My First Experience With Apple MacBook

Sunday, February 10th, 2008
by George Appiah

For most of yesterday, besides meeting a couple of really interesting people, I was flirting around with my new found love - my new Apple MacBook. So far things have been surprisingly easy-going between the two of us.

The biggest issue I’m grappling with now is how to quickly UN-LEARN my PC habits accumulated over the years. And I think I’m doing such a great job at that, being being the nerd I am. Here are some of the surprises I’ve been dealing with:

Unboxing and Plugging: After I unboxed the baby and inspected everything inside the box, I took the beautiful power adapter and looked all round the computer searching for where to plug it in. Before I could think “this must be it”, I felt this pull, and BAM! - the thing plugged itself in! No kidding, the damn connector plugged itself into the computer! At this point I started thinking: this Apple thing must be damn good — I’ve never been treated like an idiot like this before (get the gist?).

Anyway, I pushed the power button to start the baby. After a few clicks I was up and running with my user account, and the baby politely asked for my permission to connect to the WiFi in the room.

But it seemed like something was missing. Where is the right mouse button? Actually Macs have “right-click” functionality … except there’s no right mouse button — there’s just one mouse button! The “right-click” menu is, you go CTRL+Click. Apple must have a design philosophy behind this, but I’ve not had made time to read on this yet. Trouble is, I keep clicking on the right side of the single button and waiting for something to happen.

The Control (Win) / Command (Mac) thingy: Back in the PC environment, many keyboard commands and shortcuts are done with the control key plus some other characters (eg. CTRL+A - for select all, CTRL+C - to copy, CTRL+P - to Print, etc). There’s something similar in the world of Macs too, except this is the COMMAND key. But here’s the thing: There’s CONTROL key in addition to this COMMAND key, and the Command key is in the wrong position :-). So as you’ll expect, I keep hitting FUNCTION+something, and always getting the wrong results.

Installing & Uninstalling Applications: I’m yet to read on the RIGHT way to install applications. Sure, I’ve installed a bunch of applications already, but it seemed so easy that… I’m left thinking… there has to be something else I’m not doing. How can Apple take me to be such an idiot that they’d make things so easy to do round here?

It’s already Sunday morning, and I’ve not had any sleep within the past 48 hours. So I’m off to catch some sleep now. More love stories tomorrow.