MacBook Pro - First impressions

The Hardware

Firstly, the box and the packaging itself was quite elegant. Other notebook/laptop companies should take note. The MacBook Pro has the same casing as the PowerBook from what I can tell - metallic-silver-titanium-aluminum finish with high-grade grey plastic trims. It's sleek and slim which is helped by the widescreen LCD. For us non-Mac users, little things are really cool and well through out, like: the Apple Logo lighting up, the dimming of the LCD in low light environment, the lighting up of the backlit keyboard in low light environment, the swappable powerplug heads for the power brick, and the motion sensor (more on that another time).

The main problem I have is the heat that this machine gives off. There are a number of postings and discussions on this topic. I will put them into my next post.


The Software

As I had expected, there were less problems than when I had the Mac Mini. Not only because I knew what to look for, but because Apple had been upgrading the OS since then. The main Achilles Heel for switchers is the conversion from Outlook to Entourage.

I have over 4 years worth of emails in Outlook. I separated them into various archive mailboxes - each about 1 to 2 GB. I am a packrat, but I do notice that I do sometimes need to go back a couple of years.

There is no easy way to do this. I first tried converting to Mozilla mail and then importing mbox files into Entourage. This did not work: it converted to mbox but could not import. Next I purchase some shareware "Outlook to Entourage exporter" or something like that. This did not work either.

So my current solution is running Parallels virtualization with WinXP and Outlook for my past mails (and other apps) while using Entourage for current mails. Having the DVI output was also very good for having Windows on a separate dedicated screen. More on my experience with Parallels and comparison with Boot Camp in another post.