January 6, 2007

Switch Journal: First Impressions

January 6, 2007, 10:44 AM | 4 Comments

Well, here it is, part one of the recently announced Switch Journal. I promised that my first entry to this series would be all about my first impressions of the MacBook Pro and my “switch” experience, so that’s what this post will be all about. Experienced Mac users will probably have heard most of these thoughts (or thought them themselves) before, but feel free to add your input to the mix.

My first real experiences with Apple products (not including the time I spent working on them during high school, the OS 9 days) came because of the iPod. About 2 years ago I bought my wife an iPod Mini for her birthday and it was then that I started to develop an appreciation for Apple and their brand. I’ve always been one to notice little details - whether it’s a little phrase in a song that stood out to me, or tiny things in the background of a scene of video - so Apple’s attention to detail is always something I’ve both noticed and appreciated.

Apple must spend a tone of time on designing the packaging for their products alone, because opening one of them is like opening a present. They’ve obviously realized that the first impression a consumer gets about their products starts from the time the touch the box, not just the time they first turn on their iPod, computer, etc. Other companies are starting to catch on to that notion, but the vast majority of products these days still have fairly uninspired wrappers.

One thing that Apple also strives for is minimizing the amount of packaging their products require. I can’t count the number of times they’ve redesigned their iPod packages to make them both smaller and more imaginative. Not only does this help increase the “wow factor” but also serves an obvious environmental purpose as well.

The MacBook family is no different from the iPod line of products when it comes to its cool packaging. I know there are millions of unpacking photos out there of the MacBook, but like any good Mac user I had to take my own - the photoset is on Flickr. The pictures really don’t do justice though, the box the computer came in is unbelievably small. I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Initial Startup

The initial startup of a Mac is interesting. First off is the standard “welcome” video that plays. The video has no real purpose except to say “welcome,” but the delivery is pretty good. For those that don’t know, it basically flashes welcome across the screen in several different languages with some nice music and video effects to go with it. After that you’re asked a series of questions to set up your computer with all the standard stuff like your user name, network information, etc. One of the nicest things that happened during setup was that (because of the built-in iSight camera) OS X setup asks to take a picture of yourself to use as your user icon. Again, little details.

Pretty much everything for me was smooth sailing, but one problem I did run into was setting up the Airport wireless card with my wireless network. I had some fairly uncommon security settings applied to my router that Airport doesn’t support (that I know of), so I had to change them to get it to work properly. After that it was simple, but it took me a while to figure out what the problem was. The setting in question was that my router (a Linksys WRT54G) has 4 options when it comes to the security key. Airport wouldn’t let me select which key to use, so I had to set my router to use key # 1 and then, problem solved.

After I had done all the initial startup, I got to experience it again because I wanted to do a clean install of OS X to make sure that I didn’t have all the needless stuff on my hard drive. I had heard this is recommended as OS X comes with a lot of language files installed. I chose to only install English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese (and maybe Chinese) as I figured those were probably the most common ones I’d run across anyways. Also, some of the iLife apps (like GarageBand, iMovie, etc.) come with a lot of audio/video samples. After doing a clean install I was able to save a little over 10 GB of space, so I think it was worth it.

The MacBook Pro

The computer itself is everything I expected it would be. I’ve wanted one for a while, and knew what they were all about so it’s not like anything really surprised me. It’s well built and feels extremely solid - definitely a step up from my previous laptop (an HP Pavilion ZV5160CA) that always felt needlessly bulky and somewhat cheap.

After much research and internal debate, I decided to go with the glossy screen option. I know I’m probably making a lot of people shake their heads, but I really like it. The HP laptop had a matte screen because it was bought just as glossy screens were starting to appear on PC laptops, but that was always something I wished it had. I was initially worried about how much glare the screen would suffer from, but honestly, it isn’t bad at all. When compared with my old laptop, the screen is really bright and colours seem to really pop from behind that gloss.

I will say one thing though, the glossy screen is either a “like it or hate it” kind of issue, so if you’re debating, make sure you check one out in person first. If the store doesn’t have a MacBook Pro with a glossy screen, take a look at the screen on the MacBook for an idea. Make sure you look at it with a lot of dark colours on the screen as they’re easiest to see glare on.

The keyboard is really nice and the backlight that adjusts to the ambient room lighting is clever. By default your screen brightness is automatically adjusted based on the ambient room lighting as well, but you can turn that off if it’s not your cup ‘o tea.

I hate track pads; I always have and probably always will. They just don’t offer the same control as a mouse and that can sometimes be frustrating. Having said that, the track pad on the MacBook Pro has to be the best one I’ve ever used bar none. You can use 2 fingers to scroll in any direction (oh yes, a full 360°), and you can tap with 2 fingers for a “right click.”

I’d heard a lot of people complaining about the MacBook’s heat problems, but I can’t really say that there’s any issue with that, at least for me. I’ve never felt it get alarmingly hot at any point, so I’m not sure what the big deal is. Most of the time when the computer is actually on my lap though I’m not doing anything particularly power intensive.  I haven’t watched a DVD on the laptop yet, so we’ll have to see what happens in that scenario.

Battery life is pretty good in my opinion and I routinely get over 3 hours of life on a charge, but again not doing anything extremely power intensive. It’s not the 5.5 hours that was advertised, but I’m also not using it under “optimal battery consumption” conditions either. When I first got the computer the battery came with about a 60-70% charge and it took me over 3 hours to drain it completely.

Conclusion

The thing I have enjoyed most so far about my new Mac is that everything just works. Plug in your headphones and the computer switches your volume to a headphone profile, unplug them and it uses the built-in speaker profile. Plug in an external monitor and with no setup at all you’re running dual monitors. It’s something Apple’s always advertised, but it’s true, stuff just works.

So far I’ve been extremely happy with this computer and I’d have to say that all my first impressions have been good. The next bunch of entries will get a lot more technical from here on out, but I just wanted to start with the first impressions and move on from there. I have a lot of great ideas and tips that I will be posting in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

Posted in: Apple, Switch Journal, Technology