Unwelcome changes (new Macbook Pro)

Bridge crossing, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

This posting is only slightly related to photography, I hope you don't mind.

I had a busy week at work, to the degree that I was atypically blunt to colleagues. On Thursday I had a long list of work to do, and when I noticed that a new Macbook Pro was delivered to my office, my first thought was: "Oh no, not this on top of everything!"

After some moments, I decided that I could continue work as usual, and not spend time on setting up the new laptop. I was still using a Titanium PowerBook G4, which is 5 year 11 months old. It has been extremely reliable, serving as my only computer at the office and while traveling. In fact, the TiBook is still very much able to do the job, except for running properly the new version of Office and the new Mac OS X.

Nowadays many are interested in the so-called mini laptops, and in performance they are about the same as the TiBook - and in some respects worse. It is of course bigger and heavier, but that hasn't been a problem for me.

In the end, I found out that there was little I needed to do to start using the new Macbook Pro. There are three applications I mostly use: Mail, Firefox and MS Office. I transferred the most recently used files on a 2 GB memory stick to the Macbook Pro, and then I was ready to go. There was hardly any break in working, moving to the new machine went seamlessly.

Of course, there are many gigabytes of data still left on the old machine, but I can move it over later when I have more time. In any case, most of my data is not stored on the TiBook, but resides on the Exchange server and on the net.

What about the Macbook Pro as a computer? Some complain about the glossy display, but for me it is perfect. Bright colors, good contrast. The buttonless trackpad was a nice surprise - at first I hesitated in using in, now I hardly notice any change between the old and the new. Some have complained of trackpad use problems in Photoshop etc., but that may be a question of individual use patterns. I like the trackpad and try to learn to use the new gestures as well.

I do hope this machine lasts as long as the TiBook - six years is quite a feat for a laptop. At least the construction feels extremely robust.

I'm tempted to get a new aluminium Macbook for home use. Currently I have an 24-inch iMac, which is excellent for viewing and editing photos, and all kinds of other uses. I have two iBooks as well, of which the newest is still in active use, but is starting to show signs of wear. I need to replace it at some point, but perhaps not yet.

Returning to photography - the photo is an example of my continuing experiments in handheld long-exposure photography. There is a great deal of experimentation possible in this area.