Migration from PC to Mac – first impressions
Opening the box:
The box it came in is very well made. Thick high quality looking cardboard and much smaller and well thought than the box my Lenovo R61 came in. Inside the MacBook rested in a plastic shell, which also had a section for the CDs and the user manuals. It all fit really snug and well thought. So far so good: I didn’t expect much less since Apple are known for their well designed and eye catching products, but was impressed nonetheless.
I was pleasantly surprised that in the box was also the installation disk for the Snow Leopard OS, which was released just a couple of weeks ago.
There was a pretty thick EULA included in the box (almost as thick as the manual), so to all that complain about the Microsoft’s EULAs – they need to see the Apple’s.
The First boot:
The power supply is really small. It actually has foldable “ears”, so you can tie the cable around them to save space. Kudos to Apple for style and design again for it (see the image to the right).
The connector for the computer is a magnetic piece with contacts that are reversible. At first I was a little concerned whether the magnet will hold the contacts tight, but so far so good. I can imagine the contacts getting loose and causing problems, but the magnet seems pretty strong.
The keyboard backlight is kind of nice and a lot more useful than my PCs keyboard light.
Another really cool thing is the battery meter: a little push button on the side of the MacBook with a tiny charge indicator, lighting up when the button is pressed. Great attention to detail in the design of the case!
I pressed the power button and got greeted by a single apple in the center of the screen. There were no POST messages, no press DEL for setup, nothing. A user is a user and does not apparently need to touch in the BIOS. As a long time PC user it was a little disturbing to me, thinking how can I access the BIOS if I need to. After a little consideration I tried to remember when was the last time I accessed the BIOS on my PC laptop. I couldn’t.
Anyway, after a short wizard asking me to create a username it started and I was given control.
I opened the “System Preferences” and started clicking all icons to tune the settings for what I thought would be convenient for me. The first was to enable the function keys by default, not by Fn+<functionkey>.
Woohoo – I am in.
More to come as my experience grows…