Back to Mac

After about 10 years away from Mac I finally have returned. I grew up with Macintosh and left after a horrible experience with Power Computing and OS8. Over my time away I've grown fairly used to Windows but quite a few events have taken place that have led to my Mac reunion. Firstly I've always secretly wanted to return to a Mac but the initial release of OS X was lack luster (and the OS9 backwards compatibility was a nighmare, my mother went through it). Then I had no desire to go back to Mac with the adoption of Intel, reference the time frame I left Mac the first time. The Intel switch seems to be stable and Leopard seems to have gone through a nice settling period as well so this seemed like a good time to make my move back home.

My second reason, Vista, aka windows biggest mistake since ME which was not even that long ago. Vista itself really is not enough to turn a person to Mac, XP is solid and supported and I am sure Windows will correct itself with the next major release. The unfortunate part of Vista was it did show me where Microsoft is heading with their OS and quite frankly I am unimpressed. Vista is a hog and if nothing else is trying to be more Mac like, it lacks innovation and MS looks to be moving towards a subscription model. I'm not saying Mac really impresses me as an OS but Apple is continuing to push innovation into their line of computers and OS.

Features that won me over:

• Similarly spec'ed laptops in the Windows arena are as much or more
  
• Spaces is cool and I think I will be more efficient in the longrun
• I missed AppleScript and it can be very helpful
• Expose looks like it will be nice
• The multitouch track pad was attractive
• Time machine looked impressive

Finally I'll admit its "the in thing." Anyone that knows me would know I am not generally in the "in" crowd so it shouldn't come as a a surprise that this was not a determining factor but it did add a sense of urgency to purchase it now. I planned to get one soon and was considerng waiting till June to see if they did anything like add BlueRay but after reading about the power cost of BR I figured it may not be worth it anyway.

After < 24 hours of use I have to say I am loving the multitouch mouse pad! On my previous HP I would use my pinky to hit that small little sliver on the right side of my mousepad to scroll up and down, and heaven forbid if I wanted to horizontally scroll. Bedlam would happen if I accidentally passed over the sacred scrolling area while just trying to move the mouse! The multitouch pad is nice and large and there is no sweet spot for scrolling, just use 2 fingers and pull/push, sorry for anyone out there that sawed off all but one finger. "Right Clicking" is easy as well with the 2 finger tap very easy and pretty intuitive. Most annoying thing so far is the lack of a delete key, well its called delete but it is a backspace to do a (windows) delete I have to do fn + delete.