New MacBook Pro

I bought a new MacBook Pro on Saturday. I wanted a Time Capsule but they were sold out. It turns out Time Capsule is not covered by any AppleCare, so there was no need to buy it at the same time as the computer for any beneficial bundling.

I backed up my PowerBook to a Firewire 800 external drive and then turned on the new machine. After verifying my language as english it asked if I wanted to copy user data from another machine, I said yes and used the external drive. It gave times all over the place saying 4 hours to go and then 2, etc. It took almost exactly an hour to finish.

I finished going through the setup and the migration was good. I had my main account and a couple of small ones I use when I need a clean working environment (like for the Quicksilver Manual). But it was also a little too good. The machine had the name of my PowerBook since I'm keeping the old machine I had to come up with a new name and teach my router about it. Also the port forwarding rules for iChat were set to the old machine and now I want them to the new. I'm pretty sure there's no way to have the rules work for both machines. The printer configuration changed so I had to teach it about my printer. Opening the Printer prefs and choosing add was sufficient. It found the printer via bonjour (it's on an AirPort Express) and all was fine.

The Hardware

The machine is very similar to my PowerBook G4. Its a little wider and I do like the extra screen real estate (1440x900). More and more apps are configuring themselves for wide screens so it's easier to have one. The matte screen looks great. Very bright and clear.

The magnetic power adaptor is great. I've already tripped on it once and it came out just as it should. Some people told me it came out too often, but I haven't had any problems yet.

I've use the new multi-touch trackpad to pinch to zoom in Safari and Finder already and like it. With the tighter screen resolution, text is just a little smaller and I find I want to zoom a little more often. I also gained the two finger click to do a secondary click (right-click or control-click previously), which is wonderful.

I'm ok with the slight changes to the keyboard layout. The new function key order I'm already used to. The change from enter to a second option key seems good. It's easier to option-click with just my right hand.

The crappy builtin speakers are a lot better than the crappy builtin speakers of the PowerBook. The builtin iSight is more convenient than attaching the external one.

Everything seems much faster, probably due equally to the faster processor and the 2GB of RAM instead of 1.

My only complaint is the latch for the lid. I don't think it's magnetic at all. My old powerbook had one mechanical latch in the middle and button on the front to release it. With the iSight in the middle, the MacBook Pro has two latches on either side and the button seems a little less substantial. It's not a big deal at all.

The Software

Leopard has a few new features and so far they're working for me. I haven't tried Time Machine yet, I will wait for Time Capsule.

I went through System Preferences. In the Desktop one turning off the Translucent Menu Bar was the first thing to do. I already love the two finger click on the trackpad that my PowerBook didn't have. I've used pinching for changing icon sizes and zooming in Safari. This is more useful as Quick Look and Coverflow are really nice in the Finder. Dashboard now has all widgets in one process so it uses much less resources; I've started using it again. I keep the Dock on the side and I prefer the white dots to indicate a running app over Tiger's black triangle. I used to download things to my Desktop but I'm starting to really like having the Downloads folder in the dock and using stacks.

It took a little router configuration to get iChat to work, but once that was setup it worked fine. The new backgrounds are cute, my sister liked looking at me on a roller coaster. I'm curious to try the screen sharing when we get her leopard. iCal is worse and will be the subject of another post. Address Book doesn't have new features but seems more stable. Terminal is a lot nicer if you're into that kind of thing.

Mail is a bit zippier and I'm curious to try the to-do and notes features though I suspect that's a feature that won't be really useful until 10.6. Mail Act-On works but GrowlMail (the only reason to use Growl as far as I'm concerned) is still in beta and I'll wait the hopefully short time for it to release. Also I've managed to transfer a bug from my old machine, ⌥⌘' (option-command-') doesn't do Decrease Quote Level, but I know that must be something I've done.

My 3rd party apps all seem to work and only Quicken and Office 2004 are PowerPC only. Thankfully Quicksilver seems to work pretty well though the User Accounts plugin seems broken so no fast user switching via it.

iTunes, Safari and iWork seem the same as on Tiger. I'm now able to run Safari AdBlock and it seems to work well. I started iPhoto and really like the new events mechanism for managing photos. I think it created about 200 and I went through and got them down to about 150. More work to do, but it's definitely a better organizational system.

Since I switched from a PowerPC chip to Intel looked through my applications to make sure things were universal binaries. First I looked in Activity Monitor and enabled the Kind column to see if any PowerPC apps were running. There were only a couple so that was good. I knew that Quicken 2007 and Microsoft Office 2004 were PowerPC only. I also saw an mdsworker and at one point a translate process that were PowerPC. The first is Spotlight and since it comes with Leopard I figured it was ok. The second I learned was the actual Rosetta translator that lets PowerPC apps run on an Intel machine. But I saw this right after rebooting and wondered why it was running at all. I went through all my Applications in the Finder with a persistent Get Info window open (select a file and hit option-command-I, the Get Info window opens and changes as you select different files). I had a few apps that were PowerPC only but none that were running. I looked at my Login Items in the Account System Preferences and all were universal. Then when looking in a Players folder I have for media players, I thought about Safari plugins. I looked in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ and found several old ones that were PowerPC only. I upgraded some like Flash and moved others to a "Disabled Plug-Ins" subfolder, restarted Safari and found it came up faster and the translate process was no longer running. I see the mdsworker process as PowerPC occasionally but it goes away on its own.

So far I'm very very happy.