This beautiful specimen is now mine, officially replacing my 14" iBook G4. It is a 15" MacBook Pro (the new Core2Duo kind), and is, officially, awesome. I spent a couple hours on Saturday reinstalling all my old applications (and some new ones like Lilt that I am going to check out and write about soon, because it sounds and looks really impressive), moving important files from my backup drive (best purchase I ever made), as well as a few more recent files that didn’t make it onto the drive, but which I backed up on my web server (wow, I’m good with the backup!). I installed a few new dashboard widgets and am having fun populating the greater screen space with cool stuff (including sprucing it up for Christmas with some flashing lights and a tree that becomes more decorated each day leading up to the 25th.
There’s lots to love about this new computer, and lots to discover over the next couple weeks, but what impresses me most about it (something that I also noticed with my iPod Nano) is how quickly it feels like home all over again. A few hours of work installing and configuring, and my MacBook Pro feels as comfortable to me as my two-year-old iBook. It’s a warm, huggable, human feeling. It’s family.
This is what Apple should be advertising. Not the dorky Mac vs. PC commercials that shoot for creating a cool factor - but family. A young boy and his grandmother taking pictures together using PhotoBooth, brothers and sisters making impromptu music using GarageBand and putting it on their parents’ iPods secretly in the middle of the night, a new couple watching and rewatching their wedding tape using iMovie/iDVD and browsing through the hundreds of pictures from the reception using iPhoto. And then posting their memories and soon-to-come baby pictures on the Internet for all to see using iWeb. Each of these tasks are easy to accomplish, elegantly designed, and created with real people in mind. They are not made for the professional crowd, but for the everyday user. For the families who can’t always find time to eat dinner together but who still gather together and still need each other in very real ways. Apple computers make it so easy to create memories and share them with others. Yeah, they are great at the geeky stuff (that’s why I use them, for the most part), but they truly excel in humanizing technology. If you haven’t made the switch away from Windows-based PCs, now is the time, more than ever, to adopt a Mac to your family. It is so worth it.
End unpaid advertisement.
