On August the 1st, at long last, I went to a place I usually avoid like the plague- Forum Mall in Bangalore, and bought my dream machine- a sexy black Macbook! It sports a vivid 13.3″ screen, 2 GB RAM, a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and built-in everything except an SD Card reader/ PCMCIA card slot/serial port. To add icing to the cake, and because I dislike using the track pad, I went to the Reliance iStore on MG Rd. and splurged on the Apple Mighty Mouse, a wireless, Bluetooth mouse with a laser pointer that works everywhere except on glass tables. The Imagine store was out of Mighty Mice on that day. I also purchased the slick Apple Front Row remote control for convenient access to my music, movies and photos.
I had to return my first Mighty Mouse the very next day because it would only scroll down but not up. ll the other buttons worked as advertised. The nice folks at the iStore exchanged it for another new mouse with no hassle, and even helped me test it on my Mac to ensure that it worked. To date, this defective first mouse, and the fact that both USB ports are located too close to each other, preventing 2 devices from being connected simultaneously (if one of them has an extra-wide body like my Tata Indicom Plug2Surf CDMA modem), has been my only negative experience with Mac ownership.
The sales staff at the Imagine Store at the Forum, which is not an Apple store by any means, albeit an Authorised Reseller, were very friendly and helpful. They were puzzled by my insistence, before parting with my cash, on seeing if the keys on the keyboard could be popped up from their standard QWERTY configuration, and rearranged in my preferred DVORAK keyboard configuration for better ergonomics and less RSI. I had read on instructables.com or some such site that a Macbook could be reconfigured this way, but wanted to be 100% sure just in case the keyboard design had changed since that article was posted. Lo and behold, not only was this configuration supported by Mac OS X (as it is in Windoze and Linux), but it took barely an hour for a busy but helpful technician to prise and rearrange the keys to my favourite configuration.
A couple of days later, after being disappointed by the meager selection of laptop bags at the Imagine Store, the Witco store and at the new-to-India Staples office-supply chain, I bought myself a Samsonite backpack from the company store on Residency Rd. There are better packs available abroad, and some of the Crumpler and Targus bags were nice too, but didn’t meet my requirements for a bag that I could tote to a clients’ offices and around town in general.
Then, to ensure added protection to my prized new machine, I bought a slick black neoprene case from Case Logic, whose CD cases have impressed me over the years with their functionality and durability. Neoprene is mostly used in diving suits, and helps repel water, though I believe it is not a fully-waterproof material.
My new MacBook worked like a dream from day 1, and I revelled in the user-friendliness of its operating system, known as OS X Leopard. Sure, many things were different in Mac World after migrating from Microsoft Windows. All windows have their minimise, maximise and close buttons on the top-left, as compared to being on the top-right for Windows. After changing any settings, there’s no “Save” button, as all changes are applied on the fly. Really slick.
I downloaded Firefox 3, my favourite browser, as well as VLC Media Player, HandBrake for DVD ripping, Adium (a neat multi-protocol chat client that lets me use Gtalk and Yahoo Messenger within one application), as well as NeoOffice, the Mac version of the popular OpenOffice free office software suite. To install apps in a Mac, you don’t double-click on the .exe installer file like in Windows. The Mac equivalent is called a Disk Image File, and you just have to drag that .dmg icon to the Applications folder to install. What I like is that OS X will ask you to enter your master password for all installations and major changes to system or user settings. This way, it’s harder for any potential Mac viruses out there to install themselves and wreak havoc.
Using a computer has become a joy now, compared to the headaches inflicted on me by Windows XP for so many years!