No, it's not a new product from Apple. The Mac/Thinkpad shuffle is what you do when you buy a new iBook for your daughter so that you can redeploy her Thinkpad to the family room, so that you can redeploy the six-year-old and broken family-room PC to the, well, to the dump.
Yes, the new iBook arrived, and Jenny opened the box Wednesday evening. She was thrilled.
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The adventure begins! Jenny carves into the newly delivered iBook box. |
It's the first Mac in our family since I sold my Powerbook way back in 1993. Here are some of our initial thoughts and reactions:
Jenny likes the iBook case material very much.
She was momentarily upset at having only one mouse-button. I think I could carefully saw that button into two halves, but she wasn't too interested in my, er, suggested hack. Really, Apple ought to offer two buttons as an option. I'm sure the design is modular enough that they could offer two trackpad configurations.
You should have seen Jenny's eyes light up when I went to the iTunes store and began playing song samples. She didn't know what she was missing. And it all just worked. I've never run iTunes before, and I was playing song samples in less than a minute. No setup. No configuration. No registration. Just fun.
While transfering Jenny's files and other data, I found I can get just as frustrated using a Mac as I can using a Windows PC :-)
Apple's icon and GUI design are awesome. No Teletubbies on that screen. The icons are very pleasing to look at. Well done.
Why on earth does the extension adaptor for a two-prong power adaptor terminate in a three-prong plug? What's that about? Ease-of-use does not include hunting around one's office for a grounded outlet.
Sadly, OpenOffice.org doesn't seem to play well on the Mac. Having to use X11 is no bother at all. But the fonts, they render terribly. We opened a couple of Jenny's files, and the text was awful to look at. The good thing is though, that OpenOffice.org does at least run on the Mac. She's at least got access to her files. We both really appreciate that.
Hmmm... I just now opened Appleworks, typed in a few words using the default font, and the results there are not very appealing either. Interestingly, that font, Helvetica 12pt, renders better, though larger, in OpenOffice.org than in Appleworks. A further oddity is that clicking on the bold and italic toolbar buttons in OpenOffice.org has no effect at all. More research is indicated here.
Jenny's had some trouble adjusting to the trackpad. She tends to drag her palm across it while typing, with the result that her cursor flies across the screen, window focus changes, etc. She and I are both big fans of IBM's little, red nub. Oh well. Can't have everything. She'll get used it eventually.
Jenny was completely baffled (at first) by the slot-loading CD drive. It was a bit funny watching her try to put in her first CD. She was looking right at the slot, but couldn't find the drive. Such are the small joys of fatherhood :-)
Despite a few rough points during the configuration and setup process (I was in iHell for just a little while), and despite a few adjustments she's had to make (one button mouse, trackpad rather than Trackpoint, etc.), Jenny is a very happy teenager. When I offer to take back the iBook and let her keep her Thinkpad, the answer is a resounding "No!" And Jeff, my nine-year-old son, he's completely lost eyes for Thinkpads. He could care less that Jenny's giving us her old one. He wants an iBook too.
Jonathan Gennick is an O'Reilly Media, Inc. editor specializing in database and programming titles.
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