February 14th, 2008
3 days from Shanghai
I’m typing away here on my new MacBook, freshly arrived today from Shanghai, via Anchorage and Indianapolis. A mere 3 days after it left the factory in China, I received a tracking notice on my phone from FedEx that it had been delivered and signed for by my favorite secretary. A curious student was more than happy to truck down to the office and grab it for me.
I resisted the temptation to break it out immediately as we were in the midst of a firewall failure, I was teaching a class, and I really wanted to install the 4 GB of memory I had sitting at home first. So I was a good boy and we just took a few minutes to admire the MagSafe power adapter while I gave it a full charge.
My first impressions, having not used a Mac seriously in about 3 years and certainly not having the opportunity to use Leopard are incredibly positive. Are they positive enough to lobby for a switch to the Mac platform for teachers at my school? The jury is definitely still out and it will take a few weeks of pounding away on my little white laptop to decide how much value these have for mainstream high school teachers.
So far, I’ve copied my important files over from my old laptop via an external hard drive (USB 2.0 is really fast, by the way; I have to wonder about the future of firewire, but that’s another discussion for another day). I’ve installed Maple, imported files into iPhoto, created a quick document in Pages (one of the iWork applications), and, of course, written a blog.
As expected, all of these tasks were completely effortless and lightning-fast (of course, 4GB of RAM and a 2.2 GHz dual core processor help). The touchpad is huge and has impressive built-in functions that erased my last bits of doubt over Apple’s single-button design (two fingers and a click get you the equivalent of a right-click: sweet!). Two-fingered scrolling was also a nice feature and beats the scroll regions on most touchpads hands down (two fingers dragged anywhere on the pad scroll around a page). These functions are completely natural within moments.
Spaces, a concept long familiar to Linux users (basically multiple desktops) has an elegant interface and controls built in for accessing the desktops from the keyboard and touchpad.
I won’t go into yet another Leopard/Mac review. I did want to point out a couple features that grabbed my attention immediately. It’s only taken an evening with my new Mac to make me a convert. As much as I’ve grown to like the power, flexibility and price of Linux, the effortless productivity and elegance of OS X (and even the Mac hardware) really impressed the heck out of me.
Bottom line, assuming I don’t uncover anything unexpected that I really dislike and Apple doesn’t screw up its future incarnations of the Mac OS, I’m a Mac guy. The interface is that good (and the keyboard rocks out loud). More importantly, it serves my purposes very well right now (small and light enough to sit in my lap on my couch or under my arm in the halls, but a multitasking monster at the same time).
What remains to be seen, however, is whether I think they are worth the price and perceived learning curve for most teachers or if Linux and/or Windows solutions are a better choice for the majority of users. I’ll keep you posted and have a gallery posted Monday of the new slick bits of Mac goodness I discover over the weekend.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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| 02/15/08
