First, I must say that the simplicity of buying a computer that deliberately has few options is a joy. Saw a rare $100 off deal at Future Shop, went in and um'd and ar'd for a few token minutes, then said I'll have it. Some might say I'm crazy, but we turned down Future Shop's maintenance plan and haven't signed up for Mac's service program. Logic suggests serious problems happen within a year and I really only buy insurance for my life, my house and my car. I bought a Airport Express at the time of the purchase with thoughts of a replacement for my 'g' router plus I loved the wireless iTunes capability.
I got home and literally within minutes turned it on for the first time, answered some very basic configuration questions and connected to my existing wireless network. I was literally up and running on a brand new Mac computer in about 30 minutes.
Next task, was familiarizing myself with basic Mac applications and getting used to the new magical trackpad. Some Mac things immediately began to trip me up like missed home/end keys and the awkward Finder interface.
The Airport Express wasn't really a "silver bullet" as it doesn't have an ethernet cable input for my existing hard wired PC. So I configured it as a wireless client just to stream iTunes. I got it configured pretty quickly and it worked beautifully. However, it did trigger the next wave of networking decisions and since then, I have bought a Airport Extreme from a friend and almost got it perfect. Some gotchas on the networking front and still occasional interference problems and the odd drop. It's not perfect , but doing the job and pretty fast. Note that I had thought my PS3 had an 'n' wireless card, but it only has a 'g' card so I've decided to downgrade the network on occasion when I need PS3 network connectivity. Otherwise I'm going to try and keep the network as 'n' only and on 5ghz to hopefully reduce interference. The last configuration change was connecting my Seagate external USB drive to the Airport Extreme. I had to reformat the drive (using an included Seagate app) to be compatible with the Mac (I think that means FAT32, but haven't confirmed because the drive appears as something special to the PC and is now being used as a backup Mac Time Machine. This last little bit was a nice bonus. I spoke a little too soon - it just failed with a connection error.
And that little excursion may be a good example of the problem with Mac. When things go wrong, it's not always that obvious how to fix them. A few people have asked about my Mac experience and comparisons to PC's. I've quickly replied that I think Macs are great for the home, but I'm not sold on them being a good solution for a large business customer. The logic being that I haven't seen the granularity of control and configuration that is often needed to meet the high demands of enterprise information technology today. I've been very impressed by the simplicity of the Mac OS and its easy plug-and-play capabilities (especially with other Mac products like the Airport network components). However, on a few occasions I've been tripped up, merrily walking down the pleasant Mac boulevard, when gotcha, figure this one out !
I'm just getting around to finishing this post a few weeks later. I have seen Mac's hourglass equivalent - spinning colour wheel a few times and had to force quit on a few occasions, but I'm getting pretty comfortable with MacBook. Network instability is still a bit of a problem, but it's been on 'n' with 'g' compatibility for a little while and all the clients (PC, MacBook, Airport, PS3 and my work Windows laptop) seems happy. [Just as I finished typing this last sentence the Extreme router hiccuped and I lost the connection - connectivity up and down now - weird, it's like the Mac network knows I'm talking about it from a Windows laptop].
I actually gave it trying to finish this post last night, I finally got the network back after installing the Airport Utility on my PC and changing it to 'n' 5Ghz - again. This morning, the Extreme was reporting an error connecting to the internet - I really getting to dislike that little flashing orange light ! I'm seriously thinking of replacing the Airport Extreme if I can't get config a reliable setup. Any suggestions on specific settings appropriate for my mix of machines and adapters in a very (wireless) busy and close proximity neighbourhood would be appreciated.
Some miscellaneous items:
- antivirus - none installed, yes, none installed
- Firewall - basic Mac firewall included in OS - seems a little too basic
- fast user switching - beautiful and highly functional in a household with 4 users - but it's not ideal, because we have the "home" account streaming the music and then when someone is on their personal account, they're always being asked to skip to the next song; on a sidenote I did consider a remote control, but Apple told me it works on line-of-sight, so not great for me trying to DJ from the kitchen.
- USB/iPod connectivity good except the Seagate connection on the Extreme seems a little funky and disrupting Time Machine and manual PC backups
- Garage Band and Photo Booth lots of free fun
- I'm still loving the trackpad
- I'm not using many native Mac apps, Firefox runs great, and OpenOffice has nice compatibility when needed for office apps; I've moved all our music to the MacBook with iTunes, but for disk space reasons, source photos are still on the PC with Photoshop
- Battery power seems ok, but not great and it does run pretty hot
- The MacBook chasis is beautiful and strong - it's getting around the house on a regular basis
- The screen is pretty nice and feels bigger than it's most 13"
- Spaces seemed like a good feature to use initially, but not using it much these days
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