Think Different
My new macbook came this week. Justifying it was kinda hard. I wanted a new laptop, I wanted to tool around with iPhone development, and buying refurbished from Apple was relatively cheap. Having the money helped.
So here it is, on my lap, responding to my keystrokes as I write this.
I’m feeling pretty warm and fuzzy about the experience right now. Of course, in the interest of complete disclosure, I have had a fair amount of red wine tonight.
Two days ago, I was pretty pissed off at the whole experience. Apparently, OS X 10.5.2 has fundamental problems with many wireless networks, to the point where New York City schools have suspended all Mac orders until Apple gets their collective act together. This wireless bug bit me in the ass, until I found that my problems could be resolved by abandoning DHCP as a bad job and setting everything up by hand.
Alas, I’m nerding out. It’s a protective reaction. I’m feeling rather insecure, as I apparently don’t know they keyboard shortcuts for copy paste on this (rather cute) laptop. Relearning all my basic OS skills leaves me a bit defensive.
Computing skills aside, there’s still a lot of concepts I just don’t get when it comes to the Mac way of doing things. To give you an example: MacBooks come with a remote control. Why? To control multimedia playback from across the room. I don’t get why this is needed for a device that will spend most of its time in my lap. Maybe I’ve had too much red wine. Also, launching iMovie is trivially easy for a new user, but I had to search for over ten minutes to figure out how to get a console window - an inversion of my personal priorities, but it seems I’m not this MacBook’s intended average user. Oh well.
It’s a nice laptop, but I haven’t had the kind of revelatory experience that the Apple advertising has led me to believe. I still feel like using the Windows and Linux boxes I already own. I’ll post if and when that changes.
Ah well, back to drinking and watching TED talks.
4 comments April 18th, 2008