I've just bought a Macbook Pro for work purposes and I thought I'd share my first impressions and compare to my current work Dell Latitude E6400:

Build: rather solid lump of metal, feels much more sturdy than the Dell. The Mac screen is lovely, I like it a lot.

Keyboard: not so nice to type on. It also feels odd as it seems to sit right in the middle of the laptop (this is a 15" model). Why is it supposedly a UK spec, but why is the @ above the 2? Also where the hell are the page up / down / home end keys! There's loads of free space they could have put them in.

Updates: ~750MB on a new laptop! After the reboot there was getting on for 200MB more! Although it wouldn't let me install them until it was plugged into the mains which is very sensible. It decided to open two parallel updaters for the Bluetooth firmware and once I'd installed it, the other one complained I hadn't installed the update.

Power cable: keeps getting knocked out of the side of the laptop. LED which changes colour according to charge status is nice.

Keys: It's taking a while to get used to using the Apple key rather than ctrl, this confused me last time I used a Mac all the time in 2004.

Security: I feel a computer should not automatically power on and then load up without prompting for a password

Initial poweron: annoying video from the marketing bunnies; Apple seem to want loads of info from you...

First tasks: Get the terminal & X Windows in the Dock & install Opera

Mouse pad: took about 5 mins to get used to not having distinct buttons. On the Dell I can tap the touchpad slightly to L click, I have to press the Mac's much harder. Not having a right click really, really annoys me and has done so for over a decade. I don't want to have to ctrl click

Hopefully this Mac will become my personal laptop and it'll get setup on the work wireless & VPN etc. One of the Mac's strong points is that it is a Unix with native MS office.

@ above the 2 because that's where it is. You'll get used to it.

The home/end stuff requires use of the fn key.



Try using two fingers. The new trackpads support multi-finger support, as well as the iPhone type gestures. I think you'll find if you do a two-finger tap you'll get the contextual menu. I love it.

1 - that's deliberate to prevent you from pulling the entire laptop onto the floor just because you snag the power cable. I guess you either think that's a good idea or a bad one.

2 - That behaviour can be changed. Open System Preferences>Security>General and put a tick in the Disable Automatic Login. You may also want to enable 'require password on wake from sleep/screen saver'. It's also possible to get the machine to not show a list of user names at the log-in screen although I've never bothered with that one myself.

3 - You should only get the Welcome video once the very first time you turn the machine on or if you re-install the OS from scratch. If you get it on subsequent start-ups then something hasn't taken/been set properly in which case I'd pose a question to the lovely people in the Mac Software forum for assistance.

Thanks for the tips. BTW the video only came once. The annoying first boots afflict Windows too. The Linux distros I use boot straight through to Gnome with no marketing +1 for Linux.

Having the keyboard short cuts is still a bit annoying, both Windows & Linux use the same ones eg f5 for refreshing has become fn f5 which requires finger contortions or two hands.

Another oddity - on the Dell (and any other PC with iTunes) when I connect my iPhone iTunes fires up, oddly this doesn't happen on the Mac.

Possibly, but don't quote me, this is because you haven't "paired" your iPhone to the Mac's copy of iTunes yet. I may be wrong on that, though.

When I fired up iTunes I had to click yes. It also refused to do anything until I'd entered the passcode on the iPhone which could have had something to do with it.

I'm trying to decide if I should be really said and make the next thing I download Mothur which I'm using for a project at work.

BTW Heather, thanks for the two fingers on the trackpad thing, being able to scroll up and down webpages so easily makes the absence of dedicated page up / home etc. keys much more bearable.

Got a new Toshiba Tecra A11 (released 2 weeks ago, after previewing at CES). It needed several hundred megabytes of patches as well...

The manufacturers get a standard build, which isn't updated all that often, plus you have to factor in how long it has been sitting in the channel.

Looking for a new laptop, want a MacBook, but waiting for a Core i7 Q series to appear...

This can also be changed.

Go to keyboard preferences.

To be fair so did the latest Red Hat server I built. I just think that computers should leave shops as patched as possible.



Given a choice I'd have waited, but we needed a Mac this week, hence my trip to Guildford today.

I just fired up the Dell to get onto the VPN to sort some bioinformatics for tomorrow and the Dell's explorer process seemed to hang and wouldn't restart. I think it could well be a problem with the MB in the Dell as I swapped the disk and there still seem to be IO errors.

I've just turned the single tap on and it makes it a lot nicer to use.

PS: finally Mac have SD card readers

The firewall's off by default

+1 Windows & Linux -1 Mac

I suspect that would increase the cost of computers as the whoever sold it to you would have to open it up and run all the updates before handing it over therefore adding time and cost to the sales process. Not to mention the shop or supplier having to constantly update the basic image they apply to machines (which would also represent a loss of contro in the distribution process from the point of view of MS and Apple).
It would also delay shipping.
Plus I'm not sure how well that would work with a machine that hasn't had a user account set up first.



You can even boot from it IIRC.

It took me a while to get used to mine, the keyboard is a little odd and the trackpad is too...but now I'm smitten. Now I'm looking at how I can get a mac desktop. The wife seems keen too.

Lets face it, anything has to be better than windows 7..

Windows Vista

Many PC manufacturers seem quite capable of shipping their PCs with all manner of junk installed. I sure they could manage some useful stuff



You can even boot from it IIRC.[/quote]

Cool. Wonders if I could stick a Linux distro on.