My New Toy

As I stated in an earlier post, I mentioned that I had an announcement to make.

Basically, check out my new toy!

PowerBook. Source: Apple.Com PowerBook. Source: Apple.Com


So yes, I am now the proud owner of a new PowerBook! I’ve been thinking about getting a laptop for quite awhile (and feel that it would help me with my senior thesis project this coming year) so I’ve been doing a lot of research. I’ve always been a big PC user my entire life, but have been using the Apple computers in our school computer lab and at my sister’s house quite a bit. They have really been growing on me. The new features of OS 10.4 (Tiger) are awesome too. I tried the Google Desktop Search for the PC and it was… okay. “Spotlight”, the search engine for Tiger just blows that thing out of the water. It’s so easy to find ANYTHING on this computer, and lightning fast too! It’s faster to hit the shortcut button to bring up Spotlight (Cmd-Spacebar on my computer) and type in the name of the application I am interested in running (and having it instantly pop up) than it is to move the mouse to my applications folder and scroll down to find the program.

Searching with Spotlight

Other cool features:

  • Keyboard lights up at night (sensor onboard that detects ambient light)
  • Scrolling vertically or horizontally, using TWO fingers on the mouse pad
  • “Dashboard” with all these informative little widgets that pop up at the press of a button. Everything from a calculator to calendar functions.
  • This thing is just amazingly well built and everything just works. No spyware, no pre-installed garbage (like you get with most consumer computers from HP/Dell/Gateway), a beautiful interace (unlike WinXP’s color crayon interface or the dull and drab GUI of “Windows Classic”).

    I eventually want to put another gig of RAM in this when I get a chance. Maybe later this summer. This thing is great though. I already have MS Office installed (which works better than MS Office on the PC!), Photoshop, Dreamweaver for web page editing and various other tools. Basically, switching to an Apple computer is really no big deal, as I can read/write basically any file imaginable.

    I imagine that I’ll be talking about this thing for quite awhile. Anyway, I’m still keeping my big, bad homemade PC for a few reasons. I sunk a lot of money into it when I built it 2 years ago and it can still keep up with the latest and greatest computers. I also have my large video game collection to keep on it (hah, as if that is a reason for keeping something). It also helps when developing web pages, to make sure they work on all systems. Also, it’s nice to have a real mouse and keyboard to use when doing a lot of wordprocessing work. (I can actually do a remote login to my PowerBook from my PC and vice-versa and it works perfectly fine.)

    Anyway, I’m leaving for my trip tomorrow. I’ll have to post when we get back next week. Until next time…

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