Adventures in Macintosh Part 1

Friday, March 25, 2005

So I’ve had this PowerBook for about 10 hours now. What a day it’s been. I’ve had about three of those hours to actually get to know my new Mac. Here’s the story so far.

As I unpacked the computer I couldn’t help but notice how detailed the packaging was. In my life as a K-12 technology administrator, I’ve had the opportunity to unpack over 100 Dell or Compaq laptop computers. Nobody has packaging like Apple. Nobody. It looks like its been designed by the same people who design the cases.

The case is a work of simple art. Clean lines of machined aluminum. Everything fits together with close tolerances. I’m impressed. The top opens easily, yet the hinges are tight. No bouncing screen like the Dell Inspiron 8100 I replaced last November with a new Dell Latitude 600. This is one nice box to be sure.

I opened the power supply first. Knowing that this computer just arrived from China yesterday and had been sitting in a warehouse for a while, I knew the battery should be fully charged before I went mobile. Once I had the power supply plugged in, I sat down in my easy chair, picked up the Powerbook and plugged the power supply connector into the side-mounted connector. The connector looks like an oversized RCA jack and the power supply has the related plug. As I plugged it in a ring round the perimeter of the plug briefly turned green and the changed to amber. Ah, the Apple engineers thought this feature through nicely. The connection is verified by the light. The color of the light indicates the battery state. My guess is that the ring will turn back to green once the battery is fully charged.

I pressed the power button conveniently mounted on the face of the computer in the right hand speaker grille. That Apple sound played and I knew I was on my way. The OS went through its very friendly set up routine. I wondered if it would find my wireless network. I expected that it wouldn’t since it is set up to not broadcast its name. My suspicions were confirmed when I had to bypass the network setup stuff.

Once I had the initial set-up completed I set the wireless configuration. Fairly easily done once I changed the WEP key setup to look for a 40 character ASCII key. The Powerbook associated with my network, grabbed a DHCP issued network address and I was off an running on the Internet. First order of business add some entries to my blog to begin describing my new adventure in the world of Macintosh.