My First Apple!
August 7th, 2004
I bought my first Apple computer ever today…a 12-inch iBook with a 1GHz G4 processor! Having bought PC’s my entire life (and also having said in the past that I’d never be a Mac person), this is serious news here.
I’ve played around with Mac OS X in the past and have already been impressed by its features and performance, more than I’ve ever been with Windows. So when it came time for me to buy a laptop, I figured this was my chance…and it’s definitely been worth it so far.
Attention has been paid to every detail of the laptop (as expected with Apple), with my favorite being the slot-loading CD/DVD player that is located on the side of the machine. And OS X is even cooler than I originally thought. It’s easy to use, it looks slick, it makes customizations very intuitive, everything (including wireless networking) worked right out of the box, and it has tons of built-in applications. My favorites applications/utilities so far are:
- Expose — a utility that with a single keystroke either minimizes all windows, brightens all the active windows while dimming the inactive ones, or shrinks all open windows to miniature sizes so you can see all of them at once. It sounds boring, but if you try it you’ll be amazed too.
- Terminal — nothing like a terminal window to make working more efficient (remember that OS X is based on FreeBSD).
- Sherlock — the greatest application to seamlessly use the internet to retrieve information. If you need to check out movie times, look up someone’s address or number, search the net for an image, look up the definition of a word, check up on stocks, or anything else…just start Sherlock. This single application makes all these tasks super easy.
That’s about it for now…I’ll post updates when I figure out more. Till then, I gotta go get all my documents from my PC…damn, I sound like I should be on one of those Apple “switch” commercials.
P.S. I also bought an iPod too (a 4th generation one with a 20GB drive), taking advantage of a $200 rebate Apple offers to people buying laptops and iPods at the same time. Once I open that, I’ll write about that too. I hear they’re cool.