Well folks… I finally broke down and made the switch! I’ve replaced my Dell Lattitude D800 with a refurb Apple MacBook Pro Intel Duo Core 2.33ghz with 2GB of ram and a 120GB HDD. Keep in mind that I’ve been using windows based machines since 1995. My initial experience with this machine has been great. My biggest concern was that it was going to take me weeks to get to a point where I was able to be productive with it. When I saw that I was able to install Windows XP via Parallels and run it within a window on the machine with the same speed and efficiency as my current setup, that was all the justification I needed to take the plunge. It took me about 2 minutes to go from out of the box to setup and running… including getting online on my wireless network. It was probably the easiest new computer setups I’ve ever endured, and I’ve had to endure quite a few of them. Honestly, even with XP available in Parallels, I have not spent enough time in that environment to even bother getting it setup. I’ve been in that XP instance maybe 3 times this week, and even then just to show someone else what it was able to do.

Everything about this laptop screams ‘SLICK’. I kept flicking the lights on and off in my office the night I got it just to watch the automatic dimmer work on the backlit keyboard.

One major thing I noticed immediately is that my speed online increased by at least 400%. I was getting really crappy internet speeds with my Dell, lucky if I was able to get 150/KBps out of it. My Mac mostly cruises around 900/KBps.

In fact… while I’m talking about speed… this Duo Core Intel 2.33ghz is wicked fast.

the power management is wonderful… if i don’t use the mac for a few minutes, the screen will dim. a few minutes later, the screen will turn off.

I’ve also dumped 100% of my Microsoft software. I’m running OpenOffice for my word processor, spreadsheet program and Microsoft Access replacement. I’m using Evolution to replace Outlook. Both of these are free and open source.

While I’m still in the honeymoon phase with this thing… there are some minor annoyances I have:

1) as a windows user, my mouse tends toward the bottom left hand corner of the screen, looking for the start menu that isn’t there. at first I had my ‘expose’ setup to show the dashboard if I’m down in that corner until I realized that my mouse gravitates to that corner so often that my dashboard kept popping up. After moving it to the top left hand corner, I realized that it would activate every time I went to the apple icon for system prefs or whatever. I also have my dock hidden on the left, so every time I’m in that area of the screen, my dock will ‘unhide’.

2) the dock is very limiting when compared to the windows start menu. there is no organized heiarchy. The benefit here being that you have 1 level of icons to work through, but if you have a bunch of applications that you frequently use, the dock gets very crowded very quickly, and it isn’t the smartest way to find files. I’ve been using ‘QuickSilver’ and ‘SpotLight’ to help me find and launch programs… both are very quick and intuitive, but for a beginner user who is accustomed to using a start menu to find their applications, in my opinoin… it just isn’t enough.

3) random tempurature overheating… what’s odd about this one is that one of the first things I noticed about the laptop is that the fans were not kicking on, but the unit was always very cool to the touch. then i tried installing ubuntu under Parallels, and in the initial setup screens my fans kicked on, and Growl started to alert me that my temp was up as high as 79 degrees celcius. at first i thought it was maybe an issue with Parallels, but then i had the same experience after opening the ‘chess’ game that came with the machine. I’ve been able to reproduce the issue several times, and after looking in the ‘Activity Monitor’ I didn’t see any real heavy CPU usage at all that would indicate a problem. I haven’t had the chance to call Apple to see if they had any ideas. I haven’t had this issue come up with anything else I’ve been doing with the box… so it’s possible that it is just related to those two applications, and it might not really be a ‘mac’ issue. who knows.