Follow-up thoughts on being a Mac (1+ month in)

Just wanted to follow-up on my previous post with some things I forgot to mention and my impressions now that I've been using my MacBook Pro for over a month.

One of the biggest positives of OSX is no longer having the lame Flash bug I had on both Vista machines I was running. This annoying bug only played flash videos for 2 seconds and without sound. It effectively made it impossible to watch most online videos, including YouTube! It's amazing when things work as you expect them to.

The lack of a right-mouse button on the notebook itself hasn't been as bad since I use a USB mouse at work that has a right mouse-button that works fine (without any configuring on my part).

I was frustrated that tabbing with the keyboard seemed to always skip dropdown boxes. Thanks to writing this post, I forced myself to finally try figuring it out and a google search helped me find some help in changing this. I just activated it so haven't used it in normal browsing yet, but one thing i've noticed is that when tabbing to the dropdown box i don't seem to be able to expand the list of options, only cycle through them. Hopefully there's a way to do that, but i'm too tired to search for that answer right now.

All-and-all, i'm pretty surprised how quickly i adapted to using my MacBook Pro and OSX, and it's amazing how clunky PCs feel to me now. So far, the MacBook Pro has proven to be a more elegant machine, and OS X has not surprisingly been a far superior OS to Windows.

Learning to be a Mac

It's been about 2.5 weeks since i got my MacBook Pro for work, and so far i've been mighty impressed. As a quick background, i've been a PC user since i was 6, and a ThinkPad user for the past 11 years. I absolutely loved my T42 (running the stable and usable Windows XP). Last year i got an X61 running Vista Business and have been very disappointed. I love the form-factor and size of the X-series ThinkPads, but it was crashing constantly, among other issues. So when i got the choice of choosing a laptop for work, my decision wasn't too hard:

• ThinkPads are no longer IBM machines
• I've been punished by Microsoft for way too long already
• Most of the other people at work use MacBook Pros
• I was fairly clueless around Macs/OSX and felt kinda stupid as someone who's supposed to be relatively tech savvy
  

So how's it been so far? Pretty awesome. :)

The goods:

• It is so freakin' fast to boot up, sleep, wake. I remember my X61 took about 5 minutes to hibernate or resume.
• Its sleep mode is so impressively battery efficient (as Paul had told me before)
  
• OSX (10.5.5) is really stable. I've had one or two programs freeze up, but haven't had the whole OS freeze up on me (*cough*, Vista, *cough*).
• Most of the functions are fairly intuitive and logical once you know how to do them, and work really well (i.e.--scrolling using two fingers on the touch pad).
• Seems to be a short-cut key for everything (just need to learn them all; http://www.usingmac.com/2007/11/21/mac-os-x-leopard-200-productivity-booster-hotkeys is a great resource).
  
• Built-in iChat is so easy to use and performs pretty well.
• Beautiful bright screen, good speakers.
• No longer having to deal with Windows.
  

The not so goods:

• I still don't know whether to use control, option, or command when i want to skip to the beginning/end of a line or skip from word to word. I don't think it's even consistent among programs.
• No right-mouse button. Yes i can hold control while clicking, but it's so much slower.
  
• As people have said, the machine does get quite hot.

While i felt really strange about it when i first took my Macbook Pro out of its pretty packaging, i've quickly grown to love it, and to enjoy being among the increasing number of people who "are a Mac".