My Life as a Slider

For those of you who have been following along, I gave up on HP after they bombed on repairing my machine under warranty – which required sending it off to Indiana – and yes, it’s still in the Midwest as I type this, under the care of someone named Chad. It has been out of commission for over a month.

The Mac arrived on July 3, though I wasn’t really able to do much with it besides basic image editing until the 5, when I got Microsoft Word for it. I transferred over some music to listen to it while I worked, and attended a meeting on Skype (and that Facetime HD camera is just a bit too unforgiving for those of us with blemishes…note to self, remember concealer).

But as of July 6, I was getting all of my work done on the machine. I am very pleased with it. It even inspired me to clean off my desk (big step there). 

It has OSX Lion on it. I don’t know what version I used last; the last time I worked on an iMac was 2009, so…Leopard, maybe? It’s all pretty straightforward. I didn’t have any initial difficulty in making “the switch.” Bear in mind that I was pretty happy with Windows 7; aside from Vista, really, I’ve been OK with Windows. It’s the crappy customer service that comes with PCs that turned me off. 

As a sort of test, I actually brought the Mac into Starbucks today – that’s where I’m typing this – for the first time, and the only table available was right underneath the skylight. Whenever I get stuck with the PC here, the glare is terrible. With the Mac, I can actually see the screen quite well, although the aluminum reflection is kind of blinding. And yes, I am now one of those people with a Mac sitting in Starbucks like some kind of ridiculous hipster. At least I put a case on mine.

The aluminum shell is a little more resistant to fingerprints than my plastic-covered PC, which is nice. The screen is a dust magnet, however, and I find myself wiping it down with a microfiber cloth every night.

The touchpad is very nice, but does way more than I need it to, although I appreciate all the swiping and pinching and moving around it can facilitate. I’m sure one of these days I’ll convert completely, but for now I’m just using a mouse.

The machine runs utterly silent, by the way. I think I heard the fan going exactly once, in the middle of a long video meeting, and that was it. I’m so used to the fan on my PC that I wondered if something was wrong. Maybe I’d gotten a defective unit.

Nope. It’s just U-boat-like in its stealth.

Installing software is easy – just drag and drop – and the battery life is stellar. I average about seven hours; I could get more out of it if I turned off wireless and just worked in Word, which is what I’m doing now. The sound is surprisingly good for such a little computer. I guess the speakers are tucked underneath the keyboard, which tripped me out at first (“Where are the speakers?!”).

The only thing that really bothers me at the moment is the Flash support, or lack thereof. Every YouTube video I click in Safari tells me “this video is currently unavailable.” I finally ended up downloading Chrome, which I’m not fond of, so I could view videos. I realize Steve Jobs thought Flash was the devil, but c’mon, dude, I need to see my “Call Me Maybe” parodies.

Now, this wouldn’t be an episode of My Life as a Slider if I didn’t mention the brand-new external drive that just up and died on me – you know, the one I used to back up the big machine? All of my important stuff was backed up elsewhere, but I lost some new videos and pictures. I’ll have to take it to a data extractor to see if I can salvage any of it, and then back it goes.

Yes, it has a warranty. After the mess with HP, I’ve gotten the extended warranty on everything…even the wireless mouse I just purchased from Radio Shack.

Hey, you can never be too careful.

I’ll have a proper review up after more time spent with it, but overall it’s been a very positive experience.

Now, if I can ask for Justin Long to make an appearance…