“Well,”, said Sam Gamgee, “I’m back”. And so am I, after nearly a month of travel; back to unpacking, clearing my in-tray (which now supports a pile of sufficient height that I’m hoping it may topple over and clear itself), and catching up with all the other things I should have been doing during March.
Of course, all of these might have been done more quickly if it weren’t for the fact that my new MacBook Pro arrived while I was away, so the first thing I had to do after kissing my wife, of course, was to set that up. The Apple migration tools are very good; I just plugged the old laptop and the new one together during the installation, and all my applications, settings, documents, photos, bookmarks and so forth were copied across with no trouble.
So this is my first posting from an Intel-based Mac, and so far, everything is working very nicely.
The new power connector is very neat, but it does mean that all the old Powerbook power adaptors I have lying around won’t work until somebody produces a convertor cable.
There are a couple of apps which don’t work under the Intel and I’ll need to wait for upgrades – NeoOffice and Final Cut being the main ones – but the fact that I’ve only hit a problem with these two is quite remarkable when you consider just how many apps and utilities on this machine were compiled for a completely different processor architecture. The Rosetta emulation technology is really very good and most normal apps and utilities just work.
Otherwise, frankly, it’s not very different from my old Powerbook except that it’s noticeably snappier and has a bit more disk space, and that’s just fine with me! As the saying goes: If it ain’t broke… just make it go a bit faster.
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Fun, isn’t it? Spotted you online earlier with video enabled so I guessed the macbook must have arrived. I’m still enjoying mine – particularly the keyboard illumination – despite having ended up with an insanely large bag to fit it in. Although as I type this, the feature I’m enjoying least is the impressive heat generation whilst the battery charges…
Ooh. And I’ve just discovered that the remote control can do a few other things beyond controlling Front Row. In particular, it will let me control Keynote slideshows, and I don’t even have Keynote 3 yet.
The remote with Keynote is super. You get to give talks, whilst having something to fiddle with, and because it’s the remote you don’t look as if you’re nervous 🙂 I’ve not had the opportunity to use it much yet, but I am extremely glad I am no longer in my PowerPoint-centric research group, where compulsory slide review meant that Keynote, or indeed anything non-ppt, was out. iWork06 is terrific, I think, but lately I haven’t had the time to play with enough alternatives to say this with the authority of a proper comparison.