My New Mac

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I’m writing this on my new iMac, which arrived today, Thursday. (It’s after midnight as I type this.) I ordered it online on Tuesday, but I had to call Apple customer service to fix a payment issue, and after it was resolved, the customer service rep bumped my order up to two-day shipping. For two days I tracked its progress online, waiting for it to arrive… and here it is.

I’m psyched. It’s pretty nifty. Especially compared to my seven-year-old PC. After I unpacked it and set it up on my desk, the first thing I thought was, Jesus, this thing is huge. It’s a 21.5-inch widescreen, compared to the 15-inch 4:3 monitor I’ve used since 2003.

I’m not completely new to Macs. In 1999-2000, I worked at a small company for 10 months where my work computer was a Mac. It must have had OS 8 or OS 9. I didn’t particularly like it. I thought Windows 95/98 looked sleeker, and I was completely unfamiliar with how Macs worked. But I’ve always thought OS X was a lot prettier.

So now I’ve got my own Mac! There are a few things I’m getting used to:

One, the green “maximize” button doesn’t do the same thing as the maximize button does in Windows; it doesn’t fill the whole screen but maximizes to as much space as the program needs. Or so I’ve read. I can’t quite figure out exactly what it’s going to do before I click it, especially when I click it a second time.

Two, if you close a window, the program doesn’t actually shut down unless you make it “quit.” It’s weird to see a menu in the top left corner for a program I thought was closed.

And three, I don’t yet fully have a handle on how to install programs that I’ve downloaded.

But I’m slowly figuring things out, and I’ll figure that stuff out too. This evening I bought Switching to the Mac, by David Pogue, because it’s convenient to have a book by my side to look stuff up instead of having to Google things.

One other thing of note: I have an external hard drive, so it was easy to copy all my personal files from my old PC onto my Mac. And I realized that I’ve been copying some of these files from computer to computer for years. I have a folder called “College papers and letters,” and the “Date Modified” on the earliest of those files is from October 1991. Holy crap. I wrote my college papers with WordPerfect 5.1, but I think I found a way to read them on my PC, so there must be some way to open them.

I’m looking forward to playing around with this thing. I know it’s just a computer, but really, it feels like a more enjoyable experience than a PC. I’ve promised Matt that I’m not going to turn into a crazy Mac person — but for a while I may be experiencing the zeal of a convert.

So, that’s that. This is gonna be fun.

12 thoughts on “My New Mac”

  1. Well done on the new Mac. I bought a then new 21.5 2 months ago and I love it. You’re right about the size, it’s huge. It won’t take long to figure out the quirks etc. Enjoy it. I know you will.

  3. On the other hand, if you don’t engage in a little zeal of the convert, what fun is that? :)

    For your #3, Mac programs rarely need an installer. If you want to keep them, simply drag them to your Applications folder. If it needs an installer there will be one that’s well labeled in the download package.

  4. By avoiding the zeal of the convert, one avoids acting like a dick in the eyes of those who will have to wait about 4 years or so to be able to share in one’s conversion ;)

  7. The main thing with installing programs is that you never want to run a program from the white mounted “drive” that appears when you open a DMG file. You either copy the program to your Applications folder or sometimes you run a .pkg/.mpkg file inside it (which are the equivalent of a Setup.exe) or sometimes there’s something in there that specifically says “Installer”. I think this is the most confusing part about owning a Mac, the rest just takes some getting used to.

    I switched about 6 years ago (used Linux for a little bit before that and then Windows before that) and I haven’t looked back. :) I’ve never really found I needed to “maximize” anything, which is strange because I did that in Windows a lot. But I guess I’ve had higher resolution screens since I switched so I haven’t needed to fill the screen with anything.

    My list of recommended programs: MenuCalendarClock (replacement for the time that has a calendar menu), Mailplane (if you have multiple Gmail accounts and don’t want to use Mail for them), Tweetie, Mplayer OS X Extended + VideoLAN + Perian for playing various kinds of videos (I mostly use Mplayer but sometimes there’s a video only VideoLAN can play), Adium (not as pretty out of the box as iChat but I prefer it after customizing it to look better), Google Chrome, Alfred (new program that lets you launch programs quickly), Coda (HTML editor and FTP in one) or Transmit (just for FTP), and Delivery Status is a handy dashboard widget for keeping track of packages.

  9. If your mouse is at the bottom of your screen when you want to close a program, you can hold it down on the icon for that program on your Dock. It will give you a Quit option.

    Also, Macs support right click (at least the operating system does). I don’t know if the mice that come with regular Macs have a right mouse button. If that bothers you, you can get a regular USB mouse and then you will be able to right click away. (I have a Mac Mini which doesn’t come with the Mac mice and keyboards that I don’t like.)

    Anyway, I love my Mac Mini. OS X is waaaaaaayyyyyyyy better than Windows, though I can get buy with either.

  10. The mouse the iMacs come with lets you right-click if you change your settings (Apple icon -> System Preferences -> Mouse -> Secondary click).

  11. Yup, I’ve got the Magic Mouse, and the first thing I did was set up the right-click option.

    (Since it lacks a physical scroll wheel, the Magic Mouse doesn’t work very well for tilting in Google Earth in order to see 3D buildings, so I’m going to hold onto my old mouse for times when I really want to do something like that.)

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