MacBook Pro 17″ Review – Part IV

Keyboard

I like keyboard a lot. Keys are easy to press, well defined threshold for the amount of pressure that has to be applies. Keys depress naturally, do not hesitate or resist. One problem I have is with Control key that is right of the Fn key. I would prefer if it was switched. I barely use Fn while I use Ctrl a lot and it is difficult to use. But that’s very subjective.

Overall Experience

I have to be honest here. It is very productive and cool laptop. I could be as productive in development with my old Dell as I am now. Saying that I am still getting used to shortcuts (especially Aptana, Eclipse and Intellij IDEA have a lot of conflicts with pre-defined system shortcuts). I don’t like running GIMP (I used it quite often before on Ubuntu). It’s running in X11 and it is just not a very pleasant experience. For some reason there is a lot of double-clicking and just somehow I could not get used to it.

It is different story when it comes to overall experience. I just love to sync my iPhone, iCal, Address Book and it all works! Very, very, very smooth. Sometimes I miss extra heat coming from Fujitsu N6010 and Dell XPS, I could use some of that now that it is a little bit colder. MacBook Pro just would warm up, it is cold-blooded machine. Can barely feel any heat coming out.

Another Problem

I installed additional international keyboards to write some Christmas emails with in Slovak. When I walked away screensaver kicked. I have password protected screen saver and I wasn’t able to type in correct password. There was $ sign in the password and with keyboard set to Slovak, I just didn’t know what to do. I ended up turning off laptop sing off switch. I am not sure what else could be done.

MacBook Pro 17″ Review – Part III

Development Tools, Environment etc.

I was able to find Mac versions of Aptana, VMWare (Fusion), Eclipse and pretty much all other tools needed for web development. I liked Synaptic on Ubuntu and how easy it was to install any development packages, latex libraries, tools etc. I am somehow reluctant to install Fink and so far I was able to install all required tools and packages without any problems. I had to install pyodbc, pyodbc-django from the package. But it was pretty straight forward.

Support

This paragraph doesn’t fit in but I just had my  first experience with Apple support and would like to comment on it. Some of the multi-touch gestures stopped working and after exhausting all my options I decided to exercise 90-day free support and called Apple. Better to say I let them to call me. I signed in, was unable to register laptop because Future Shop purchase date did not match Apple records. I just provided my phone number and they called me right away. I was on hold for 4-5 minutes and then friendly customer representative introduced herself. Which was really nice. It would be even nicer if they called when rep is available and avoid initial 4-5 minute wait time.

However, Rochelle was very friendly and said we will take care of that after we resolve the problem. Asked me to make keyboard gymnastics (pressing four different keys and power button on top of that at the same time) and problem was fixed. It was followed by some not that clear explanation about powering on some devices, but hey … it worked. Then she completed registration for me. Overall, very good experience. One point for Apple.