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My MacBook Pro came Thursday.

When some American Girl doll owners get a new doll, they might gather their other dolls together to witness The Great Opening of the Box. I kind of did the same thing here, except since this was a computer we were opening, I felt it was only right that I have electronic gadgets witness this event. And I had my regular MacBook take pictures for me (using its iSight camera). :3

Afterwards, I spent some time trying to transfer my current info from my MacBook to the MBP, using the Migration Assistant. Except it kind of got stuck toward the very beginning, to where I decided to just move the files myself.

The way I transferred the files was to connect the two Macs wirelessly, and then on my MacBook, I opened a Finder window for the hard-drive of the other computer and a Finder window for the local drive, and started dragging and dropping.

As for the speed, it’s definitely a lot faster than the MacBook. Moving 82 files on the MacBook took an estimated time of 2 hours. But when I transferred the files on the MBP instead, the estimated time for 11,000 (not exaggerating here) files was…6 minutes.

Then I spent time trying to configure the MBP to operate like my old Mac (i.e. get all the files to snap to a grid, get it to show hidden files via Terminal, etc.). I had to reinstall Photoshop (something to do with the license not working).

One interesting feature Ryan demonstrated was that the display darkens and the keyboard lights up a little when the speakers (on either side of the keyboard) are covered (if you ever need to work in the dark).

As for any drawbacks, well…aside from the fact that this display has a problem with uneven illumination that’s even more annoying than the regular MacBook, I’m not too fond of the new keyboard key functions for the F1-12 keys. I’m used to pressing F12 to access Dashboard, but F12 on a MBP only raises the volume (I could use F12 to get to Dashboard if I hold down the Fn key along with it, otherwise I have to press F4).

(This seems to be the case for the newer generation Macs, at least for the MacBook line, as I noticed during a semi-recent trip to the Apple Store.)

Another issue: Since this MBP came with Leopard (OS X 10.5), I could no longer run PHP on my laptop. D: (The site I normally get it from only has it for Tiger.) If anyone knows if there’s one for Leopard, I will love you forever if you tell me.

And there’s the size, which I think I’ll get used to eventually (I’m still used to my nice, small 13″ laptop :3).

As for my old MacBook, Lorin wanted it for some reason (the case is cracking, the screen flickers, only has 55 GB of hard-drive space and you can’t let it become more than half full otherwise it starts to act weird), so I gave it to her. (Last time I checked, she was reinstalling Tiger.)

That’s all I can think of now. We’re going to be leaving reeeeallly soon to go to a relative’s graduation party.

Modified: November 18th, 2008