needs office compatibility and unfortunately needs to use Publisher (ick) for some work she does. Hopefully, with the exception of Publisher, Open Office will be sufficient.
The good news is that she likes the mail application that comes with it. Unfortunately, the first time she opened it up herself, it crashed (not sure why yet) which was a bit of a let down. No one ever said the Mac was crash proof I guess. It is a darn shame the mail app won't import a PST file from Outlook directly.
My only complaint is the wireless antennae built into the thing seems poor. Where my laptop and other devices pick up the wireless in my house just fine, the MacBook Pro has problems. I know it is the MacBook Pro design too because my father-in-law has the same issues with his MacBook Pro. Perhaps this problem will go away when I upgrade to 802.11n sometime in the near future.
It'll take a while to make the transition but hopefully this is the first of many Mac OS machines to reside in my household. While I'll never be able to banish Windows completely (not yet anyway), I don't intend to support Windows personally ever again.
It sure is good to be home.
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3 comments:
Welcome home, bro. Welcome home. It's good to have you back.
:::Sniff::::
Excellent work my friend:)
I've found that most Windows apps work just stellar under Parallels provided you have a healthy amount of RAM. So that's one road you can go down if you have to.
The wireless thing...yeah. No getting around it. I think its the price for the aluminum case. My wife's plastic MacBook usually finds twice to three times as many access points as I do.
The funny/sad thing is that the Intel MacBook Pro is actually much better in this regard than the last few iterations of the PowerBook G4.
Maybe a better antenna I guess.
I don't know if there's a way around it. For my Pro tower, I read about a method of swapping the positions of the antennas between the bluetooth and wireless, and it did seem to make a profound difference. Then I fiddled with it some more, broke the lead off of one of the antennas, and it went back to pre-fiddle performance levels. Which is to say that, as shipped, it works about as well as when it's broken.
A bummer, but a small bummer, all things considered.
Anyone know where I can get a soldering iron?
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