New Shinies
On June 8th, 2005 I took the plunge and bought myself my first laptop, a 12" PowerBook G4, the last of Apple's portable Power PC line before they began switching over to the MacBook. That thing has served me faithfully since, despite age taking its very, very noticeable toll: increased crashing, strange buzzing noises, a rapidly decreasing ability to handle Flash applications, a battery so busted I could unplug the cord and literally watch the percentage count down... but still it kept chugging.
Well yesterday, after four and a half years of loyal service, I finally put that poor thing to rest. I honestly wasn't expecting to buy a new computer so soon, what with the student loans and the inability to actually hold down a decent paying job over the summer... but then a surprise interest payment came from my parents Educations Savings Plan they'd set up for me way back when... I couldn't claim it last year because I didn't have enough credits to qualify for the next tier of payments, and I couldn't claim it last fall because I filed the paperwork too late... so it had just been sitting there gaining interest and suddenly SURPRISE! And out I walked from the Apple store with the shiny new 13" MacBook.
I haven't had too much time to really get into yet, I spent all of yesterday just trying to get all my important stuff from the old machine to the new, and boggling over how much crap I've accumulated in those 4.5 years... That turned out to be a bigger hassle than I planned; I tried using Apple's really simple Migration Assistant, but the Power Book kept crashing before I could get anywhere. It's like it knew...
First impressions though, wow. This thing looks and acts amazingly. The unibody design is sleek and purrrty, and the finish manages to look all glossy even after I manhandled it repeatedly. The most interesting new feature though is the new trackpad. It's huge, much bigger than any I've ever used, and the new array of multi-fingered gestures is incredibly intuitive. So much so in fact that even just going to Chris' laptop for two minutes to grab something really quick suddenly felt awkward and constrained...
I also picked up a copy of iWork '09, because with my student discount it ended up being a third of the price of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. I'm hoping I made the right choice... I'm definitely not an office power user by any means, so I'm hoping that Pages will be all I need to get my essays written. I've played around with the '08 trial version and didn't find it lacking anything I needed at the time, but we'll see.
I'm very excited though. I'm really, really looking forward to having a machine that can actually keep up with all the extra stuff I want to do but was always constrained to doing on the desktop like encoding, playing around with audio software, trying out boot camp and playing some of my games (I don't really intend to do any hardcore gaming on this thing, but it would be nice to play some of my older titles without being locked in the other bedroom), heck even watching YouTube, which caused the old G4 to sputter and skip.
Well yesterday, after four and a half years of loyal service, I finally put that poor thing to rest. I honestly wasn't expecting to buy a new computer so soon, what with the student loans and the inability to actually hold down a decent paying job over the summer... but then a surprise interest payment came from my parents Educations Savings Plan they'd set up for me way back when... I couldn't claim it last year because I didn't have enough credits to qualify for the next tier of payments, and I couldn't claim it last fall because I filed the paperwork too late... so it had just been sitting there gaining interest and suddenly SURPRISE! And out I walked from the Apple store with the shiny new 13" MacBook.
I haven't had too much time to really get into yet, I spent all of yesterday just trying to get all my important stuff from the old machine to the new, and boggling over how much crap I've accumulated in those 4.5 years... That turned out to be a bigger hassle than I planned; I tried using Apple's really simple Migration Assistant, but the Power Book kept crashing before I could get anywhere. It's like it knew...
First impressions though, wow. This thing looks and acts amazingly. The unibody design is sleek and purrrty, and the finish manages to look all glossy even after I manhandled it repeatedly. The most interesting new feature though is the new trackpad. It's huge, much bigger than any I've ever used, and the new array of multi-fingered gestures is incredibly intuitive. So much so in fact that even just going to Chris' laptop for two minutes to grab something really quick suddenly felt awkward and constrained...
I also picked up a copy of iWork '09, because with my student discount it ended up being a third of the price of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. I'm hoping I made the right choice... I'm definitely not an office power user by any means, so I'm hoping that Pages will be all I need to get my essays written. I've played around with the '08 trial version and didn't find it lacking anything I needed at the time, but we'll see.
I'm very excited though. I'm really, really looking forward to having a machine that can actually keep up with all the extra stuff I want to do but was always constrained to doing on the desktop like encoding, playing around with audio software, trying out boot camp and playing some of my games (I don't really intend to do any hardcore gaming on this thing, but it would be nice to play some of my older titles without being locked in the other bedroom), heck even watching YouTube, which caused the old G4 to sputter and skip.