A Mac for Mike

This lovely vacation day of mine brought me to both my orthodontist, and then to the Apple store in Manhattan (three buses and two subway trains later). I saw the entrance to the store last night, and then decided to come here. I actually began posting this from one of the Macs at the store. The place is loud and a bit busy-feeling. I guess Apple really is that popular.

Once I got past the initial shock, I sat down with a couple of Macs: a black MacBook, a Mac Pro with a gorgeous 30-inch Apple Cinema Display, and a 17-inch MacBook Pro. In particular, the big-screen really impressed me – I could see the entire write post screen without scrolling! All of the machines are beautiful, although they are also all hot – literally. Even on ths 30-something degree day, I think they could use some AC in the shop (forget about summer!).

I was particularly wowed by the speed of these guys. Opening Safari took just a few seconds. When I plugged my Cruzer Micro into the MacBook Pro’s USB port, it was mounted and ready for use about a second later, and preparing it for removal was nearly instant. And even Photoshop CS2 didn’t take so much time to load.

Using a Mac is different. Many of the familiar keyboard shortcuts from Windows (ex. Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V, Ctrl + A, Alt + F4, and many others) don’t mean anything on a Mac. I tired taking a screenshot, only to note the absence of a Print Screen key (turns out Grub is the program for this task).

Toward the end of my visit, I got one of the store reps to show me Windows on a Mac. As I’ve read before, the process of booting into Windows is very simple: At startup, just choose the OS to boot into. Once booted up and logged in, the machine acted like a normal Windows XP box, with the same normal apps, and the same errors (I had to add that). To top it all off, the graphics card was running at the 24″ iMac’s native resolution, giving me the same giant-screen feeling that I got with the Mac Pro and then 30″ Cinema Display.

I think I love Macs. I don’t have the money to buy one now, but I will definitely talk about it for my next computer.