new toy

On the 27th I ordered a new toy from Apple, well, okay, it's a computer so thus a tool for my research. I figured since I was buying a new laptop, I should go all out and get dongles for it too; it's important to be able to hook it to a monitor, projector or TV, so I bought an S-Video, a DVI, and a VGA dongle to plug into it. Funny thing, they arrived two days ago.

So needless to say, last night I was anxious for it to show up. FedEx was shipping it from China, and I had been following it on its travel through Alaska. When I went to bed, it was still en route from Alaska. FedEx woke me up at 8:30 by pounding the hell out of my door, and there it was! Incredibly fast. Go FedEx.

Anyhow, I'm as always infatuated with Apple's packages, so I slowly opened the sucker marveling at how they used a thick shipping box with only corner foam pieces to kind of minimize waste. (They have been getting lots of flack recently about being harmful to Ms. Earth.) Anyhow, inside the brown box was a really pretty marketing box that mostly shows off their presentation abilities.

Tearing through the tape, I pulled all the stuff out of the box noticing a new flavor of foam: it looked waffley. Stamped on the foam too was the MacBook logo. I still think it's odd that Apple goes through the trouble to make things so pretty when people will only see them once. Maybe it's for geeks like me who enjoy opening boxes way too much.

Box drooling aside (not quite as cool as the original cube iPod boxes), I pulled out my new workhorse and opened it up. I really like this new magnetic latch. One of my peeves about the 12" PowerBook is the flimsy latch.

Of course the best thing about the way Apple ships their laptops is the full battery. I've never seen instructions packaged with any battery-powered Apple product that says "plug in for charging before first use" or even "go buy a battery." They take good care of their customers -- cell phone manufacturers could take a hint from them.

Anyway, all things in order, I've set up the new MacBook just the way I want it, and am constantly being impressed by little things. For example:

• During initial setup, you pick an image to represent your account. The software turned on the built-in iSight camera and let me take a photo of me (bed head and all)!


• Emacs compiled in 10 minutes (took over an hour on my old PowerBook).


• Target Disk mode rocks! I used my old laptop as an external FireWire hard disk to transfer all my documents and settings. Couldn't have been easier.


• Third-Party software, including games, were pre-installed. This included a Mancala game. I didn't know Mancala was even popular.

There's lots of software that looks fun, including ComicLife... maybe I'll post a comic strip later.