8 September 2007 in Apple, Microsoft, Windows | Comments enabled

This may come as a shock to those of you who were closest to me. I thought I had done a good job of hiding my desires from those around me. I have spent so much time in denial but, finally, I couldn’t control “the urge”.

On Monday I bought a Mac. A 15″ Mac Book Pro to be precise.

To my amazement it arrived (from Australia) before lunch the following day. That sort of service is just outstanding given I only placed the order at about 4pm on Monday. Don’t be concerned, this is not the start of gushing about Apple and showing myself to be a Mac fanboy – more that I’m impressed with TNT’s global logistics. I haven’t had anything delivered directly by TNT before but I am seriously impressed.

I have always been quite anti the idea of owning a mac however those long time readers may recall I made more than a few posts when Apple shifted to the Intel chips and opened up the opportunity of running Windows on Apple brand machines. This is precisely the reason I elected to buy an apple machine, I get the following:

• I can run windows and continue doing .NET development
• I can run OS X and be able to dig into the Unix base of it
• I can now run whatever application is best for the job, irrespective of the target platform

I kicked off with a boot camp partition and then directed Parallels at the partition. This was easy enough however I wished the boot camp assistant would have let me select more than 32GB for the Windows partition. Parallels had a few issues though in terms of usability. Andrew had been trying out VMWare fusion so I’ve since installed that and had everything running nicely.

There were a few things that just annoyed me with how Apple have done things compared to how things are done in the Windows world. My main gripe was the mouse, it’s like the cursor is stuck in the mud to me. The suggestion was made that I should just boost the speed so I tried that and it was slightly better however something was still missing. I did some digging and it appears “sensitivity” was my issue (mainly in that I appear to be sensitive to it not being sensitive enough to my needs ). Steermouse is an application that provides the ability to alter the sensitivity of the mouse and, along with the speed adjustments, I’m now using a mouse the way it should be used.

Overall I’m still testing to see if I’ll continue to host Windows on top of OS X as I’m still very much on the fence. I’ll make a follow up post in a week or so covering how I’m finding it. Any way you cut it, Apple make kick ass hardware.

John-Daniel Trask

P.S. 4+ hours of battery life is just phenomenal compared to be previous laptops!