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I’ve had my iBook for about 48 hours now, and I’m beginning to find my way. OS X (or is it OSX?) is a completely new experience to me, but I think I’m taking to it rather well. I’m still getting used to the difference between shutting an application and quitting an application, but that’ll come in time! For what it’s worth, I wanted to jot down my initial experiences and reactions with the switch. I won’t go into too much detail just yet – I’ll save that for later articles.

  • File browsing is more intuitive, especially after I switched to column view in Finder.
  • A lot more emphasis is placed on using keyboard commands than in Windows…
  • …Which is just as well, as the trackpad is a bit pants.
  • Software installation is a breeze. It’s so simple and logical. Drop the application into the applications folder and away you go!
  • I’m still not sold on the Dock, but I haven’t done any tweaking yet (other than the size of it)
  • Everything just looks better. From the icons to the text to the GUI widgets… it’s just better!

So far, I haven’t done anything to set up the machine for local development/testing. I plan to do this later this week, after I’ve done a bit more reading – I want to set up SVN and Ruby/Rails, both of which I’ve never set up before (or even used before, in the case of Ruby/Rails!). Another thing that I haven’t done yet, is transferred any old files onto the iBook. That’s tonight’s job.

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Ok, so it’s official, I’m switching to Mac. The iBook is all but fully ordered – I’m just waiting on my next pay cheque to come in. It’s sitting there smugly in my saved basket on the Apple Store UK. I can virtually hear it saying “I knew you couldn’t resist!”

Barring any last-minute changes of heart on just how much I’m going to spend, here’s what I’ve gone for:

  • 12-inch iBook G4 with 1.2GHz processor
  • 14-inch iBook G4 with 1.33GHz processor
  • 60GB HDD
  • Bluetooth module
  • Additional 512MB RAM from Crucial

I’m lead to believe that installing the additional RAM will be a piece of cake. Far easier than spending the extra £140 for the same amount of RAM from Apple…

I’m counting the days already.

So… anybody want to buy a 18 month old Centrino laptop?

Update 15/01/05 Ok, so I finally managed to find somewhere local that had iBooks in stock for me to give one a test drive. The 12” screen was a little too small for me, so I’ve upped my spec to the 14” model. To offset some of that extra cost, I’ve dropped the bluetooth module. So basically, I can just buy one off the shelf at the store and do the RAM upgrade later. As a bonus, the store guarantees everything for 2 years – so no paying for extended AppleCare!

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I witnessed something quite bizarre on the way home from work today. I’d popped into our nearest PC World store on the way, to pick up a USB hub for my parents (2x USB Ports + 8 USB devices = cable nightmare). While I was browsing around, edging closer to the Mac section as I usually do, I overheard another customer talking to a member of staff about antivirus/security software.

Unfortunately, it’s a habit of mine that when a store sales person is talking about anything computer related I listen in to see how clued up – or not – they are. With PC World, normally the staff aren’t particularly good. This staff member seemed reasonably knowledgable about spyware/virii, how they get on your machine and cause havoc and how to avoid them. Slightly better than average I’d say. He was recommending an overpriced, not-so-good bit of software though…

Anyway, conversation finishes and customer leaves contented. It was only then that I realised who they had been speaking to – the store security guard! I was amazed, simply because he seemed more clued in about computers than most of the other staff I’ve had dealings with in PC World (or most big chain-stores for that matter). I hope they pay him extra for being a decent salesperson as well as keeping the store secure!