WEEK 1 thoughts:
#1 This is a truly beautiful piece of machinery, externally and internally. It took them 25 years to produce something that really hooked me, but they've done it. So much smoother and more intuitive. Of course, they paved the way with the iPod and the iPhone, which edges out the DVR as my favorite possession.
#2 The truly amazing difference between the MacBook and a Windows PC (and I'm still heavily tied to two Windows desktops) is the speed with which it boots and comes on. I have no idea why that hasn't been an absolute priority for Redmond - I'm guessing that because it's an OS designed to run on so many different configurations you just can't speed it up that much? At any rate, using an OS and a computer designed to work together is an entirely different experience.
#3 If you are unavoidably linked to the Windows world, you should come into the process with your eyes open. Learning the quirks of the Mac OS X has been relatively simple. But getting it to communicate successfully with Windows is a real challenge. I and my business partner ARE our IT department (with a little outside help), and we've been able to figure it all out so far, but it wasn't easy to get Entourage to communicate with Exchange 2003, for example. If your company runs the latest IIS, things may be smoother.
#4 Allowing Windows to be run in a partition is great. I hunted up an unused copy of Windows XP SP2 that we had in our software library, and thanks to the Internet, figured out how to find the Software Key on the Disk. Thanks, "Kevin," for your very useful blog post! Accessing Windows Server directly requires access to Direct X, which just isn't possible on a Mac. Now, on the occasions when I have to login directly to my computer (I'd much rather do this than use GoToMyPC or LogMeIn), I can do it directly from Windows.
Things that took awhile:
- Installing Windows XP,
- Copying my huge-ass music library off my iPod (should have used CopyPod or similar - it's worth the $30 - instead I turned my iPod into a hard drive by deleting all the music libraries, saving them on the hard drive, copying them to the Mac, then deleting them again, then readding them to the library. Took a long time).
Thing that was hard:
- Setting up Entourage to work with my Outlook account at work
Most of the issues are just figuring out how to do what you need to do using Mac OS X instead Windows. The tradeoff is worth it so far. I've always had a lot of work to do setting up my new Windows PCs, also.
I'm not ready to worship at Steve Jobs' feet, but the experience is certainly superior to Windows in all respects so far.
