New lappy...

I bit the bullet and purchased a NEW 15" 2.2GHz MacBook Pro last night. My girlfriend's 800MHz iBook G4 is on it's very last legs (endless beach ball while doing nothing, random freeze ups and taking forever to restart) and I told her she could have my slightly newer 1Ghz iBook G4 when hers died.

I had been eying the MacBook Pro for quite awhile but didn't really have a reason to drop the $2,000 on one since I had a perfectly good iBook to do the around the apartment web-surfing and email duties and my G4 PowerMac to do the heavier stuff like holding my iTunes collection, running Photoshop and the very rare web site stuff that I don't really do much of any more.

As far as first impressions go: It doesn't feel as solidly build as I thought it would be for the money. It feels a little bit flimsy to me. The left side fan sounds a little noisy and display doesn't fold back as much as I would like. It also gets pretty hot sitting on my lap!

I do love the display quality, though! I'm a huge fan of the widescreen aspect ratio, too... so it's a huge step up from my 12" iBook's display! The sound is pretty good for a laptop and the battery life doesn't seem too bad with the brightness down kind of low and the Bluetooth turned off. I also like the silver color MUCH more than my white iBook and the backlit keyboard is pretty awesome. Leopard doesn't feel all that much different from Panther or Tiger to me, so far... I haven't really had all that much time to dive into it yet, though. I've just been doing the initial setup things like cleaning off software I won't ever use and starting to add on software I like (Firefox, TextWrangler or BBEdit and Photoshop).

Over the next couple months I have to find (or buy) a copy of XP Pro so I can try out Parallels and VMWare Fusion and hopefully play some of my old PC games that I haven't been able to play in a long time. I'm also hoping to put my old copy of Visual Studio on it so I can mess around with a few programs I've been thinking of throwing together for the past couple years!

So, in short, I love this computer but I just wish it would run a little cooler, feel a little sturdier and have a quieter fan! I think the noisy fan is the thing that is the most irritating to me. My iBook was almost silent compared to this one and I paid $1,400 less for that one (albeit, very slightly used). I'm debating dropping by the Apple store to see if the other MacBook Pros are this noisy or if I got one with a bad fan.

PS: If you're a Firefox user check out Speed Dial. This is the one feature of Opera that I loved and missed in Firefox (even though I still preferred Firefox overall).

PPS: If you're into ambient pop/downtempo music check out Ambient Popsicle on iTunes radio or on their website. Sometimes I get in moods where I need to listen to something other than metal/hardcore/punk/screamo and this is a good alternative. ;)