A review of my new MacBook Pro

I saw David Pogue’s review of his new MacBook Pro and had a couple of thoughts about my own recent purchase. Also, I had at least one person ask me for a review of the Touch Bar after I’d had a chance to use the laptop for a while. So here we go.

This is my third MacBook Pro. I had a late-2007 15” model and a mid-2012 13”. I loved both of them and I’ve become a big fan of macOS so I had no desire to get a Windows 10 laptop. I was willing to trade off the lack of compatible USB ports and the loss of a MagSafe power adapter in order to have a computer that didn’t show me the macOS “pinwheel” anytime I launched another application or opened a tab in Safari. So I bought a 13” version with the Touch Bar, 8 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD space. Since I use iTunes Match to store all of my music in the cloud, I moved my 140 GB of music to a portable drive at home and just copied my Photos database from my old laptop.

Things I love:

The TouchID power button that logs you in with a fingerprint is so convenient that I wish I could do it on every computer I use. Also, I don’t have to type my master password in 1Password anymore, so I’m using it more on my laptop now than I used to. It can also be used to pay for purchases with Apple Pay, but I haven’t done that yet on the computer.

The Touch Bar is still a little gimmicky for me, but I’m starting to appreciate it more and more. I added a Lock button to the standard row of keys (accessible when you tap the < next to the omnipresent brightness, volume, and Siri controls), so I can lock the laptop with two taps. I like the ability to tap and drag to change the volume or the screen brightness. Other things, like having tap access to your Safari browser tabs, are less useful features. You can’t see enough detail on the tabs in the TouchBar to be able to switch between them. I haven’t used the auto-complete feature that much yet. I do like having access to emoji on the Mac now. I’m sure there was a way to type them on my previous laptop but the Touch Bar suggests emoji replacements the same way as on iOS, so it’s much easier now.

The speakers aren’t quite positioned where the holes in the top case would make you believe they are, but the sound is loud anyway. I almost always listen to music with headphones or external speakers anyway, but the audio is excellent. 

It’s ridiculously light and thin. My previous MBP weighed about 4.5 lbs. This one is supposed to weigh 3.5 lbs but it feels much lighter, and it’s half the thickness of my previous laptop. I hardly notice it’s in my backpack.

The Retina screen is gorgeous. When I have to connect to my office network and use a Citrix remote session, it’s noticeably less sharp than the native macOS apps. My photos have never looked better.

I like the larger touch pad and I don’t have the accidental cursor problems Pogue describes, even with “Tap to Click” turned on. I do have some issues with click and drag, so I need to tweak the settings. But the touchpad is fine and I don’t know why anyone would deface their laptop by taping a piece of paper over part of the top case.

Things I don’t love:

The keyboard is a little too lightweight and click-y for me. I loved the keyboard on the 2007-era MBP, and moving to the “chicklet” keys on the 2012 MBP took a little getting used to. I’m adapting to this keyboard, though. If I can type on an iPhone or iPad, I can get used to typing on this. It is a fast keyboard, and find myself making fewer mistakes with it. This review is the most I’ve typed on this laptop to date, though.

Things that are fine:

The USB-C ports are great as long as you have compatible cables or adapters. The day I ordered the MacBook I ordered three short USB-A to USB-C cable adapters and two USB-A to USB-C adapter plugs. I also ordered a spare Apple 61W charger and a USB-C to HDMI adapter for my 21” monitor on my desk at home. I had factored the expense of these adapters into my purchase price, and I spent about $130, the bulk of which was the spare AC adapter ($70). Thanks to the flexibility of USB-C, I could have bought an off-brand backup charger for the office, but I didn’t want to take my chances connecting my brand-new laptop to a knock-off charger, even at a lower voltage. But it’s a possibility if you want to do that. 

I don’t miss the SD card slot from my old laptop, as I hardly use my standalone digital camera any more. I might need to get a USB-C to Ethernet adapter at some point, considering that my main job is computer networking. But most of my work is with Wi-Fi, and I can’t remember the last time I had to connect my old laptop to my router at home, let alone a switch at my office.

I also didn’t buy a USB-C to Lightning cable. I connect my phone to my MacBook about once a year. With iCloud and Apple Music and iTunes Match, I only need to connect my phone if I need to back it up through iTunes or recover from a fatal problem. I can use one of my adapters in that case.

 I haven’t had a chance to test the overall battery life. Most of the time, my laptop is connected to AC power, either at home or at the office. I ran it down to 40% or so the other day over a couple of hours. It charges faster than any Mac I’ve ever owned, so I don’t see how the battery life is going to be an issue for me. I also don’t live off this laptop the way I do my phone, where I obsess over battery life. 

Overall, I’m extremely happy with my new MacBook Pro. It’s lighter and faster than my previous one, with an improved display and a Touch Bar that I think will be a great addition as more third-party applications support it. I’m going on a short trip for work at the end of the month and I look forward to seeing how I get along with it on the road.

My computer is like an old car

When I was growing up, my mom used to talk about how her cars would always start to fall apart just when they were out of warranty.  I'm not sure if that was really the case, but it did seem that her Datsun 310 had more problems at the end of its five-year warranty than ever before.  Of course, she drove that car everywhere and it was on its third clutch by the time we traded it in for a Toyota Corolla in 1986.  Nevertheless, her words have come back to me the past few months as my Macbook Pro nears the end of its three-year warranty.

When I invested in this computer in February 2008, I knew it wouldn't last forever.  I always assumed it would hold up for about three years and then I'd buy another one.  But I didn't think its demise would be so obvious.  My Windows desktop PCs always deteriorated gradually.  Each one needed a new hard drive sometime in its lifespan, but other than that entire components didn't just fail out of nowhere.  They just started performing slower and slower until I couldn't take it anymore and bought a new desktop PC.

However, the MacBook Pro has declined in marked stages.  One evening in October it refused to come out of sleep mode or boot up.  A two-night stay at the Apple Store in midtown Manhattan resulted in a new logic board (which I assume is the motherboard).  A few weeks later I noticed that the keyboard and touchpad would stop working periodically.  They usually came back after a reboot, but by mid-December the problem was serious enough that I took it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Chelsea.  That was a three-day stay (and a trip back to the mothership in Houston) for a new "top case" of a keyboard and touchpad.  I got the laptop back a few days before Christmas and it was great to have a fresh keyboard and non-worn-out touchpad, plus a fully functional 9 key.  But I suspected that something else would break sooner rather than later.

A few days ago I opened the laptop and saw that the speaker icon in the status bar was grayed out.  When I tried to play music I didn't hear anything.  System Preferences claimed that the internal speakers weren't there.  I plugged in headphones and external speakers and they worked, so the audio system itself was OK.  After a reboot my internal speakers came back.  But now they're not working again.

I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble of taking it back to the Genius Bar again in the next few weeks before the warranty runs out.  I suppose it is; if it's possible to fix the problem for free, I should do it.  Once the warranty is up I'm not getting anything fixed.  And I'm planning to buy a new MacBook Pro later this year when Apple refreshes their laptop lineup.  I just need to hold out until later this spring and hope that nothing else happens to this computer.  And I need to keep getting regular backups.  You never know when you'll lose a hard drive.

Puzzled, perturbed, and becoming peevish over Mac troubles

My MacBook Pro has been acting funny for the past few days. When I close the lid, the computer is supposed to go to sleep. It does sleep, but if I disconnect the AC adapter and leave it in sleep mode, eventually it turns back on or runs the battery down in some other way. Twice last week the battery ran out while the computer was in sleep mode and resting under my desk at home in a laptop bag. The first time that happened I assumed I'd left the computer turned on somehow. But the second time I was certain it was in sleep mode, yet when I got home the computer was off and the battery dead. I brought the Mac to work this morning. It was asleep when I put it in my backpack but hot to the touch when I took it out 30 minutes later. The system wouldn't wake up and I had to power-cycle it. It seems the computer had turned itself back on during my commute.

Along the same lines, the laptop's battery life has declined steadily over the past few weeks. The battery is less than a year old. I replaced it last December when the previous battery began to lose its capacity over the course of a few weeks. I'm sure I can get another battery through Apple support, but I wonder if the battery life and the sleep issues are related. I've also had weird issues with the OS. Last night I had to reboot before Photo Booth recognized the built-in iSight camera. System Preferences has given me the "beach ball" a few times. I couldn't even run System Profiler yesterday without rebooting. It's possible that some of these problems are happening because of the improper shutdowns, though that seems unlikely. I did upgrade to Snow Leopard about six weeks ago, though these problems only appeared last week. I've checked the system logs but they're not much help, though you'd have to be a developer to understand most of the entries in the log.

I am growing concerned. Let's call it "threat level: troubled." The computer is under warranty for another 16 months, so if I need help from Apple I can get it. But it's my baby, and I wouldn't be a good parent if I weren't just a little worried about what's going on under the keyboard. I'll try a few more self-help ideas like clearing the PRAM and looking at any other recent upgrades before I give up and visit my local Genius Bar. If I go that route, I just hope I get a real Genius and not some doofus who just got out of the training program. I've not been impressed with what I've heard about the newbies at the Bar.

Really early thoughts on iTunes 9

I seem to have become an early adopter. I had to grab iTunes 9 as soon as it "dropped" this afternoon. It took me about 25 minutes to download the 82 Mb installation file and roughly two minutes to install it. I launched iTunes and after the usual licensing page it went into "updating iTunes Library" mode. I had left my Time Machine backup disk connected to the laptop, and while iTunes claimed to be updating my library, my Time Machine disk was running. I didn't pay much attention at first, as Time Machine regularly backs up the disks during the day. But after 10 or 15 minutes and no change in the status, I took a chance and forced iTunes to quit. Then I disconnected the backup drive and re-launched iTunes. This time iTunes came right up. It must have detected a copy of my iTunes library on my backup disk and started to organize it. That's bad, iTunes. Leave my backups alone!

There's a slightly different look and feel to the interface. The icons along the left side have subtle changes. The smart playlists now have a gear icon instead of a note, so it's clear from the icon and the color that those playlists are different. The list view shows artists on the left and songs on the right, and the grid view has a white background instead of the older dark gray background. You can change the columns in the list view, and you can switch back to the older view with the columns on top. I'll have to play with it for a while to see which way I like it. The Podcasts page mimics the iPhone podcasts view by using a half-filled circle to indicate which podcasts you've listened to only in part.

More importantly for me, there's also an iPhone update to version 3.1. There are some video tricks and MMS enhancements in there, but the feature I like most is the ability to drag and drop your iPhone apps from iTunes. When the iPhone is connected to the computer, the Apps page shows you all of your iPhone apps by the "page" on the iPhone. You can move apps from one page to another and remove apps from the phone with the mouse. Now I can roughly organize my apps by type: one page for music-related apps, one for productivity, one for restaurants and movies, and so on.

Apple also introduced iPod Nanos with video cameras, updated the iPod Touch line with new hardware with more memory and faster video chips, and bumped the iPod Classic to 160 GB. I should say that they bumped it back to 160 GB, because I own a 160 GB Classic I bought two years ago. But this new Classic uses a one-platter hard drive, so it's thinner. But it's good to know that Apple still has an iPod for geeks like me who want to carry around all their music. And if my old Classic dies, I can replace it without spending too much or sacrificing space.

Spending money I didn't really need to spend

I bought iLife '09 on my way home from work last night. I was underwhelmed by the iLife '09 demo at MacWorld last month and at that time had determined that I could live without the new enhancements to iPhoto, iMovie, and the other programs in the suite. But after I ran the first draft of my tax returns and saw that I should get a decent sum back from the federales, I changed my mind. Late last night I installed the upgrades and set about place- and face-tagging my photos. The advantages of place-tagging and face-tagging are that once you've tagged all your photos, you can search for photos by person or location. Since I organize my photos by date, time, and then location, searching by place and/or person could be useful. For the $80 I spent on the software, I certainly hope it's useful.

The place-tagging didn't take that long, but it took me a while to figure out how to get specific with my pushpins. I didn't want to tag every photo taken in the five boroughs as "New York," when some of them are specifically in Central Park, or at a particular location in Brooklyn like Floyd Bennett Field. After making a few adjustments I finished the process about an hour later.

By that time iPhoto had completed its face-scanning process, so I set about face-tagging some of my recent photo sets. I am not too impressed with the facial recognition so far. It has trouble with people wearing glasses or sunglasses, or with heads tilted slightly. I have had to correct or add face tags to most of the photos I've adjusted up to this point. But it is fun to go back through some of these photos and see who iPhoto knows and who it doesn't know. Also, it helps me to remember the names of all the people I met at the various weddings I attended last year. I know that I don't need to tag everyone; it's unlikely that I'll want to search for friends of friends that I met one time in my photo collection. But if I tag the major friends, it will make a difference for future searches.

As for the rest of the product suite, I spent a few minutes in iMovie this morning just poking around, and I haven't tried the updated version of GarageBand or iWeb yet. I don't own a guitar or a piano, so I don't think the celebrity lessons feature of GarageBand will be of much use to me. And this blog is the only web site I maintain at the moment so iWeb might not get much use either. But I couldn't pick and choose which applications I wanted to buy so I got the whole suite. I just hope Apple doesn't release a super-updated version next year, because I'll have to buy that too.

Why you should keep your backups separate from your computers

William Wiley was a passenger on US Airways Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River last month. He had a laptop with him with about $30000 of data on it. He had a backup of this data on another laptop. However, he had this backup laptop with him on the flight. Both laptops are now in storage, awaiting data recovery which will take about eight weeks.

Backups are a great idea. But you don't want to have your only backup copy of your data stored with your primary data device. You want to keep at least one backup in a different location. I have two backups of the data on my Macbook Pro: a Time Machine disk at the office that backs up the computer every weekday, and a SuperDuper backup at home that holds a recent image of my laptop (at the moment this image is about a month old). I also back up my photos and music on my iPod. I wasn't always this conscientious about my backups. But I lost all the data on my PC a few times when the drive crashed, which cost me about two years' worth of old e-mail and old documents. Now I'm paranoid about backups because you never know what's going to happen.

tech update: the Mac battery is not healthy, but the TV looks great

I've kept an eye on the "battery health" meter on my Dashboard and on how long my battery lasts when I unplug the power cord. The health hovers at about 25% and battery life has been under an hour for the past week. It's in a sorry state right now. I want to run the recalibration process (and I might be able to give that a go this weekend) but I think I'm going to need a replacement battery. That will require either a cal to support or a trip to one of New York's Apple stores to speak to a Genius. I think I'll try the Genius route if I can get an appointment before I leave for the holidays. I don't like the idea of fighting the crowds in the store to get tech support at the height of the shopping season, but if I can get a new battery in the store, that would be worth the effort.

My calibrated HDTV still looks spectacular, so I think that effort a few weeks ago was time well spent. The incredible thing about owning a HDTV is that I am always impressed by the picture quality, even after 18 months. I will never get tired of watching sports and movies with a picture that amazing.

Computer problems on my vacation

On Monday morning I went to check my Windows desktop PC which I'd left on overnight. I found that it appeared to be dead. Moving the mouse didn't wake up the monitor from sleep mode and when I power-cycled the computer the monitor insisted that it had no signal. I opened the case and poked around. Everything looked OK inside. The PC was getting power because the optical drives' lights flickered when I turned it on, the fans came on, and the hard drive light worked. But I never got any POST messages or beeps indicating that the PC was trying to boot up. So it looked like the motherboard had died overnight. It's a three-year-old Dell PC that's out of warranty, and I bought my MacBook Pro to replace it, so it's no great loss. But it is now trash.

I wasted little time in dismembering the PC. I took out the hard drive, installed it in a USB enclosure, and used SuperDuper to clone my MacBook Pro to it. Now I have a spare, bootable copy of my Mac that I can run on any other Mac, or use to restore my system in a hurry if I have a hardware failure. This backup is in addition to the Time Machine backup drive that I keep at work. (In case you haven't noticed, I'm a zealot when it comes to data backup.) I might cannibalize the DVD drives as well, though I don't really need them.

I have another backup drive that I used to keep for the Windows PC. It now holds the last good backup of the PC, from just before my move to Brooklyn in July. I can access it from my Mac, but because it's in NTFS format, I can't write data to it from the Mac, I can only read it. I tried writing data from my Windows Vista VM on the Mac, but that didn't work either. If I want to edit that data or reformat the disk, I'll need another Windows PC. I could always bring home my work laptop and use that. Or I could take this as a sign that it's finally time to give Boot Camp a try and install Vista on the "bare metal" of my MacBook Pro. While I'd be able to access Windows resources natively with the Mac hardware, I'd lose 20-30 GB of hard drive space to my Windows installation. I've resisted that temptation until now, but without a reliable PC at home, I think my hand has been forced. But that will be a task for after my vacation. In order to use Boot Camp, I need to print out the software manual. However, my home printer has been out of order for a few weeks with ink cartridge issues. I need to replace the ink cartridges to get the printer working. So I'll have to wait to install Boot Camp until I go back to work after Labor Day, print out the instructions, then have a free day at home to play around. I love tinkering with my computers, so that sounds like a fine way to kill an afternoon.

Goin' home

Well, that was fun. But all good things must come to an end, and I'm on my way back to New York. I had a good time in Florida. I learned a few things about the product we use, I learned a few things about myself (mostly, that I'm 34 going on 74), I saw more fake breasts than I've ever seen before, and I got to relax on the beach and eat some great meals.

The conference ended last night around 8 PM, after a largely disappointing closing reception (not enough food, badly lit room). One of my former co-workers lives in the Miami area, and he met us at the hotel for dinner. We wanted to stay close by, but a consensus soon developed around the idea of going to the Hard Rock Casino on a nearby Seminole reservation. We had a bit of trouble finding the place, but once we saw the lights from the highway we couldn't miss it. I'd only ever been to casinos in Las Vegas, so I was curious if the typical Florida casino patron is of the same species as the Nevada variety. The casino is next to an outdoor shopping mall with a few restaurants, so we chose TATU, an Asian restaurant, for dinner. (No relation to the Russian pop duo, apparently.) I don't know if the place was a chain or a one-off, but the food was excellent. It was some of the best pad thai I've ever had. After dinner we went to the casino itself to see if we could find some of our friends. I was not surprised or disappointed to find that my anthropological theory was correct. There were plenty of old ladies (and old guys) in Members Only jackets chain-smoking in front of slot machines. There were also plenty of beautiful and surgically-enhanced women wandering around, but that didn't help with the depressing impression I had. I didn't like the casinos in Las Vegas, at least not the gambling parts of them, so I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything better from the Hard Rock. In any case we hadn't intended to gamble, and we couldn't find our friends, and it was after midnight and everyone else hadn't slept the night before, so we went back to our hotel.

Back in my room, I found that I'd somehow screwed up my Mac earlier in the day. I had no afternoon sessions to attend so I'd hoped to get down to the beach one more time before I left. But the afternoon thunderstorms that had held off most of the week appeared on schedule at 3 PM, and that put the damper on my beach plans. I went back to my room and read some blogs and tinkered with the Mac. I discovered via the system logs that the Mac was trying to load some software that I thought I'd uninstalled, and that some components of the software were still running. I found a tech support site that told me how to unload everything, and I rebooted and the Mac was fine. Then I went out for the night. When I got back to the room and plugged in my camera, the Mac was sluggish and unresponsive, so I rebooted it again. That's when things really got weird. The Dock crashed and Finder wouldn't load. I took a few deep breaths and didn't panic. What was the worst thing that would happen? I'd have a sad Mac to take home and fix back in my apartment, and I'd have to run to the office over the weekend to pick up my backup drive to restore my data. I rebooted in Safe Mode and OS X came up properly, and after a few minutes of checking some things I rebooted normally. So far (fingers crossed) the Mac has been fine since 2 AM last night. If I have any problems after this I have the Mac OS X DVD at home to help me through my troubles. Besides, I have TV on the plane so it's not like I NEED to use the Mac on the flight. I think I'll be OK.

I don't know where my head is lately

I should preface this story by pointing out that except for last night, when I slept about 7 hours, I'd slept less than 6 hours each night for the past three or four nights, and I don't think I've been eating properly for a few days. So sleep deprivation and a change in diet might explain what's been going on with my brain lately.

I had a weird trip home from work tonight. I left the office about 6:30 and got on a 5 train, which was good because if there was a Yankee game tonight the 4 train would be crowded but the 5 would not. I got out my iPod and put on Bob Dylan's "Bringing It All Back Home," which I haven't listened to in a long time. I was thinking about what I had to do tonight: buy groceries, call a friend who's going to cat-sit for me this weekend, watch some TV, get ready for work tomorrow, talk to Kate, and go to bed early. For some reason I decided to play solitaire on my iPod, something else I haven't done in a long time. I thought I was keeping track of the stops, but I must have been "in the zone" because when I looked up I saw that the next stop was 125th Street, one stop past mine. I still think I was in some sort of time warp, because I've been riding the 4/5 trains for five years and I've missed my stop only once or twice before. I was a little freaked out at my mistake, but I switched tracks at 125th Street and got on a downtown 4 train and got out at 86th Street.

I started walking home when I realized that I had forgotten my Macbook Pro's power supply on my desk at the office. (I realize that I could do without bringing the Mac to work every day, but I have been using it to test the Lotus Notes client for Mac, and it's fun to have at work anyway, so I bring it each day.) I've been making this trip with the Mac since I got it in February, and I hadn't forgotten the power supply before. I was cursing my absent-minded, hunger-addled and sleep-deprived brain when I remembered that I could just buy a spare power supply at Best Buy back at 86th and Lexington. So I turned around and walked back. I had been thinking that I should just get a spare power supply anyway so I wouldn't have to worry about carrying one to work each day, so I didn't really mind paying for another one. When I got to Best Buy I was still thinking about how dumb I was when I realized that I was halfway down the stairs into the subway station again. Now that was me operating on pure muscle memory. I go into that subway station at least once a day on my way to work and sometimes twice if it's a busy travel day, so that's why some part of my animal nervous system ignored my brain and assumed that was where I wanted to go. I turned around again and walked into Best Buy and got my spare power supply.

Three hours later, I feel much better after eating dinner and relaxing. I plan to get more sleep this week and eat right and try to exercise and hopefully that will put things right in my head. It's hard enough to get through my day when my brain is operating at peak efficiency. When I'm suffering from self-induced ADD, I'm not doing myself any favors.

updating last night's tech post

I had no problems installing the new RAM in my Macbook, but I had some trouble installing my slightly-used RAM in Kate's Macbook. Her laptop refused to boot at first, so I had to take it apart again, remove half the RAM, close it up, reboot (it worked), then open it up again, insert the other RAM chip, close it, reboot (it didn't work), then swap the two chips. This time it booted up and recognized all 2 GB of memory, and it booted about four times as fast as it had before. When I left the laptop it was happily running multiple applications and playing a video podcast. I was a little worried that it wouldn't boot up another time, but so far I haven't heard of any problems with it.

This afternoon I switched back to Google Reader for my RSS feeds. I didn't have any problems for most of the day, but around 4 PM Firefox refused to play any Youtube videos so I restarted the application. When I went back to Google Reader it had marked 90% of my unread blog items as read. That wasn't a total disaster, as I wasn't going to read those 600 Slashdot posts anyway. But it seemed like a bad omen. It didn't drive me back to NetNewsWire, though. I'm going to stick with Google Reader for now, but I'll keep NNW around in case I want to give it another try.

Editor's Note: I intend to write more in this forum starting now. I've slacked off recently, but writing is one of the things in life that makes me happy and I can always use more happiness. So look for more posts from me from now on. I may take things in a more technical direction, so please bear with me. Content is content, and I'll try to make things funny when appropriate.

A minor upgrade, some other tech thoughts

I splurged a bit the other day and bought extra RAM for my Macbook Pro. While I hadn't exhausted the 2 GB I started with, I realized that for about $100 I could double the RAM and have plenty of overhead for a virtual machine or three. And I can give the RAM that came with my Mac to Kate, who only has 512 MB in hers.

I'm trying out NetNewsWire, a RSS reader for the Mac. I've been a happy Google Reader user for three or four years, but I hear good things about standalone RSS reader apps now and then, so I thought I'd give one a try. It's OK, but I miss Google Reader. I think I'm too used to doing everything in the browser. I had the same problem when I tried using Apple's Mail app instead of Gmail in the browser. It's just not the same. The only thing I like is the Growl notification when my feeds update, but even then I feel like I need to switch to the reader and check them out immediately. I think I'll switch back to Google Reader in another day or so.

I installed one of those newfangled flourescent bulbs in my living room the other day. It's dimmer when the light first turns on, but after that it's as bright if not brighter than the previous incandescent bulb. And I think the power savings made my overhead ceiling fan run faster. When the weather gets warmer I'll have to check that out in greater detail.

still loving the new Mac

I've spent lots of time on my new laptop this week and while I'm still figuring out how best to use all of its features, I'm really enjoying it. I hooked it up to my 19" widescreen LCD last night and unlike Windows, which would prompt me for what kind of monitor it was and how to configure it, the Mac just added it as a second screen. Right away I could drag an application like Firefox to the LCD panel and use two monitors like I do at work.

One thing I haven't been able to do yet is take advantage of the Time Machine backup feature. I have a spare external HD at home, but when I tried to format it for the Mac I got an I/O error that I haven't been able to solve. I might end up buying a new, larger external HD anyway and keep the other one for my PC. Otherwise the Mac has been everything I wanted and more. I've been carrying it back and forth to work since I got it, and while I think I'll stop doing that eventually, for now I can't really bear to be parted from it. It's just that much fun to use.