As you might have read some time ago I decided to switch to Mac, I`ve been a Windows user for 17 years now and I support them, configure and manage them for work. I wanted to have the experience of OS X on Apple hardware first hand and so I purchased a Mac Book Pro Retina 15″ which was announced in October 22nd Apple event and I received last Friday.
My first impressions are great, its an incredible well built machine. Its design is really beautiful and on the inside it seems to be very powerful. I opted for the Quad Core 2.6 Ghz. version with 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD drive. I am really happy till now although I didn’t have the opportunity to do much with it.
I am starting to learn everything from scratch, I had no direct constant experience with OS X before so I am having a very strange feeling because I cant find how to do basic stuff, or better say what in Windows I already know by hard, I am learning it from scratch now, so everything takes more time, more reading, more research, which is something amazing because I am learning a lot.
Little by little I am getting used to it, I still have my PC with 2 old external screens on the desk that at a later time will become my media center PC. I also acquired a Synology NAS DS1513+ so a lot of movement of files is happening in my storage units these days, it will take some more weeks for me to be able to put everything in order and I will write my thoughts about it in a future post.
I managed to install a BootCamp partition to run Windows 8 by following some guidelines from the official Apple guide here, but I had some issues and I was unable to really complete the installation. It seems that latest Haswell based MacBook Pro`s are having some trouble and this step by step guide posted on Apple forums got me through.
I also purchased Parallels to be able to run Windows applications within OS X and till now it works really flawlessly. I am configuring and knowing the machine, its capabilities and analyzing how am I going to work from now onward.
I still have to take the decision of purchasing a new external big screen to connect my Mac while I am at my desk at home. I thought on getting the Apple Thunderbolt display but it is more than 2 years old already, the rumor is that the refreshed version of it should arrive together with the Mac Pro`s in December 2013 so I might wait a bit. Unless of course somebody wants to recommend a nice screen I could check. 😉
I purchased an Apple Magic Mouse, which I felt very attracted to by its simple design, unfortunately I returned it after a couple of days of usage. I found it very uncomfortable to use, my hand was not naturally posing on top of the mouse like I did all my life with other mice`s. Also when sliding over my mouse pad I could hear like a scratching sound, something that my M310 Logitech mouse doesn’t do. So after reading a bit online I purchased a Targus Bluetooth Comfort Laser Mouse, it should arrive in the next couple of days so I will be able to say more then.
I just wanted to comment how things are going on my side, I wasn’t able to write too much lately because I was very short of time, but I will try to come back more often now that I have a lot of cool things to tell you more about 🙂