Not at all.

For those who bother keep­ing up with my site, you will have noticed that I’ve recently been accepted to school for graphic design. Now I never actu­ally saw any require­ment for pur­chas­ing a laptop, and I prayed that I had dodged that finan­cial bullet. Turns out that I did no such thing, as I was alerted via letter that I would have to pur­chase a Mac­Book for the course.

I was … unim­pressed to say the least. Not only did I not know I had to pur­chase one (which would have affected my saving plans just a touch… roughly 1400 dol­lars), but I was being told that I had to get a device that I have little knowl­edge of or about. This does not make me a happy camper.

The start of it all

I bit the bullet and bought the stan­dard Mac­Book (which I notice they’ve “cheapened” since my pur­chase. Had I waited I would have saved roughly 60 bucks. Woo.) I didn’t get any bells and whis­tles, as I fig­ured I’d get them as I needed them. I placed my order, felt my wallet give a death shud­der, and felt rather dirty. Please note that this was on a Sat­ur­day. It’s impor­tant to the story. It told me that my new Mac­Book would be ship­ping within the next 8 days (free ship­ping! YAY!) and I could expect it 8 days after that. Fair enough, I thought.

So Monday morn­ing rolls around and I get an email saying that my Mac has been shipped. “Wow!” I thought, “that was fast.” Alright I’ll get it next week, which will give me loads of time to get used to the bas­tard. Tues­day after work, my mother hands me a letter saying that Puro­la­tor had come and missed me. “That can’t be my Mac­Book. It’s only been a couple days!” Wednes­day morn­ing I woke up early, swung by Puro­la­tor, and picked up my mys­tery package.

It was my Mac­Book. My order went from 16 days down to 3 days (4 if you include me get­ting it the next day). I have to admit that turn-​around time like that is noth­ing short of her­culean. My mind was blown, and I fig­ured that Apple was work­ing extra hard to try and con­vert me.

So what do I think of my new computer-​turned-​art?

It’s pretty.

From the second I opened it, to my cur­rent use of it (this blog­post has been entirely done via the new Book, as a bit of train­ing for me) the whole thing has just been so damned pretty. no, not pretty; sexy. Sexy like that 23 year old teacher with the low cut tops. Sexy like the rich guys car down the street that he bought to make up for his use­less penis. Sexy like those dreams that you don’t tell anyone about while you’re wash­ing your sheets at 3 in the morn­ing. That sort of sexy.

Everything works pretty much the way you expect it to.

It took me five min­utes to get it all setup and started, which is some­thing that the PC user in me geeked out over. The wire­less setup was simple, and within moments I was up and run­ning. Pro­grams run smoothly, and I’ve yet to expe­ri­ence any crashes or odd­i­ties. All the weird­ness is reserved for the input devices.

New buttons ahoy! Fuck you normal other buttons!

Where the hell is my Home key? How about my End key? Paging? nope, not there. Oh wait it’s all multi-​key combos now? Excuse me while I blow my brains out. Why the hell would you remove common keys like that? Stupid users (like me) are used to them on their key­boards! I’m still get­ting used to using the func­tion, alt, con­trol, and option keys to do dif­fer­ent things.

Now to rag on the mouse.

Whether it’s mighty or not, the mouse for the mac makes me want to kick pup­pies while flip­ping off an old lady all while steal­ing money from a blind beg­gars money can. The fact that I have to use the mouse in con­junc­tion with the key­board angers me so very, very much.

I’m a lazy person, I shouldn’t have to plug in a third party mouse that has a left, right, and middle click­wheel just to get what has become stan­dard func­tion­al­ity. Even with the improved “two-finger” options built into the touch pad, I still find myself having to jump between the two inputs. This is not what I call simple, nor sexy. This fail­ing sits in the “granny-panty” sec­tion of the sex market.

Built in programs are … cute but useless

iCal: sucks. TextE­dit: Weak. Mail: Sucks, Front Row: totally use­less. Pre­view: Waste of time. The list goes on. Don’t get me wrong, I like that there are basic ver­sions of com­monly used things… but there is such a thing as too basic. I ended up having to get more robust pro­grams to handle every­thing. Not a bad thing, but some­what annoying.

The battery lasts for-fucking-ever

Seri­ously now. When a bat­tery can clear the 4 hour mark while play­ing music? That’s just impressive.

Over­all I think I like it, though I’ll reserve my com­ments for until after I’ve had to do some seri­ous work with it. I’m sure I’ll swear at it as much as I swear at PCs.