Purchased a new MacBook last night. Along with an Airport and a wee green iPod Shuffle, which is the tiniest piece of electronica I’ve ever seen. I had earrings bigger than that in the ’80s.
There were a few moments of frustration last night while attempting to get online wirelessly (and Apple could be a little more clear which device they’re telling you to restart when you’re trying to do setup). But once I got signed in and set up, it was a breeze.
I’m still getting used to the change in user interface from PCs, and especially from Firefox (can a Mac run Firefox? Because I’m not digging Safari so far). But ancient synapses are coming back to life — after all, I learned how to use computers on the teeny-tiny first-generation Macs at my campus newspaper, and I used them (with the exception of a few years of using mainframe-based pieces of crap at the professional newspaper I worked for between college and law school) all the way up through law school, until I arrived in a law firm that was still using MS-DOS and WordPerfect. So I had to retrain myself in WordPerfect and then, eventually, Word (when law firms finally decided to use the same programs their clients did).
My first computer,* purchased third-hand in law school, was one of the ’80s-era Macs. 1 MB of RAM. One. (My new iPod has 2GB.) 4-inch black and white screen. It was slow, and because it had no memory I couldn’t load any software onto it or use it to get online, but I was able to do my outlines and my exams on it, and print them at the law school’s computer center.
But now I have a sleek, fast, compact little MacBook. With a working disk drive! I’ll finally be able to upload my CDs.
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*Of my own — my family had a Commodore 64, not that we did much of anything with it but play games.
“Can a Mac run Firefox? Because I’m not digging Safari so far”
Yes. Go to Firefox.com and you can download it.
LOVE Firefox on the Mac. I actually deleted Safari altogether.
Enjoy!
We were at the Apple store the other day and I so want an iPhone.
Firefox has a browser, exactly like Firefox, for the Mac. It’s called Bon Echo. I recommend it.
Enjoy your Mac!
Oh, good.
I think a wireless mouse is also in order.
Resistance truly is futile, isn’t it? Welcome to the cult. At some point you’ll want to check out versiontracker.com (unless someone’s already mentioned it), for lots of free and cheap Mac applications.
Heh. The Commodore 64. I had forgotten about that.
Oh… and I-POD earrings. Now that’s a concept. I’d buy those.
Congrats! And I agree with everyone else. Kick Safari to the curb and jump in with Firefox.
I thought Camino was the Firefox equivalent for Mac… In any case, you can run both.
Actually Firefox is the Firefox for Mac, although Camino looks interesting.
Here’s the link:
http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
Zuzu,
Just be real careful if you send out resumes/etc formatted in Word for Mac. It may be worth buying a cheap version of Adobe and sending them out as PDFs just to make sure. We get resumes all the time at the office that for some reason always come up in Dingbats font or some other ornate typface and it has something to do with font ID incompatibilites.
Though I like Firefox as a browser (and yes, as others have noted, you can get Firefox for Mac OS X), I find that it’s a big-time resource hog and has a tendency to hang such that I have to force-quit sometimes when using it. So I deleted it from my iBook and downloaded Camino instead. Never had a problem since.
Safari is an acquired taste, and like many Mac features, does some things awkwardly, but I’ve grown to love it. I have to agree with Linnaeus concerning Firefox for Mac. I also dislike all the Google tie-ins Firefox forces on us.
WP+DOS Nostalgia! WordPerfect was the standard for legal documents across the continent for well into the MS Office era, and legal secretaries’ productivity briefly went down when their offices installed Windows: They knew all the nifty keyboard shortcuts and didn’t have to mess with a mouse.
Glad to see also that you’ve migrated to Shakesville–looking forward to your Macintized contributions there.
Oh, I’m hooked on Firefox. It’s the extensions. Akismet is so much nicer with Greasemonkey/AuntieSpam installed, Adblock Plus and Remove it Permanently combine to making browsing almost ad-free (even on Facebook), History Submenus is handy; throw in TabMix Plus and the Stumbleupon toolbar and the Text Formatting Toolbar (does either HTML or BBCode), and my browser is finally working almost exactly as I’d like it.
And Textedit rocks my world, though NeoOffice works more or less as advertised.
Get RAM. Lots of it. Max it out. RAM’s cheap at the moment.
Welcome to the Mac zone.I just bought the lad a venerable CRT iMac to replace his dead G3 iBook. Start ‘em early, I say.
Heh, lauredhel, or late as the case may be… my parents are using my 7-year-old iMac (graphite DVD special edition), and have been for about 3 years now.
As for the documents issue stated above: Simplest and cheapest way to fix the issue? Download and run OpenOffice.org on the MacBook.
It mimics Office products, but is open source and free. You can save in a variety of formats- odt (open document), doc (Word version), xls (Excel files), and also pdf (it creates the PDF for you without having to purchase anything adobe).
There is one bug with the current Mac version (which the devs are working out as I type)- it works with X11, and sometimes you’ll get an error that OpenOffice can’t open because X11 hasn’t opened. Easy fix: Open X11 before starting up OpenOffice. X11 can be installed for free from Apple’s support site, or from Disc 2 of your startup discs.
Enjoy your Mac!