Gabriel Radic

I took these notes while unpacking and installing my new MacBook Pro at work.

- Slick packaging, as usual for Apple.

- First thing I’d do is migrate my user account or the whole drive from the old MacBook. Since the new MacBooks no longer have FireWire 400, I can no longer use the Target mode. I’ll have to migrate my stuff over via an external disk.

- I’ll just start with a fresh Mac OS user account.

- The black keyboard feels softer, better.

- I thought the trackpad will get me on my nerves. It does. Badly.

- Downloaded my Layered Desktop from its Flickr page.

- This machine needs a cool name. Since so far it’s an underimpresser, the name needs to say blasé, but not quite lame. Like old friends. Rorschach could work.

- Installing Teleport to remote control dear SUBZERO, holding all my data.

- JMG just passed by, and he convinced me to activate the “Tap to click” option for the trackpad. I always hates this thing, but he called me a grumpy old men in French, so I have no choice.

- Bug with Safari 4, first time I see the tab bar mangled like this.

- Downloading iStat menus.

- It’s good to have 1.93GB of FREE memory.

- Trying Postbox, again, I’ve heard the the latest betas improved features, UI and stability. 5 minutes later: “The application Postbox quit unexpectedly.” Mkay.

- Hmm… the fresh new Mac OS user account thing is too tedious. I’ll just transfer my previous user account from SUBZERO instead, as I usually do when I setup a new machine.

- The Mini DisplayPort to VGA dongle needed a firmware upgrade, which I just did. Unbelievable, even the least piece of dumb cable now has a chip and needs to be patched. We used to jokes about this kind of stuff 10 years ago, and it was funny.

- Pinch-zooming in Safari 4 could’ve been great. Unfortunately it’s jumpy and unpredictable.

- Stuff is being copied from SUBZERO to an external drive.

- Compared with the new 15” MacBook Pro, the display on the old 13” MacBook looks like it lost a couple of brightness notches.

A week later…

- I installed Windows in Boot Camp, bought the Orange Box and played a little. Half-Life at 1440×900 with all the feature maxed out and anti-aliasing is pure bliss. If only I had time to play…

- When playing the aforementioned, the machine heats up quite a bit and the vents get noisy pretty quickly.

- I think I have a dead pixel in the middle of the top-right quarter. Stupid. The resolution is high enough to make it unnoticeable.

- The new trackpad IS indeed unusable. It’s hard to click and makes a horribly loud clunky noise. So yeah, I am vieux grognon.

- Still only two USB ports, and this is a 15-incher. At the same time, Apple forces people to sync the iPhone over USB, instead of going with Bluetooth like it does with any other phone on the market. Dumb.

- Mini DisplayPort? Really? Why not a special VGA connector that could deliver DisplayPort functionality with an adapter? Or both? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

This sounds hards, but the truth is the new machine is great. The bigger and brighter screen is a huge improvement. So is the Windows gaming. The bigger and faster hard disk, a new battery and the 4GB of RAM are very welcomed.

Plus, it looks and feels like a tight pack of sexitude.