Being the new owner of a Macbook Pro (MBP), really isn’t all that it is hyped up to be. I was expecting some sort of life altering “Ah Hah!” moment. I’ve been playing with it now, and not working, for about 30 to 45 minutes and the only moments i have is constantly looking for the home and end keys. Also ctrl+shift+left/right to select a whole word, how the heck do I do this.
Well anyways to recap the unveiling of the MBP till now, I have successful auto-hid the dock, downloaded Google Chrome and Firefox, and installed Firebug. Also I just want to note that it seemed like Safari knew I was trying to replace it, and was giving me a hard time trying to download the two browsers, I ended up finally being able to download Firefox, and downloading Chrome from there. This brings me to the next weirdness/difference/what-the?
Blast off
Once the downloads were complete the window popped open with 2 icons, one was the folder and the other was the file I had just downloaded. Well, it seems that I was supposed to drag and drop the file into the folder after I had downloaded it. Ok, the arrow helps.
Interface
This isn’t my first time using a Mac, we had to use them in college for video editing and my partner at 9K uses one, so I’m no stranger to the user interface. I’ve just never cared before. I’ve never tried to remove something from the dock, or add something to the dock, or auto hide something, or figure out where the file i just downloaded went.
But now that I own one of these puppies I just care, I want to know how this machine is going to make my life better. What is all the hype about.
Prologue
I actually purchased a laptop about 4 or 5 months ago, on paper it was amazing, and if you don’t ask it to do much, it really is. Actually when you do ask it to do much, it really is capable of doing it amazingly. The laptop is an Asus G73-A1, it has an i7 processor, 8 gb of ram, and a terabyte, yes, a terabyte of hard disk space. It also has an ATI 5870 graphics card in it. It is intended to be a gaming laptop, but I’ll get to that in a sec. So when i was shopping around for a laptop i was considering a lot of different models, macs included, but I had always looked at purchasing a mac as a sin for any front end website developer, which is what i am. Again, something I’ll have to get to later. I have points to cover!
During my research I found the G73 and it was a reasonable price; a little over 1800 after taxes. Pretty good for those specs.
Front End User Interface Developer
Well I guess really I’m more just just a front end dev, but really that it what i considered when thinking about buying a laptop, since as a dev, coding for IE is so essential. I mean we recently ended support for IE6, but IE7, and IE8, together is still 40-50% about all internet browsers, based on the metrics of the sites that we are tracking. Another 30- 40% is split between firefox and chrome, and a whopping 10-20% is safari, ff, and chrome on macs. I have never coded for another browser. Sorry Opera.
So it would be only natural that since my target audience is 80 – 90% window users, I have to ensure that the site works for them first. Logical. So I had to have a windows based machine.
Bootstrap
Yes, there is bootcamp, but that just seems like its more trouble than its worth.
Change of Heart
So, why the heck did I get a MBP? I’m just a sucker for shiny things i guess. Sorry Windows.