Everyone, meet Hera, my new 15″ Macbook Pro.

After 7 extremely loyal years of service, I have retired my trusty Toshiba Satellite.  While the Toshiba hasn’t completely failed yet, I was encountering error message more frequently, lost the capability to access my SD card slot and was encountering more Windows issues (again).  I could no longer resist the urge to make the leap.

And while I’m excited about my new life with Mac, one of the main reasons I chose the Mac was because it allowed me to still keep Windows on a second partition using Bootcamp… and it was dead simple to do.

Now, let’s discuss a bit about Hera’s impressive feature set:

• 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 (quad core)
• 8 GB of DDR3 ram (that’s right, I said 8 GB)
• 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce GT graphics card on top of the integrated Intel HD card
• 15.4″  High Def antiglare screen

So far I’m pretty impressed.  I’ve already made a short video using Final Cut Express 4.0 and it didn’t take too long to figure it out.  I’ve also gamed with my buddy Barry and I gotta say… WOW!  The graphics are freakin AMAZING!  I knew the Toshiba was outdated… but sweet mother of all that is good and pure… it’s just amazing now.

But there are a couple of things that have been challenging:

• No hard drive light:  At least with the Toshiba I had a hard drive light that would flash away and give me some indication of when the system was busy.  No such animal with the Mac.
• Difficult migration: Trying to migrate from Outlook to Mac’s Mail program was very challenging and, for awhile, I thought I’d lose all my important mail.  I see this as being both the fault of Microsoft AND Apple.  It appears that neither have gone to any great lengths to allow users to export their data to other platforms… and that’s just a piss off ‘cuz it’s MY data.  I did eventually find an app called Little Machines O2M which will export your mail, contacts and calendar events from outlook to a format that you can import into Mac’s Mail.  It did a pretty good job and only cost $10.
• OS differences:  It will take some time to figure out all the little nuances of Mac vs Windows.  Little things like keyboard shortcuts, where this lives, how to do that… it’s all a small learning curve.

Overall, I’m thrilled with my new Macbook Pro and look forward to many years of enjoyment.  Now, as the wife says, I better start ‘making money with it’.