In what amounts to a complete one-eighty move, Apple has decided to endorse the installation of Windows XP on the new Intel Macs. Wow.

It was only a couple weeks ago that a hacker scored $13,000 for being the first to solve the puzzle of booting Windows on the Mac, and now Apple has one-upped him by releasing Boot Camp, a (beta) installer that achieves the holy grail: the ability to run Windows on your mac for those times when you just need it. For me, that’s only to run AutoCAD and Flight Simulator, but that still happens enough that I’m still running my old Athlon desktop system at home for those times.

Boot Camp looks nice, and it even re-partitions your hard drive non-destructively so installation is about as easy as it can be. This just might be worth going out and getting a copy of XP…

Well, it’s been a few days now, and I have good news and bad news about the new MacBook Pro.

First off, it’s fast; much faster than my old Powerbook, but then again my old Powerbook is four years old and that’s not a fair comparison. Regardless, I’m pleased as hell with the speed, and recently ran a Radiance benchmark test on it and the MacBook Pro proved its mettle. But some other niggly details are pissing me off and ringing in my ears (literally) and I feel the need to vent.

Where the hell did tabbed browsing go? I’m using Safari once again because it’s a Universal Binary, and I’m trying to simplify my life so I thought running the browser that comes with the operating system would be one way to do that (opposed to installing Firefox (or Deer Park, the Universal Binary beta of Firefox)). But there seems to be no way to do tabbed browsing anymore in Safari. What the fuck is up with that?

Battery life on this thing sorta blows. My old slow-ass 550 MHz G4 Powerbook could go five hours with minimal disk activity. This thing expects an olympic gold for three hours. It’s got a Bode Miller battery. What the fuck is up with that?

The Apple email program sucks at IMAP. It lacks the ability to save sent mail to an IMAP folder, and the workaround (prepending “INBOX” to your path) only makes your IMAP folders show up outside of the main mailbox tree. This is, like, totally gay. The best option is currently to save copies of sent mail to a local folder, which of course flies in the face of the whole premise of IMAP in the first goddamned place. What the fuck is up with that?

All the above complaintes are nitpicks. My main problem with this thing right now is that it emits a high pitched whine, basically all the time. It’s an electronic hum, a binary squeal. And it is pretty much constant. I’m thinking of calling Apple on this one, because it’s starting to give me a headache, but I fear that I’ll get some zit-faced surfer on the line telling me that this is “normal”. My old laptop did this very occasionaly, but this thing emits satan’s squeal pretty much all the time it’s on, and it’s starting to make me a little nutso. What the fuck it up with that?

Whenever I spend a couple grand on something, I seem to obsess about my percieved derived value from said purchase. This one is a bit of a mixed bag at the moment. What the fuck is up with that? Apple? Apple?

It’s here! My new MacBook Pro! OS X running on a dual-core Intel. Backlit keyboard. 15.4” screen. Friggin’ great.

So far, so good, but a few bumps in the road too. For some reason, I can’t connect to my wireless router, so I’m leeching off of a less-than-clued-in neighbor’s open router, but the first thing I really need is the latest version of xcode so I can compile Radiance, and the damned installer is over 800 megabytes, so as that crawls into my hard drive I’m just playing with the new gadgets like Spotlight and Dashboard, and setting up some of the basic apps. The email program that ships with OS X is vastly improved with this version, and the built-in video camera is cool. Holding my hands over the speakers—where the photosensor is apparently hidden—to force the keyboard backlighting to activate is pure theater, and this thing is FAST. My four year old Powerbook is really looking old and grey at this point, and I’m having fun exploring my first new personal computer in four years.

More to follow, certainly.