As I pulled the Mac Pro out of the box, my first thought was, "It's shiny." Granted, that doesn't mean very much, except that Apple clearly wants to differentiate its products visually, so that you can see at a glance whether a given machine is from Apple or not. They succeeded; no one would mistake the Mac Pro for any sort of PC. The fit and finish of the case is excellent, though I would expect nothing less from Apple.

So, I hooked it up, plugged everything in, and turned it on. The first things that you actually touch are the keyboard and mouse. Now, I happen to know that there are people who are not picky about the layout and feel of their keyboard. Those people will have no problem with this keyboard. Not being one of them, the main question I have about the "aluminum" keyboard is, what were they thinking? I don't doubt that it is functional, but its feel is far too different from what I am accustomed to -- even if I didn't use an ergonomic keyboard, which I do. The Mac keyboard provides a couple of features that you can't get anywhere else, like a power button for the computer. On the other hand, I can reach the actual power button on the computer without moving in my chair, so that's not worth a whole lot to me. Given that my current keyboard works just fine with the Mac and gives me everything I need, I see no reason to switch.

The mouse is a different story. Being a long-time user of Logitech mice, the cordless Mighty Mouse that I got with my Mac is also very different from what I am used to. However, it has the very interesting feature of being able to scroll both vertically and horizontally, or universally if you configure it for that. After using it for a few minutes, I hooked up a Logitech mouse and got it going. (The older generation of Logitech mice have MacOSX drivers; the newer ones don't. Fortunately, the ones I have are supported.) However, the jury is still out on the Mighty Mouse. I couldn't get the Logitech mouse configured to my satisfaction (still working on that), and the Mac is quite happy for me to have both mice connected, so I may try both for a while. The Mighty Mouse has an on-off switch (a nice touch for a cordless mouse), so I don't have to worry about using the batteries if I'm not actually using the mouse.

Once I got through the welcome and registration screens and actually started running the system, one of the first things I noticed was its quickness. By that I don't mean "fast" in the sense that we usually use it when describing computers (i.e., raw processing power). I mean when you interact with the computer, the action you are directing occurs immediately. On Windows, even on a lightly loaded system, there is often a time lag when doing simple things like restoring a minimized window, or switching tabs in Firefox. I don't know if this will manifest on the Mac; I certainly didn't do anything to really tax the system. But its responsiveness contrasted with Windows enough for me to notice, which I find significant.

I had already done a good bit of research on MacOSX and how it looks to a Windows user. It served me well. I was able to negotiate software installation (Logitech mouse drivers, Firefox), network configuration, and accessing my network Samba share without much difficulty. (OK, getting to the Samba share was a bit tough, but that was due to a configuration issue on the Linux server, and not with the Mac at all.) I played a few MP3s in iTunes, and they sounded great. It has some sort of "sound enhancement" trickery happening, which I have yet to explore, but the sound I got was just fine.

Wanting to explore the multimedia capabilities further, I played a couple of DVDs with the Mac. I have the ability to play DVDs on my Windows machine, but it has a problem with fullscreen mode. The picture will periodically lag behind the sound, and then jerk to catch up. Happily, this issue did not appear on the Mac -- the sound and the picture were in sync. Unfortunately, the picture quality that I got was not good at all. I don't think this is the fault of the Mac, exactly -- I imagine it is faithfully (and mercilessly) reproducing the source material. I was using DVDs that were originally shot with TV resolution (480 raster lines if I'm not mistaken). Displaying them full-screen means upping the resolution to 1600 lines, and I am using an LCD monitor, which reveals a lot of detail. This recipe is not likely to produce a pristine image. I haven't tested with a Hollywood film, which will have more raster lines to work with; also, the LCD monitor is new, and there may be some issues with it that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Mac.

I have yet to do any "real work," by which I mean photo or video processing, on my new Mac. In fact, I can't do photo processing yet, because I need to calibrate the monitor. (Having looked at some of my pictures, it is clear that the colors are off.) I have ordered a calibration package (the one I have now is Windows-only), but it hasn't arrived. So, I haven't seen what the quad-core processor can really do just yet.

Now for a few gripes. I haven't found a way to enable global hotkeys for iTunes. This was a nice feature of Winamp -- I could set up hotkeys to control the player, and they would work regardless of whether the player had keyboard focus. Of course, iTunes provides the ability to control the player from the keyboard, but only when the player has focus. I found an app that claims to be able to do this, but I haven't had a chance to try it out.

Speaking of keyboard focus, I prefer to use pointer focus. This is where you don't have to click on a window to give it keyboard focus; you just hover the mouse over the window. It gives you the ability to type in windows that aren't raised, which I find valuable. I discovered pointer focus years ago when using X Windows on Unix systems, and I have been using the "TweakUI" utility for many years to do the same thing on Windows. Unfortunately, MacOS doesn't support it natively, and there doesn't seem to be a good way to enable it. I found one application that claims to do it, but it's commercial software. I guess I'll have to decide how much that feature is worth to me.

I have a few other gripes. I can't seem to disable mouse acceleration, which I find highly annoying. Getting used the "Command" key (the Windows key on non-Mac keyboards) rather than the "control" key is strange. The Mac driver for my printer does not acknowledge that it has a duplex feeder, so it disables double-sided printing. When Firefox asks me what to do about a cookie, the cookie dialog doesn't respond to the keyboard, so I have to use the mouse to deal with the dialog. (On Windows, I can just tab to whatever button I want and hit space to press it.) The Mighty Mouse takes a long time (close to a minute) to connect when you switch it on. All in all, though, these are relatively minor things, which I imagine I'll learn to live with (assuming I can't find workarounds).

I am just getting started with this thing, and there is a lot to learn. Even using familiar software, like Firefox, is different on the Mac -- and I am going to need to learn to use a great deal of software that is unfamiliar. I don't expect to become an expert in one day, regardless of how much I'd like to. But I do expect to become an expert, in time.

I have had my Mac for nearly three months now, and I have used it quite a bit. Initial impressions have been replaced with more considered ones. Thus far, the Apple tag line you see so much, "It just works," has proven true (at least for the most part -- see below). The bottom line is, I like my Mac. I like it a lot.

One of the subtle advantages of the Mac over Windows, which I did not catch at first, is the absence of bloatware. In part, that means all the trial software that comes with a new Windows computer these days. (Sony was so infamous for loading down their Vaio laptops with this stuff -- you can read a lengthy account of that here -- that they offered customers the option of buying the system without it. The catch was, they were charging an extra $50 for the privilege! I hear they have since waived that fee.) I can't stand that stuff, and I can confirm that my Mac came with none of it (that I have noticed, anyway). In addition, I have is no firewall or antivirus software running. With a Mac, there is no need (or, not much -- spyware can still be an issue). In my previous post, I mentioned that the Mac was "quick," very responsive to user input. I suspect that the lack of unwanted, unneeded software running in the background has a lot to do with this.

At that time, I also said that I hadn't done any "real" work with the Mac, meaning CPU-intensive tasks like photo processing. Now I have, and I can attest that this is one fast computer. I have run the same operations that I used to run on my (admittedly old and slow) Windows PC, and the perceived time to completion is significantly less. This sort of performance is the reason I sprung for the Mac Pro over the iMac, and I am well pleased with the results.

Of course, given the specs (quad-core Xeon at 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM), this machine ought to be fast. It would be pretty darned fast if it were running Windows. Regardless, Apple put it together, it has their name on it, and it runs their OS. (Not only that, but you've never opened a Windows PC and seen anything like this.) It is a slick piece of hardware, no doubt about that.

While I'm on the subject of performance, I want to describe another situation I encountered. Where I work, we have a lot of digital video material that we use for testing, including some HD material. Most of the HD stuff that we use is 720p, but I found a 1080i file that looked interesting, and I wanted to play it. My computer at work is adequate for most of what I do, but it didn't have enough CPU horsepower to play the file. I tried it on a faster machine running Vista, and it couldn't play it, either. I brought it home (not easy -- huge file), and my Mac played it while barely breaking a sweat. Now, it's possible that better graphics cards at work might have enabled the Windows machines to play the file, but there was no contest when it came to the CPU.

Along with the computer itself, I am exploring a number of new software packages. I bought a raw processing package called Bibble, as well as a newer version of Photoshop Elements. I was very excited about the capabilities of Bibble, but I have gotten mixed results. Some photos look terrific, but others have some rather odd artifacts. Also, there are some aspects to the operation of the software that seem wrong, and that I still don't understand.

Because of my experience with Bibble, I have been exploring yet another raw processing package, Aperture from Apple. I recently installed a trial version, and once again, initial results are promising. Aperture isn't as powerful overall as Bibble, but it does some things extremely well, and Photoshop Elements is able to pick up its slack. I would like to eliminate the need for two different applications in my workflow, which is one of the reasons I was excited about Bibble, but I have been using two apps (a raw converter plus Elements) for several years now, and it hasn't killed me yet.

Speaking of Photoshop Elements on the Mac, while it does its job for the most part, there are some things about it that are downright goofy, and others that are downright broken. It has a very wacky way of handling windows when multiple files are open. It is hard to describe, but each file shows up on the dock as a separate document, and Elements seems to jump around different desktops under certain circumstances, which baffles me. I also discovered that the feature which creates animated GIFs is broken on the Mac version. It doesn't work at all unless the account under which Elements is being run has admin permissions. (From what I understand, this is very bad form for Mac software.) Even when you do run under an admin-enabled account, one aspect of the settings dialog (the setting for the time between each frame in the GIF) doesn't work, effectively rendering the feature useless. Fortunately, we have Elements for Windows, and the animated GIF feature works properly on that platform, but that doesn't help me on the Mac.

I had a chance to explore NeoOffice, an open-source office productivity suite. It is related to OpenOffice, but it uses Java as its UI mechanism. I needed to edit a Word document that I brought from work, so I tried NeoOffice on it. I made a few changes to the document, but I hadn't gotten very far before NeoOffice locked up, requiring me to force-quit the application. I tried several times to edit that portion of the document, but I got a lockup every time.

Because of the problems with NeoOffice, I downloaded and installed OpenOffice 2.4. Sadly, it was worse. It is not written natively for the OS X graphical API, but instead relies on X11 for its graphical engine. Because of this, the UI is distinctly (and strangely) non-Mac-like. In fact, it is downright clunky. The only good thing I can say about it is that the problem I saw with NeoOffice did not occur with OpenOffice, and I was able to complete the changes to my document. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of trying to print the doc, and OpenOffice munged up the print job somehow.

I hate to say it, but I think I will need to purchase Microsoft Office for the Mac. The Home/Student version isn't exorbitant, and I need a reliable way to read and edit Word and Excel documents. For better or worse, Microsoft has established a de facto standard. I may not like it, but I am forced to acknowledge it.

I have used iTunes a bit, though I haven't explored it much. I will say that I have no plans to buy an iPod, nor to make purchases from iTunes store. Not that it is surprising, but I did not realize how restrictive Apple made its system. Music sold at the iTunes store is encoded using a proprietary algorithm that can only be played back on an iPod or other Apple device, such as an iPhone. (For the record, you can play out those files and re-encode them as MP3, but you pay a price in terms of the fidelity of the music.) I plan to continue to acquire new music the way I always have, purchasing CDs and ripping MP3s.

I am happy to report that I have found solutions to most of the gripes from my previous post. I found a way to control iTunes using hot keys. I was mistaken about the printer driver -- it supports duplex with no trouble; I just hadn't found the correct control panel to enable it. The cordless Mighty Mouse connects reasonably quickly after all. I discovered through trial and error that you have to click it to get it to connect. I also found a setting to let me access the Firefox cookie dialog using the keyboard.

Sadly, many gripes remain. There appears to be no way to disable mouse acceleration. It is much more subdued with the Mighty Mouse than the Logitech, so that is the mouse I use most of the time. I am learning to live without pointer focus. Getting used to the different keyboard shortcuts is quite a challenge, especially when editing text (like I am now). The shortcuts for cursor movement are very different on the Mac, and I have to "reprogram" my fingers when I switch between the Mac and Windows.

In closing, I want to describe a conversation I had with a former colleague about the Mac. He is a longtime Mac user, and during the time that he and I worked together, he would often tell me that I needed to get a Mac. I recently sent him an email to let him know that I had finally taken his advice, and by way of describing my experience, I said of the Mac, "It does what I need as well or better than Windows." His response to that comment was, "Yeah, and it's fun, too!" Now, what he meant, as he later explained to me, was that it is more stable, less prone to viruses, and easier to maintain, so you can spend more time actually using the computer and less time dealing with, or worrying about, extraneous problems. My experience lines up with this statement. Having said that, there is something alluring about the Mac. I have spent more time with it than I would spend on my old computer. It is certainly possible to chalk this up to novelty, and it will be a while before I can make that determination. The notion that it is actually more "fun" just doesn't make much sense. And yet...

I like my Mac. I like it a lot.