SeanDareOnline.com

Our Church owns a new MacBook Pro for presenting song lyrics and video’s during the service. As I am volunteering in this area I got to take the Mac home for a week to familiarize myself with the controls. After 10+ years as a Windoze…er…Windows user I decided to list the first three impressions I had of the Mac. Wouldn’t you know it all three are positive impressions.

Speed

I clicked on the Apple icon in the menu bar and chose “Shut Down” from the drop down list. A second later the ubiquitous “Do you really want to shut down?” window popped up in the middle of the desktop. I click “Yes” and start counting. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four…the screen goes blank. I lift the MacBook to my ear. I don’t hear anything. I move the mouse, nothing. I look for the light in the Apple logo on the cover, nothing. It is off. Really. OFF! Four seconds! My Dell, which is comparably equipped, except it is running XP Pro, takes something like 30 seconds to shut down! WOW!

I turn it back on, expecting it to take at least a minute. 21 seconds later the Mac has booted and I am opening Safari. TWENTY ONE SECONDS! My Dell takes two minutes! WOW again!

I can’t speak for the other bench marks, as I don’t own any benchmarking software, but the start up and shut down sequences are incredibly quick. If you are anything like me you get frustrated every time you turn Windows on or off, which you have to do frequently, because of the boot up and shut down times. You also know that you have to wait for a Windows machine to shut all the way down before you leave it because sometimes Windows freezes during shut down. I don’t like waiting around for a computer to finish shutting down, and with the Mac I don’t have to.

Installing Programs

Even though I didn’t install any programs to the MacBook itself, remember it isn’t mine, I did install some Mac versions of my favorite portable apps to my USB drive. In particular I added Portable versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, Keypass and Gimp (I later removed Gimp to free up some space) to my USB drive. The process was so simple that I didn’t think I had actually installed anything at first.

Here is how you install a portable app in the Mac world. 1. You download the program. 2. You copy the program to a specific folder on the USB Drive that the Mac thinks is a disk image (easy to set up), 3. Well…you’re done. That’s it. You don’t have to run an installer, you don’t have to choose a directory for the files out of a archaic list in the installer program, you don’t have to worry it was installed to the right place. Once you copy the files you are done. Finished. Kaput! Cool!

Backlighting

Unfortunately this feature isn’t available on all the Macs, only the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air. When the ambient light drops a sensor on the Mac not only adjusts your screen brightness automatically, saving battery life, it also turns on the keyboard backlight! If you have ever used a laptop, or any computer for that matter, in a dark room you know how hard it is to see the keyboard. With the Mac you don’t have to worry, the keyboard lights up from underneath. The best part about the way Mac does this, compared to say Dell’s keyboard illumination, is how the backlighting eliminates shadows from your hands when you position them to type.

I can’t wait to get my own Mac. How about you? Will you look at a Mac the next time you are shopping for a PC?

- Sean

Tags: General //