Mumblings

I have used my MacBookPro (MBP) for the past three weeks and, overall, I am quite satisfied with my experience. Before I get to my problems with the laptop, I would like to highlight some of the really nice features.

1. OS X: On the first day of owning my Mac, I thought to myself, "God what have you gotten yourself into...is that restocking fee worth it?" It took me about two days, from 3 pm to 11 pm to get all my songs, documents and photos from my windows desktop onto the laptop. Thankfully I had my iPod, but that ended up being more of a problem because I ran into several issues with the Auto-update and bad libraries. However, after the first few days were over, I started to get used to the Apple UI and the one-button mouse. Today, I'm much faster on a Mac than I ever was on windows, particularly after I installed quicksilver.
2. Design: Like the iPod, this Apple product is truly gorgeous. Every surface of the exterior feels right: from the smooth plastic case to the size of the speaker holes. I really appreciate the small tolerances this machine is built off of: when I run my finger over the power button, I don't feel it sunken into the body or butting out, it's perfectly level. Oftentimes I find myself inadvertently cleaning small specks of dust off the palm rests or screen--not even a nice car inspires this much affection out of me.

While there are plenty more reasons why this is a good laptop, I'll stop short with those two. I have had some problems with the laptop. Aside from the transitioning problem above, I ran into two other problems.

1. My screensaver preferences panel would crash whenever it was opened. After about a week of this, I brought it into the Applestore and they fixed it by deleting some system files--sweet.
2. Like some other people, my MBP will get very hot after an hour of heavy use. The top fifth of the laptop, where the function keys are sitting, gets pretty painful to the touch. The good thing is that, for me, the bottom is still bearable so I can put it on my lap while wearing shorts. Now, thinking about my physics lessons in thermodynamics, I know that the free moving air will transfer a lot of heat. Just sitting on my desk, the laptop is almost completely surrounded by air. To increase the heat-radiation, I decided to lift the laptop off the desk a few millimeters just so some air could get under there. This should be better than the wood desk, which insulates the heat inside the laptop. Wanting to test this solution, I stacked three quarters on top each other and taped the stack together, to hold it tight. I did this again so I had four stacks of quarters, three quarters thick. Then I placed one stack under each corner of the laptop. From what I can tell, the laptop runs a little cooler, but that might just be my impressions. I can't gage the laptop temperature because Apple has locked that sensor from OS X usage. Bummer. I am thinking of getting a small heat probe and placing it on the laptop, but I'm not sure if that will work either. More on this later.