I’m posting this from a Starbucks in Palo Alto from my loverly new 12″ PowerBook.
oh, yes. This is going to be fun.
(Thanks to the voice of wisdom and prudence (as played by Jonas Luster), I spent about half what I expected to. Also thanks to Jonas for giving me a charged battery and his tmobile login until I can organize my own).
MetaGrrrl 
Not one to let the grass grow between wanting and having are you Dinah. :} Hope you get heaps of pleasure out of your new pBook.
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Well, I’ve been wanting one for years, but I realized that this time when I was getting excited about the idea again, I didn’t have to wait.
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Please do share your every newbie experience (although you can hardly be called newbie). I just ordered one too, and am pretty excited to switch from PC hell.
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Well, it’s going well so far. Here’s what I’ve done in roughly the order I did it:
– swapped uncharged battery for a charged one borrowed from Jonas (who also has a 12″ PowerBook)
– put the keyboard protector I bought (“iSkin”) on
– used Safari to connect at Starbucks down the street from the Apple Store and unpacked the box (while taking advantage of a nearby plug to charge up)
– downloaded Firefox
– reviewed all System Preferences and tweaked a bit (increased number of documents in Recent Documents list to 20, background color (graphite), screen saver (forest), dock size (smaller & auto hide), show file extensions, corrected date & time setting)
– rearranged the dock a little (pulled some stuff off, put some on – see below)
– started reading the Getting Started booklet
– put all the cables, documentation, etc. in my satchel
– put the PowerBook back in the thin protective foam bag it came in & shoved it in my satchel and went & caught the 11pm train to San Francisco.
– left the box on top of a trash can on University Ave
– on the train I continued looking at programs, reading the first page of their help to get a sense of what unfamiliar ones do, continued reading the Getting Started booklet, did more dock tweaking (“OmniGraffle with the Jesse James Garrett IA components – Yay!”)
– at home I used the FireWire cable from my iPod (since one oddly didn’t come with the PowerBook) to connect to my iMac (power down pbook, plug in FireWire to both, power up pbook & hold down T key until FireWire logo appears, pbook is now appearing on iMac as drive I can drag files to)
– moved over to PowerBook: 24.66GB iTunes library (most of my CD collection, no pirated albums), my pictures, a longer article I downloaded and have never gotten around to reading.
– read about iSync while files moved
– once it finished (say 45 minutes), went to sleep
– This morning, powered up PowerBook & iMac
– moved ethernet cable from latter to former, connection automatically detected (iMac did not freak out when disconected – this sure ain’t like the PCs I ever used)
– downloaded Palm Desktop, sync’d Treo 600
– got computer-memorized password which Dinah had forgotten for iChat (AIM) and got that going on PowerBook
– downloaded iSync Palm Conduit, sync’d Treo again to pull all contacts into Address Book and events into iCal
– continued to wonder at iCal default logo being my birthday
– played around with iCal for a bit (so much nicer than Palm Desktop on Mac!)
So now things are ticking along pretty well.
My dock looks like this:
Finder – Firefox – iChat – iTunes – Mail (haven’t used yet, considering having both Mail & Eudora on here, the former for personal, the latter for work mail) – Address Book (might pull that out of the dock) – iCal – Budget – OmniGraffle – Stickies (probably won’t use that for long, just handy for keeping track of migration things to do) – Calculator – Terminal – System Preferences | Home – Applications – Trash
In my iMac dock and not on the PowerBook:
Yahoo Instant Messenger (I’ll need that for work), Internet Explorer (I *guess* I’ll have to put it on for testing purposes), Palm Desktop (trumped by iCal), TextEdit and AppleWorks (I’ll add these if I turn out to use them a lot, but I’m tending to use email as composition space these days), VirtualPC (I’ll probably consider installing this later if the burning desire to play games comes over me), and a link to my incoming downloads folder (I’ll see if I still really need this).
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Mini-apps you won’t want to be without:
Ittec – http://www.balance-software.com/ittec/
QuickSilver – http://blacktree.com/apps/quicksilver/
Synergy – http://synergy.wincent.com/
Tofu – http://homepage.mac.com/asagoo/tofu/
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I’ve added QuickSilver and WindowShade X (http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/wsx) already on Jonas’ recommendation. Thanks for the other links to check out, Mike.
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my pBook just arrived! Es ist eine Sache der Schönheit. 🙂
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And while not a joy forever, a most definite joy now, to be sure.
Enjoy. I shall do the same.
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I’ll mother at this point.. BUY the AppleCare, and consider buying insurance on it. I had a friend who dropped a huge amount on a 17″ pBook, spilt white wine in it and how its a nice looking paperweight.
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I think it’s covered from destruction by my renter’s insurance, but you’re right; I should make sure.
And yes, for repair purposes, some sort of protection plan would be wise.
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I’ve been told the same by others, but I don’t quite get it yet. I thought AppleCare was all about warranty extension. If I accidentally drop-kick the laptop into the Pacific, or spill wine on it like your friend, how is that a “warrantied” issue? Warranties cover wear and tear, and normal-use failures. I don’t see how AppleCare could have reduced the cost of fixing a wine-soaked CPU; (unless somewhere in the fine print Steve Jobs accounted for wine spillage).
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