A tiny blip in the continuum

I’ve gone and done it; I bought a Mac. I have become a switcher. Well, kinda, sorta…

Earlier last week, I received word through the grapevine that someone is letting go of two MacBook Pros at a very, very attractive price. One has already been snapped up by the guy who relayed the news to me. On Friday, I finally made the call to the seller; I am now the proud owner (sorta; more on that later…) of a seven-month-old MacBook Pro 17″ (Core Duo, 1GB RAM and 120GB HDD) in mint condition.

I have four reasons for getting the MBP. Firstly, after the whole flaky tethered shooting fiasco I had faced during my last shoot, the incentive for getting the MBP could not be greater since, with it, I can shoot tethered with Capture One (the Windows version of Capture One is just too darn ugly and counterproductive for me to even consider it). The offer came at a time when I was just this close to springing for a new MacBook Pro; all of last week, I was considering which MBP to buy.

Secondly, I do not have a workstation in the office on which I can properly do offline edits. Thirdly, I forked out the money to get it because I am going to make it a company purchase and get a reimbursement; at $2,600, we’d have been crazy to not get it.

Lastly, I work in an all-Mac environment both in and out of the office; the girls have, between themselves, two G5 iMacs, two iBooks G4 and a PowerBook 12″, while every post house I bring my work to are running FCP or Avid on Mac suites.

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No manufacturer knows how to create the out-of-the-box experience like Apple can. From the tidy little black box containing the user guides you see after you have lifted the laptop out of its styrofoam bed to the initial setup sequence that runs on-screen for the first time, every little touch about the packaging of a Mac is designed to impress. Not having ever owned an Apple product save for an Airport Express, I know now why Apple can charge premium prices for its products and get away with it. The whole damn lot is just understated sexiness. Unpacking the MacBook Pro alone has had me convinced that, perhaps, just perhaps, I am going to be made a convert after all.

At 3.1 kg, the MacBook Pro 17″ is one heavy machine, in no small parts due to its all brushed aluminum alloy body and to its sheer size. Next to my trusty Sony VAIO TR5GP, it is quite a culture shock and only reinforces my suspicions that this MacBook Pro is going to be more of a desktop replacement than something I would be toting everywhere with me.

Here are what I immediately like about the MacBook Pro 17″:

• Coming off on the 10.4″ screen of my VAIO, 17″ is a lot of screen real estate. The native resolution of the MacBook Pro 17″ at 1680×1050 pixels also makes it way more useful than that of its MacBook counterpart for video editing and photography.
• The four LED indicators on the battery; press the button on the battery and the LEDs light up to show you the remaining battery life.
• The backlit keyboard; a sensor within the MacBook Pro lights up the keyboard in a cool violet hue according to the amount of ambient light.

What I do not like:

• It runs very, very hot. This is one laptop you definitely do not want to be using on your lap.
• Abysmal battery life; I could barely ilk three-and-a-half hours out of it. I have been spoiled by the nine hours or so I can get out of my VAIO.
• Why did Apple not make the Remote Control a size that will fit into the ExpressCard slot?
• Speaking of ExpressCard, why the heck are ExpressCard memory card readers so expensive? $100 for a CompactFlash reader? Nuts!

Being the occasional Mac user, I can safely say I am not quite lost in the transition from Windows to Mac, and being platform-agnostic, there are things I like and dislike on equal parts about both operating systems.

I dislike how icons in the OS X Finder are unorganized by default.

I like how Windows Explorer relies heavily on context-sensitive menus and how easy it is to customize those menus.

On a related note, I cannot for my life understand why there is no right-click button on the Mac. Yes, there is the two-finger-tap-for-right-click gesture I can do on the trackpad of the MBP, but try and right-click a text selection and you will know what I mean…

I like how most dialog boxes are non-modal in OS X.

With the Windows taskbar, I like how I can quickly see at a glance what applications are running; in OS X, I have to mouse-over the icons in the Dock.

I like how much faster the OS X desktop boots into a usable state than the Windows desktop, and how much more responsive it feels while dragging stuff between window to window in OS X than in Windows.

I absolutely love the ease in which I can unmount external drives in OS X with just one click, rather than the counterintuitive way of having to find the eject icon that is buried in the system tray in Windows and then having to right-click it; further to that, having an external drive appear on the OS X desktop when it is plugged in makes so much sense it makes me wonder why Windows does not do that.

I do not like how—and do not understand the logic why—Mac installers come as disk images and how I have to open up the Applications folder in a Finder window and drag an application over to consider it installed. Yet, I also hate it when the supposedly ’smart’ MSI installations and the whole InstallShield nonsense in Windows screw up (which they do quite often).

And the eye candy in OS X. Oh, my…

I watched in awe the first time I pressed the Menu button on the Apple Remote Control and the OS X desktop recedes into the distance to give way to Front Row. Bloody cool visual transition. And how the semi-opaque background of Dashboard rippled when I drag-and-dropped a widget onto it. Violet’s eyes darn near popped out when she saw the transition.

I suspect I will be using OS X just as heavily as I use Windows. I bought a Mac for necessity more than for preference. Plus, I have too heavy an investment in Windows software and Windows-only hardware to fully make the switch. Does owning a Mac now make me a switcher?

Well, kinda, sorta…