MacBook Pro

I’ve been really excited by virtualization lately, so of course I’ve been drooling over the potential of the MacBook Pro.

I considered the Macbook, but decided I enjoyed the large screen and fast graphics of the Powerbook too much to give them up.

On Monday I sold my G4 Powerbook to a friend of mine, and ran to the Apple store to buy the MacBook Pro. I spent a full ten minutes explaining how I was buying one “today” to the spiky-haired Mac sales guy, who promptly walked off. I found another salesperson, named Sulgi Kim, who was very nice and gave me a discount on my .Mac subscription along with my new notebook.

So far, the Macbook Pro is hands-down faster than my Powerbook. It’s hard to quantify, but in user-experience terms, things that used to take a moment now take no time at all. For example, Adium always took a second or two to load. Now it’s virtually instant.

The migration from Powerbook to MacBook was relatively painless: when prompted, I connected a firewire cable between the two laptops, and waited for about an hour. When I logged into the MacBook Pro, everything was there, just as I’d left it on my Powerbook.

Well, sort of.

Little Snitch, a nice little “outbound firewall”, kernel panicked on login, so I had to remove it. Apple’s X11 doesn’t seem to work at all, and was in fact missing until I installed it. I’m still working on it.

Regarding virtualization: I haven’t yet installed Bootcamp, but I will soon. Meanwhile, I’ve been working with both Ubuntu Linux and WinXP under Parallels, which truly rocks. WinXP is very fast under Parallels, much more so than it ever was under Virtual PC. And for $40, Parallels is a steal.