(Hey, that would be a great name for a band!)
So last week, I was authorized to buy a MacBook Pro and try it out to see if we should issue them to the development staff. (One of the benefits of being the chief technical guy in a small company). Since I’m the guinea pig, I decided to try out both Boot Camp and Parallels, as well as native Mac Os as well. Here, then, are my thoughts on each of them.
Mac OS
- Much faster setup and boot sequence
- I like the desktop widgets
- The “download something that turns into a disk on the desktop that I can’t get rid of until I reboot” is annoying, but not deal-breaking
- I use a dual monitor setup, which works perfectly, except that it is very frustrating to have to go all the way over to the left monitor to work the menu. This is one area where Windows seems better.
- My Firefox bookmarks, settings, etc, even the secure password thing transferred over from WinXP flawlessly. Kudos
- It is already loaded with the latest version of Java 1.5
- The Photobooth thing with the built-in camera provided a couple of hours of fun for the kids (and me too, I admit)
- Eclipse runs great. I haven’t tried the beta of flex Builder 2, but I expect it will work fine as well.
Boot Camp
- Easy to set up.
- Can’t get the touchpad to work properly. Had to download a third-party app to help with that.
- Performance is phenomenal
- This will mostly be used for games and such, although I did go ahead and install the full MS Office suite.
- Games look outstanding. I’m having crashing problems with Medieval II : Total War, but I suspect it’s the game, not the hardware.
Parallels
- Setup was easy enough. A little trickier than Bootcamp, but not significantly so
- I was able to mount the Bootcamp partition as a Network drive on the Parallels setup, so I can reuse my existing Office setup, and I’ll have one common place for documents across both Windows variants. It’s not working yet, but I have hopes that it will
Asthetics
- The MacBook Pro is slim, sleek and lovely. I’ve never had a better laptop in terms of look, performance or features.
Drag the disk to the trashcan in the dock, this trachcan wil become an ”eject” icon.
Alternative: in any finder window (metallic interface) there is a “eject” icon next (right) to the volume icon. Press that.
WHEN this does not work, then soms application is using the disk; Open files for example. Close a few applications and try again. In time you will develop a sense about which application could be the culprit.
You may want to deactivate in Safari under the tab “General” the option to “Open ’save’ files after downloading”.
Comment by gmlk — December 21, 2006 @ 6:59 pm
Yeah, Firefox was the main culprit - because I was using Firefox, I couldn’t get rid of the disk. I eventually figured out the rather obscure instructions when starting up Firefox, so this isn’t as bad right now as it was.
Comment by jb — December 21, 2006 @ 7:38 pm
The “download something that turns into a disk on the desktop that I can’t get rid of until I reboot” is annoying, but not deal-breaking
Not sure if you’re refering to .dmg disk images that auto-mount on the desktop following download, but you can simply eject them like any other disk. Right-click (Ctrl-click if you aren’t using a 2-btn mouse) and select Eject from the contextual menu, or select the disk by clicking on it and hit the eject button, normally at the upper right corner of the keyboard. (Don’t have a MBP at hand to verify, but I think it’s the same as my iBook.)
Contextual menus alleviate much of the traveling back to the menu bar.
Comment by dave rogers — December 21, 2006 @ 7:40 pm
You can choose which monitor shows the menu bar in “Displays” in “System Preferences.”
Comment by iBookworm — November 23, 2007 @ 2:40 am