As of this past Monday I officially started my new job as designer / developer for Digital Dialogue, a small web design firm here in Wausau. Of course this means new hardware, and I mean new: I’m happy to be working on a brand new 20″ iMac Core Duo. I was a little worried about Photoshop’s performance when compared to my dual-core G5 at Eastbay and compared to my 1.0 Ghz G4 here at home, and it falls somewhere between the two. There is some lag occasionally when switching around to different programs and I think this can be attributed partially to Photoshop’s non-nativity and to a scant 512 megs of RAM (compared to 1 Gb and 1.25 Gb, respectively). Other than that, it’s excellent; I get the same eye-pleasing 20″ widescreen that I’m used to at home, and Tiger, of course.
Another happy note is that this machine is a little more open for me to configure as I need to, meaning I can install necessary software without involving an entire department (things like Adium for inter-office communications or FontExplorer for quick and easy (and free!) font management. Eventually it might be interesting to play with Boot Camp though that is probably best left until we see Leopard.
Other than that and aside from form factor, the new hardware is really no different than the old in any measurable way. I continue to use Apple’s Mighty Mouse as I’ve grown quite used to it by now (where is the Bluetooth version, though?) and I guess I have an iSight though it’s virtually useless. One thing of note, and this is something I’d read and forgotten about, is how amazingly fast the boot process is. Whereas with my laptop or even the old G5 OS X took at least a minute to collect its thoughts before getting going, the Intel build—I swear—takes literally 25 seconds, if that. It’s so ridiculously fast that I can press the button, turn around to hang up my jacket, and have it ready for me when I turn back to it. So, so cool.
So seriously - when are we getting the 13″ MacBook Pro?
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