A part of my Macaulay Scholarship is a MacBook for free. And I got it today. I love it. It's nce. I love the two finger scrolling. It's awesome. I love this thing.
A part of my Macaulay Scholarship is a MacBook for free. And I got it today. I love it. It's nce. I love the two finger scrolling. It's awesome. I love this thing.
I have a MBP, and love it. The experience between Mac OS and Windows is completely different. In Mac OS, I don't have to fight the OS to do what I want. Under Windows (especially Vista) it seems like work to do anything.
Before installing Windows on it, spend a week or two in just Mac OS. You will learn the cool little tricks, and never want to go back to Windows.
Honestly, I got it yesterday and I had Macaulay Orientation the whole day again (same program i got mac from). We went to see South Pacific on Broadway. Even though I'm not a big fan of fancy thing (the ticket cost the program $110), I liked it.
So I know Gov uses Mac, so if there are some cool things I should know about, please do tell me.
I don't think I will be going to use bootcamp for a while because I don't need to. Unless school requires a program which needs to Windows, I won't be using Boot Camp.
If you plan to play games that don't run on mac (these days, there are very few of them anyway), use bootcamp. However, if you just need to launch some odd program that doesn't run on mac, use Parallels. Parallels lets you run windows xp or vista in a window (no pun intended) simultaneously, so it requires no reboot and you get the full functionality of both windows and os x at the same time. It's great for me for whenever I need to test a new website markup in IE6/IE7.
I do agree with Alfy about the whole "don't use bootcamp until you have to" thing. I was originally planning to use windows fairly extensively on my mac, but after a few months on a mac, I still haven't had any reason to use it other than the IE6/IE7 thing, and I only use that every 3-4 weeks.
I highly recommend that you get the Quicksilver application. It allows you to launch programs by typing a portion of their name rather than using your mouse. That seems kind of trivial, but it really is a time and space saver. My dock and desktop are completely empty, I never have to open my applications folder to launch any application, and I can launch my standard post-boot applications (zend studio, firefox, adium, terminal, mamp) in about 2-3 seconds.
Other than that, my advice to you is to use your mouse as little as possible. OS x makes manipulating windows and running applications extremely easy with your keyboard, and it is amazing how efficient it is compared to the standard mouse interactions.
Edit: Oh, and abuse expose as much as you possibly can. It does require the use of your mouse, so that is kind of a contradiction, but if you have tons of windows open (I think the max I've had open so far was between 20 and 30), it makes it extremely easy to multitask between them.
Going along those lines, there's a program that's the windows/linux counterpart to quicksilver. It's called Launchy, and I use it all the time. You can check it out here: http://www.launchy.net/
I can't even download and unistall AIM, it says operation not supported when it tries to unzip it (i don't know the mac term)
BTW, I don't know which Mac you have, but I have an in built camera and it comes with this software called "PhotoBooth". Shit has heat detection. YAY. It's cool stuff.