Life On Revision A

Well, it’s been a few days, so it’s time for the almost legally-required post about how I’m getting on with my MacBook.

So far, it's going quite splendidly. I know everybody rolls their eyes at Mac owners with their 'oh, Apple stuff is just so much better than Windows' rhetoric, but sometimes it really is deserved. When I first turned the new Mac on, it asked if I had another Mac, and if so, would I like to copy all the stuff from the old Mac over? A quick reboot of the old Mac, a firewire cable, and it spent the next twenty minutes copying. Not just files, but preferences, caches, network setups, license keys, pretty much everything except applications (it would have done that also, but I decided to start over to ensure that I'm mostly installing Universal apps). Having already set up my accounts from the old machine, it logged straight in afterwards, completely ready to go. Hurrah!

It's fast. Very fast. On my G4, iPhoto was beginning to choke on the photos from my new T9 camera. Not anymore. No delay. No stuttering. Firefox feels a lot more responsive too. Oh, and I can run Google Earth now! Lots of fun. As I now have Tiger, I've been playing around with the widgets, but they're all much of a muchness, really. I've decided just to keep with the weather, calendar and dictionary ones.

What about Rosetta? I installed Creative Suite 2 last night, and again, it seems to be much quicker than on my G4. But for everybody with G5s, you'll probably be best to stick with them until CS3 comes out next year. For my needs, though, it's fine (actually, Illustrator was tracing 6 megapixel photos last night within thirty seconds, so it's a big speed-up for me).

Any downsides? Hmm. Firstly, the writer of the iPhoto weblog plugin appears to have taken the software down, so I'll have to research other ways of automatically uploading photos. Perhaps a move to using Flickr on this page. We'll see. The other issue which I'm keeping an eye on is the heat. The machine runs very hot. The left-hand side soon becomes uncomfortable if you're trying to use it on your lap. Which is a bit annoying, though I'm hopeful that coming firmware updates will reduce that a little.

To sum up: Yay!

currently playing: Pet Shop Boys – Fugitive (Richard X Extended Mix)