And what a box it was!
In contrast to the Acer, the Apple box was very “posh”.
Inside, instead of the never-ending pile of PC bits, there were three items:
- MacBook Pro – elegantly simply titanium case
- Power adapter & cables – even here Apple’s reputation for design shines – the power adapter can slot neatly into the mains plug. So if you don’t need the cable for length, the power adapter is secure, and out of the way. Then there’s the magnetic plug at the laptop end…
- Little square pack with user guide “Everything Mac” and CDs with software.
So what did we actually buy?
MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 160 GB hard disk, 2GB RAM and 17″ screen. Running OS X 10.4.9.
To give us maximum compatibility with our existing application software, we added:
- Parallels Desktop for Mac (Avanquest)
- Windows XP Pro (OEM version)
This claimed to enable us to run Windows XP and Mac OS X concurrently.
The Mac instruction were to plug in the power cable, open the case top, and press the power button.
It worked!
Almost instantly, (compared to the Acer anyway) the crystal clear screen sprang to life and the Mac went into its set up routine.
1st challenge: The MacBook wouldn’t connect to our wireless network.
Yes, it found to network ok – the “AirPort” network channel was enabled, but it wouldn’t accept the WEP encryption Key.
After a call to PC World, and a couple of attempts at reconfiguring the network to use different security modes, I found that no one mode was supported by all computers on the network. The new laptops, plus one desktop would work with WPA. The Windows machines would all work with WEP, but not the MacBook. So the only short term solution was to set encryption off, and run an open network!! Not ideal…But we live out in the countryside, so there’s probably only 1 or 2 neighbours within range.
After a brief orientation to the Mac desktop – chapter 2 of the little “Everything Mac” booklet – I went on and installed the Parallels software and Windows XP Pro. Needed to carefully follow the instructions for Parallels, but all went well, and I had a Mac running Windows within half an hour.
Now the task was to re-create my working environment as far as possible with the same applications I had been using.
But that’s for tomorrow…