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.
