Christmas in October?

FedEx should now see a serious decrease in the load on their tracking servers since my new MacBook Pro has been delivered and I can get on with doing something other than hitting reload. As an aside, wouldn’t it be cool if we could get real-time package location via GPS tracking on the trucks…

A few months back, I switched over 100% to an iBook G4 from a generic XP laptop. Despite slowness due to age, I thoroughly enjoyed OS X. Being a UNIX man, I love having a real shell at my disposal, all of my old friends right there, ready to work for me. While this new laptop still has the new laptop smell (which, I might add, as a new-computer-smell connoisseur, is exceptional), here are my first impressions:

• Magnetic power code - brilliant idea. How long have there been laptops? Why has no one come up with this before? The power cord has strong magnets that hold it in place but allow it to pop off easily in case of trouble. I’d seen the ads and knew to expect it, but I’m impressed with their implementation of it.
• Keyboard nirvana - I’ve never loved a laptop keyboard. Until now. There is something soft about the edges of the keys and the texture is so pleasant to the touch. Keyboards are a personal thing and I suspect that there are those who wouldn’t care for it, but loving one is certainly something I didn’t expect.
• Night mode LCD/keyboard - I knew that the keyboard was backlit, but never knew just how that worked. It turns out that there are two light sensors near the top of the speaker grills on either side of the keyboard. When both register darkness, the LCD brightness dims and the keyboard becomes backlit. So cool. I often wake up in the wee hours of the morning and like to make sure the Internet is still there, but I always dread the daytime mode LCD brightness in the 3AM darkness. Yeah, I could turn on the room lights, but what fun is that? I can already tell that this will be an appreciated feature.
• Lights, (tiny little) camera, action! - Apple found some way to sneak a video camera into the flip top just above the LCD. I have to admit that I clicked the Photo Booth application first off to try out the little camera. Very impressive for its size. David thinks he can watch me code now whenever he wants. I’m going to have to make a 15 minute video of me actually coding and find a way to loop it.
• Front row - Kinda like Windows Media Center Edition, only it works. Jennifer and I bought an early MCE box, enamored with the idea, but we were severely disappointed with the implementation. This laptop came with an old-school Shuffle-like remote control which controls Front Row (which I looked for in the applications folder before I even noticed the remote). I’ll have to play with it more, but I like what I’ve seen so far.

I’ll have more comments as I break it in and pics tomorrow when I have some daylight. Oh, it’s blazing fast, too. Double-click to coding in Zend: 7 seconds (it took about a minute and a half on the iBook and don’t even try running it with Photoshop at the same time). I hope the new laptop smell lingers.