Adventures with the Mac

My first experiences with a computer were some 19 years ago -- it was a machine called Commodore 65 - back then I thought it was a good toy to play some frog-computer game. Later, I saw my cousin struggle with another one which came with a real magnetic tape that played on something that resembled a tape-recorder. Post all this, it was the PC and its umbical Windows. My affairs with the right-click ended this past weekend and I switched - with the same trepidations and stomach-flutter as with a blind-date - to the MacBook. Here are my 1-day impressions.

It's simply sexy - there's no other reasonable word for it. For example, I just clicked (apple-button and +) to increase the font of my whole screen - there's no right-click, display, change, flicker and all that. Coming back from the Apple retail store (which is an amazing experience by itself), I excitedly opened the classic looking box - clean and white. It had the MacBook in a cloth-bag, 2 boxes (one said, "Everything Mac" and the other "Everything Else"), a remote control (yes). I turned it on and it loaded itself, asked me to register...10 minutes I was set without having to load even one CD. One of most exciting nice-to-haves is when you try to plug in the power cord to the comp - it sucks it into it - you'll just have to try this one -- of course, it's nice to have! Every 20 min during the next few hours, I kept dragging my cousin to see one aha feature after another...how the windows rotate, the crisp color quality of the monitor, the inbuilt camera called iSight(!), playing photos with my remote, 4-way video chatting, intelligent email search, the way a window flies out of sight - some of the Vista features seem standard on this side...I could go on after I figure everything out. On the flip side, my 4th and 5th fingers are kinda aching because they can't find the right click (reminds me of VS Ramachandran's articles on the Phantom brain), my external hard-disk is not compatible with this, I can't find the home/ page-up on the email (most painful!), do an elaborate shift-apple-D instead of Alt-S on email and I still can't seamlessly slide to the left to shut things down than to the right or do an apple-Q or W instead simply Esc, I frantically search for a missing back-space...but I'll get through this - who said new relationships are easy? My IBM thinkpad - with the missing 4-button shamelessly showing me the metal underneath - looks on at me making a little refrigerator-like noise -- I love you too and thanks for the good times but I already tasted the forbidden apple.