Clowns In My Coffee

OK, ok, so I did it. I got myself a white Macbook, the 2GHz model, everything else being base. Yep, I did it right before the big meeting of the Church Of Steve, at which it is rumoured many things foretold on the internet forums shall come to pass, and that he who fails to hesitate is lost. I, however, took the bold move and bet that nothing major would be happening with the MacBook line, at least nothing interesting enough to overcome the tax-free weekend and the “free-after-rebate” DRMPod. The Pro line, while nice n’all, doesn’t offer me anything I want at the price they’re asking. Since I’m not 100% on board with the whole Apple geist — despite the nice engineering and design, I find the stores and terminology a little bit creepy (”Geniuses” and “Creatives” … eww), if I’m going to venture into that world, I’d prefer it be more like a toe-dip than a leap off the 90 metre cliff.

So far, from a software point of view I’m liking it just fine, and I’m having some fun learning the ways of the Mac keyboard and dealing with the single mouse button. I’ve had my fun with the remote, GarageBand and the builtin camera (no fears, I’m not about to start videocasting), but the most interesting thing to me — besides wanting a bit more variety with the operating system - is performance. Yes, this thing gets pretty hot, it is in no wise a laptop, but it feels snappy, even though I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything to really push it yet. With 512MB it runs a basic Java development environment with Eclipse and Firefox well (it says something that this seems notable to me).

I haven’t yet located a utility to show me what the current CPU temperature is, or, to be more accurate, I have failed to locate a driver for the CPU temperature monitor. Learning a new platform, I think, is roughly analogous to learning a new programming language: the hard part isn’t the basic syntax, it’s figuring out the libraries. This is going to take a while; and, if I don’t like it so much, I did grab a copy of Parallels …