• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Apple / Switch Day 1: This Mac is Hot!

Switch Day 1: This Mac is Hot!

June 14, 2008 By Stephen 3 Comments

So the Mac has joined my replacement work Dell – two new computers in two days!  Here are my first thoughts on the hardware:

This post is part of my series focused on switching from PC to Mac.

  • How To Buy Discount Apple Computers
  • Got Some AppleCare For Cheap
  • Switch! or How the Mac (Finally) Won Me Over
  • Switch Day 1: This Mac is Hot!
  • Switch Day 58: Ten Pros and Cons of the MacBook Pro

  • The MacBook Pro is much sturdier than the average PC notebook, and even somewhat better than the high-end machines I’ve used (like my replacement Dell XPS M1330)
  • The machine is hot on the bottom when using it a lot, and even pretty hot on the top!
  • The fan is really loud – much louder than I was expecting
  • The MagSafe power cord is cute but very delicate – I’m not surprised at all that they break and burn right and left!
  • The screen is gorgeous – I got the matte model rather than the glossy since I hate the bright reflections I always fight with on my other machines
  • I wish the 15″ model I got had more than two USB ports – I just know I’m going to be swapping a lot more than I used to.  But the new Dell has only two ports, too – my old XPS M1210 had four!
  • Since I got the older model, it included the Apple remote, which is cute
  • Everything about this machine is classier and more elegant than any PC I’ve ever used, from the packaging to the case to the documentation to the power cord
  • I hate the auto-dimming screen – it reacts WAY too fast, constantly dimming and brightening as my shadow falls over the left-side speaker grille. This was the first Mac feature to be disabled!

One really odd thing about this machine is that even though it’s a “Late 2007” model, it was manufactured in April 2008!  Why on earth did Apple continue making the old model two months after it was replaced in February with the “early 2008” version?

As for OS X Leopard, I’ve just begun exploring…

  • Anyone who complains about UAC on Windows should try OS X – it interrupts just about as much but forces you to type in your password, too!
  • I love the packaging system – everything is self-contained so you can just drag and drop or delete
  • It took me the longest time to figure out how to be able to shut the lid and use the computer with an external monitor – turns out it always sleeps when you shut the lid but then wakes up again when you click the mouse or type on the keyboard
  • The included applications look much more useful than the ones that ship with Vista, which themselves are far better than anything Microsoft bundled in the past – I can’t wait to use iMovie and Garage Band, and iPhoto seems just as good as Google’s Picasa
  • I’m loving the included UNIX utilities – ssh and scp should be part of every operating system out of the box!
  • It’s ridiculously hard to change the hostname – apparently you have to edit /etc/hostconfig by hand!  Do they expect that no regular people want to name their computer?!?
  • Network setup beats Vista hands-down!  It correctly suggested that my wireless router was filtering based on MAC address, while Vista just said “can’t connect”
  • I already installed Boot Camp and VMware Fusion with a Windows Vista partition – talk about easing the transition!

I’ll keep updating the blog with my experiences over the next few months.  As a reminder, I offer separate feeds for Enterprise Storage for those not interested in this topic, which will be posted in my Terabyte Home feed.

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply
  • Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!
  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

Filed Under: Apple, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage Tagged With: Apple, Boot Camp, Garage Band, iMovie, MacBook Pro, MagSafe, OS X, switch, UAC, USB, VMware, Windows Vista

Primary Sidebar

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Steve Jobs

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Review: 2013 Ford Flex

    September 23, 2012

    Sony NEX-5 Camera Review

    September 15, 2010

    The Ideal pfSense Platform: Netgate RCC-VE 2440

    September 21, 2015

    A Watch Guy’s Review of the Apple Watch

    April 27, 2015

    My Visit to Bletchley Park

    August 3, 2012

    Preserving Your Credibility Is Your Prime Directive

    June 4, 2012

    vSphere 6: NFS 4.1 Finally Has a Use?

    February 3, 2015

    What’s (Still) Wrong With Dropbox For Business

    April 17, 2013

    A Complete List of VMware VAAI Primitives

    November 10, 2011

    MacBook Users: Encrypt Your Drive with OS X FileVault! It’s Easy and Free!

    December 20, 2012

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in