Initial impressions

OS X was preinstalled on the system and booted very quickly. An initial setup screen led me through a set of simple questions; I was up and running in about five minutes. Painless.

Software update popped up with some packages to upgrade. Conceptually, not a lot different from Windows software update, so no real surprises here.

I went on to define an account for my Lovely Wife. One obvious difference from Windows is Fast User Switching; on OS X it’s actually, well, fast….perhaps ‘Instant User Switching’ would be a better term for it. The screen does a way-cool spinning cube transition effect, and bam, you’re on the other account; the switch takes perhaps a second. This is a huge differentiator given our typical home usage.

Interface-wise, I was reminded from my prior days on Macs that the menus are always at the top of the screen, not on the windows themselves. Essentially, to use Windows parlance, everything is an MDI interface, complete with not exiting when the last window closes. Well, not actually true; some applications do exit, typically small utilities. To contrast the two, Windows is consistent, and OS X is logical. When in Rome…

New to me was the dock at the bottom of the screen; this takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s a nice interface, easily customizable and extremely functional.

The keyboard had nice key response but felt a bit small to me, being used to Microsoft Natural keyboards. I was reminded that the Mac version of the Control key is actually not the one labeled ‘Control’, and it’s in the wrong spot. It’s a bit difficult to retrain the pinky finger after 25 years on IBM keyboards.
The mouse had to go. Aesthetically pleasing, but the enjoyment ended there; we immediately replaced it with a Logitech MX Revolution.

Hookup to my Logitech Z-680 speakers required an optical cable and an adjustment to the sound preference panel to select the optical output. In contrast to the hours I would normally have spent finding some reasonably stable Windows sound driver, researching the effects of slot placement with respect to ACPI automatic IRQ steering and associated latency and/or conflict with the video card, ridiculously simple and delightfully devoid of blue screens.

So far, so good.