Finally went (back) Mac
Last week we broke down and bought a Mac Book Pro.
After about 20 years of being a PC, hehheh, and having not bought nor used a Mac for the last several years, well, other than the ancient iMac taking up a corner of my desk in my home office and acting as a glorified jukebox, I bit the bullet and went (back) Mac.
The shopping experience was certainly something. The Apple store in downtown Nagoya has a great bunch of staff there. I was prepared to talk things out in Japanese, but was pleasantly surprised by the English abilities of the salesman I worked with.
I was also pleasantly surprised by his lack of pushiness which we see all too often in computer stores in the states. He was really helpful, and I felt quite honest about getting a machine to meet our needs.
I’m hoping to use it mostly for video and photo editing, and for doing some simple multi-track audio recording using Garage Band.
We also go the free with rebate, wireless printer, and an iPod Touch which would have been free with rebate had we not opted to go for the 32 GB version instead of the 8. I think it’s a great toy, and I’ve added some guitar apps and a math app that the boys are enjoying a lot. I didn’t get any wifi plan (don’t really need connectivity outside since I’m not outside that much really) and only use that with the wifi I have set up for my home and home office. That’s not bad though.
It is interesting to see some of my web sites on there though and see what that browser does to the layouts and designs.
Things I like:
Speed — everywhere, from bootup to opening/closing video files that are being edited, I’m really happy with that speed (2.88 mhz and 4GB of Ram)
Clean desktop – okay, it’s new, so that would/should be the case with most new machines, but also while you’re working there’s not a lot of clutter.
The boys love the iPhoto and playing with the built in effects on the video and photos. Ahn has been playing ‘on the scene reporter’ and taping videos of himself in front of the various backgrounds doing these mock ‘live reports’. Very funny, too. Some of them run for several minutes — I think his longest is in the 6 minutes plus range — but I don’t think any CNN reporters need to be worried, yet 
Things I’m getting used to:
All those new commands. After using a PC for so long, there are just so many things you take for granted, like copying folders or files to folders, opening new windows or new tabs.
Safari in general. Pretty much like Firefox as far as I can see, but haven’t surfed much with it.
The video editing software doesn’t seem to be as able to handle things like title pages or converting, but part of that is just me not knowing my way around everything yet.
Anyway, that’s where I am with it now. Hoping to get more time to play around with things during the upcoming Golden Week holiday here in Japan.
