brainwagon

Well, yesterday morning I got notification that my new Apple Macbook had shipped from Suzhou, China, and later that day, it had arrived in Anchorage, Alaska. This morning, I found that it had been through Indianapolis and then on to Emeryville, California, and was on a truck for delivery.

And here it is.

This one is pretty much the base model: the only addition I made was to give it 1gb of memory instead of the stock 512M. Other than that, it is pretty much the minimum laptop that Apple sells.

Early reports: I like it. A lot. It will take a little bit of time to get my muscle memory retrained to some of the slightly different key positions and the like, but I had no trouble at all with it. The laptop booted fine, I spent three minutes answering some of the initial setup questions, and then it booted. Shortly after, it announced that it found updates to twelve packages, which it nicely downloaded over the wireless network (did I mention it configured the wireless network without me doing anything), and a few minutes later, it was ready to reboot (once) and we were done.

I did a bit of configuration: enabling ssh logins, and getting a Terminal onto my Dock bar. Making the touchpad react quicker. Changed the screensaver and the background. And charged the battery.

And then I tried out photobooth. I accessed some websites. I transferred pictures from my BlueTooth phone. I used ssh to login to my home machine. I tried out iChat and configured mail.

The only criticism I have thus far is that the maximum volume level is a bit low. It would be fine for a quiet office, but you aren’t going to thump out those booty-shaking rhythms with these speakers. Headphones are probably a must.

It’s cute. It’s quiet. It weighs about half what my previous laptop did. I like it.

Oh, and it means that Microsoft doesn’t get any money from me for screwing me on behalf of their media partners.

[tags]New Hardware, Apple, Macbook[/tags]