Michael Dale
Well I got my mac yesterday, about a week before I was expecting it so it was in time for Christmas, excellent. This is the first mac I have owned so it has been a bit of a learning experience.
As I’ve said many times before I decided to purchase an ibook 12”. I wanted a small laptop that I could move around without any problems. Everyone I talked to said that a 12” laptop would be the best thing to do.
I didn’t get a powerbook for a few reasons. Firstly a new model is thought to be out in the next few months and most people don’t recommend you get the current model as it is getting a bit old. Although it is still great. Secondly the ibook is a lot cheaper, about $600. And finally the battery life is much better in the ibook (5.5hours vs 3.5).
This model ibook has only been out for about a month here in Australia too, so it is nice and new.
The ibook comes standard with 256mb ram but everyone said that OS X really needed at least 512, I got a good deal on ram and added an extra 512mb (now 768) so that is nice.
Anyway I booted up the ibook for the first time and was greeted with a setup wizard. All pretty standard stuff, although it was a bit longer than a normal Windows one. Here I setup my user account and Wireless internet connection. Straight away the wireless connection worked, that was a good sign.
Anyway it logged in (very quickly might I add) and told me about some software updates for the OS and the Wireless. So I downloaded 150mb of patches. Then I did something wrong and cancelled the whole thing! damn. Anyway I redid the download with no problems. So I am now running OS X 1.3.7.
The first thing to check out was internet access. The mac comes with Safari as its standard browser. It has tabs and seems to work nicely. Although it uses KHTML and not Gecko as its rendering engine. It doesn’t make stuff look as good as Firefox although it is still a nice browser (I’ll talk about IE in a sec).
So off to download Firefox. I downloaded some .bin file and opened it. The file mounted itself as a hard drive and I could run firefox straight away, no install or anything. Odd. It seemed to work fine but I wanted to INSTALL it! So you just end up dragging the firefox icon out of the .bin file to your computer. Some programs do come with an installer, others don’t. I’m still getting used to that.
Now for IE. The mac came with IE 5.2 installed. Now when I think of IE 5 (or any version) I think yuck. But no! IE on the mac is good. It renders stuff almost the same as Firefox, holy crap! IE on mac is better than IE on Windows! DAMN. But there is no tabs so back to Safari and Firefox.
The funny thing I’m running both Safari and Firefox at the same time, I just switch between the two. Unlike windows changing between apps doesn’t really feel like changing between apps, its just like changing to a different IE window or something. Safari and Firefox just seem to go together. So I’m using both.
And now for the seriously cool OS X feature. Expose!! Wow. I love the F9 button! It brings up all your application windows in a minimised size and you can select a program or window just by clicking on it. So much better than alt+tab (although the mac has that too, apple+tab). F11 is like the show desktop button in the quickstart menu on windows. F10 just shows the windows from the program you are currently running. Very cool!
I’m really glad I got the ibook, the battery life is great. About 4.5 to 5 hours with the wireless turned on (bluetooth off). Speaking of Wireless, Damn! It is so good. Very fast and I can walk half way down the street without it dropping out. The netgear AP seems to be doing its job very nicely.
Oh the suspend on this thing is great. The laptop hasn’t been switched off since I got it. Just close the screen and it goes to sleep, open the screen and it is ready.
Michael-Dales-Computer:/ michaeldale$ uptime
17:34 up 1 day, 1:50, 2 users, load averages: 0.16 0.12 0.19
My poor PC hasn’t been switched on since yesterday (after I copied all my music across). The mac does windows shares very nicely too.
I installed Remote Desktop Client so I can access my windows server. I can run that in full screen so it feels just like a PC, scary!
There are still some things I need to learn about the Mac but I’ll get there. I love it!
I just need to get a C compiler for this thing.
Anyway I’ll upload some pictures later.
Merry Christmas again, have a great day :)
[added]
Here are some screen shots of my mac.
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac1.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac2.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/images/site/mac3.jpg
more photos to come later...