Geek 2.0

I recently acquired a MacBook Pro to replace my not-too-old PowerBook G4 12″. I have only one thing to say : waow !

First of all, I have to be used to the size of the beast. The 15″ is much more confortable to work but this confort comes at a price, it takes more space in my bag and on my legs. I wonder how it will fit in an economy-class airplane seat.

The machine is responsive, the backlight keyboard is impressive, the screen very bright. So far, nothing to say about hardware.

As far as software is concerned, Apple succeeded at making the transition to Intel completly transparent to end users. All applications I am using are universal (NeoOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird) or Java based (Netbeans, Creator). The only non universal application I notice so far is the Flash plugin for the browsers. And because plugins can not run under the Rosetta emulator, it requires the full browser to start in Rosetta, which is not handy.

Last word on software : in two days of intensive usage, I got one kernel panic while switching wifi network and one finder crash. Is Mac OS Intel less stable than Mac OS PPC ? In 5 years, I had only one kernel panic with the PPC versions. Let’s see how it will behaves during these next days.