Traitor!

So I’ve gone and done it. Yesterday, after having to get some of those douches at the store to wait on me (apparently I’m not hip enough), I bought a Macbook Pro. I’ve never had anything but Windows machines – with the exception of using (and liking) Linux recently – in my life, and now I’ve switched teams. I guess a better description is to say that I’ve added another player to my arsenal, and now I have a Windows machine, a Linux machine, and a OSX machine; a trifecta of nerdiness. But how is the lappy?

After one whole day of geeking out on this laptop, I must say that I do really like it. As much as I hate those Apple commercials because they exude smugness from their pores, they are right in at least one respect: OSX and this machine are easy to use. I’m pleasantly surprised. I’ve also never thought of widgets as an incredibly useful thing, or at least I never thought I would use them much, but they are fun and useful, so I’ve learned. Everything about the OS is fairly easy, and I haven’t had any trouble with figuring anything out, but this might be because I’ve used computers a lot throughout the course of my life and wandering through a new system generally isn’t too difficult. There are cute little touches here and there, and I’ve honestly said “wow, that’s cool” a couple of times in the course of looking through stuff. One rather neat addition is Front Row, which uses a little (included) remote so you can look at pictures, listen to music, or watch movies.

The system itself is filled with some nice hardware. The processor is at 2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, and the machine has 2 gigs of ram installed. A 256mb ATi dedicated graphics card rounds out all of the specs that I really care about. Once I get Windows on this thing, I’ll repost about how well games run on it. I have Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. lined up first, and I’ll probably put Battlefield 1942 and Unreal Tournament just to see how high I can get the framerates.

The thing that I’m rather disappointed about is the lack of installed software. Now Mac people will probably try to punch me in the face for saying that, because iLife ’06 and other junk is preinstalled, blah blah, but there’s no good word processor available. Basically, there’s a “Notepad-esque” program, but it’s worthless. I’m going to have to find Office for this thing somewhere. I suppose I shouldn’t say that there’s a lack of software, but you’re kind of screwed if you just want to write a regular text document with some formatting.

So far so good, though, with the machine. I’m looking forward to getting to know it a little better and seeing how well games run on it. Even though there is a steep premium for the machine itself, I don’t really feel like I’ve been cheated in anyway except for some lack of software here and there, and I can’t help but feel like a PC with similar specs would just sit around and be a million pounds with loud fans wizzing all day.