New yet strangely familiar shiny
Aug. 3rd, 2011 11:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinToday I got my new computer: a 15" MacBook Pro, outwardly nearly identical to my work machine, a 15" MacBook Pro, which I'd decided I liked everything about except that it was not mine. It's the first computer I've bought in nine years, the first Intel Mac I've actually owned, and my first-ever laptop, though that seems strange to say because I've been using various laptops belonging to employers or to Sam for so long.
Cosmetically, there is no difference except that they redesigned the MagSafe power connector so that it extends back instead of out to the side. The computer feels slightly heavier to me.
I undoubtedly bought way more computer than I needed. This strategy has worked for me in the past when I could afford it; it means the computers I do buy tend to last longer. The main differences from the slightly older work machine are internal: this one is quad-core (but with a slower clock—this seems to be the current pattern), has a bigger hard drive, and has Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) on it.
I'm perfectly aware that I paid a steep premium to get a Mac, but having extensively used Windows, Mac OS and Linux in recent years, I can say with some empirical authority that I'm still OK with that.
So far I've just been putting all the stuff I like to use on it, and seeing what happens. Little Lion incompatibilities are popping up all over the place, often where Lion and the app were trying to implement the same feature slightly differently. Lion's new gestures stepped on Chrome's forward and back gestures (I've heard the latest dev build makes a stab at fixing this, but I've got the release). Chrome's fullscreen mode clearly doesn't use Lion's fullscreen API yet. Golly (the cellular-automaton app) needed me to make a symlink to the lastest version of Perl before it would start. Gimp, Adium, Skype and Google Earth seem to work OK.
I find I don't mind Lion's new iOS-like scrollbars and in fact find them nicer-looking than the garish old ones. But I immediately reversed the scroll gesture back to what it used to be (it seems to me that the scroll gestures for a trackpad and for a touchscreen should inherently be the reverse of one another; even my Android phone agrees).
I like the MS Windows-style window resizing and think it was long overdue. The iPad-like Launchpad screen is far superior to the pop-up Applications launcher in Snow Leopard.
I'm mulling over whether to attempt installing the slightly aged copy of Microsoft Office for Mac OS that I bought at a steep employee discount in the last days that I could, in the expectation of buying a new Mac someday. I find I've gotten along fine without it up to now, and given that it's not going to support such things as Lion file versioning, maybe it's not worth the trouble...
Cosmetically, there is no difference except that they redesigned the MagSafe power connector so that it extends back instead of out to the side. The computer feels slightly heavier to me.
I undoubtedly bought way more computer than I needed. This strategy has worked for me in the past when I could afford it; it means the computers I do buy tend to last longer. The main differences from the slightly older work machine are internal: this one is quad-core (but with a slower clock—this seems to be the current pattern), has a bigger hard drive, and has Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) on it.
I'm perfectly aware that I paid a steep premium to get a Mac, but having extensively used Windows, Mac OS and Linux in recent years, I can say with some empirical authority that I'm still OK with that.
So far I've just been putting all the stuff I like to use on it, and seeing what happens. Little Lion incompatibilities are popping up all over the place, often where Lion and the app were trying to implement the same feature slightly differently. Lion's new gestures stepped on Chrome's forward and back gestures (I've heard the latest dev build makes a stab at fixing this, but I've got the release). Chrome's fullscreen mode clearly doesn't use Lion's fullscreen API yet. Golly (the cellular-automaton app) needed me to make a symlink to the lastest version of Perl before it would start. Gimp, Adium, Skype and Google Earth seem to work OK.
I find I don't mind Lion's new iOS-like scrollbars and in fact find them nicer-looking than the garish old ones. But I immediately reversed the scroll gesture back to what it used to be (it seems to me that the scroll gestures for a trackpad and for a touchscreen should inherently be the reverse of one another; even my Android phone agrees).
I like the MS Windows-style window resizing and think it was long overdue. The iPad-like Launchpad screen is far superior to the pop-up Applications launcher in Snow Leopard.
I'm mulling over whether to attempt installing the slightly aged copy of Microsoft Office for Mac OS that I bought at a steep employee discount in the last days that I could, in the expectation of buying a new Mac someday. I find I've gotten along fine without it up to now, and given that it's not going to support such things as Lion file versioning, maybe it's not worth the trouble...