- Videoconferencing with iChat - Love.Every.Thing.About.It. I have an iMac at home and my wife and I did videoconferencing while I was away in San Francisco. This was SUPER AWESOME specially since I'm a new dad. The ability and simplicity to see my wife breastfeed the baby while I'm lonely at the hotel was just amazing! Heck, I even did it from the airline lounge while I waited for a connecting flight!! The voice and video quality are out of this world! I hadn't done videoconferencing since I was in college and you can bet that I'm going to do it every time I travel.
- Customer reaction - I again got the looks and questions: "What is an IBMer doing with a Mac?" Me: Because all our sofware works on it. They: "Way cool!"
- Time Machine - Man, simply the easiest and best solution I've ever seen for backup. Nothing is simpler! Simply configure a drive (I chose an external drive), connect it and Time Machine automatically detects it and does incremental backups. No need to worry about selecting which files you really want to backup.
- Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity: Ok, so sometimes a Mac can be just darn TOO EASY! I was trying to set up a printer that was connected to my wife's Windows XP. I spent almost 15 minutes trying to figure it out. Of course, I thought it had to be super complicated like in a Windows machine. Once I gave up, I Google'd it and found the solution. Connecting to the network printer took 15 seconds. And once I knew how to do it, it was so FREAKING OBVIOUS!!!! I hate Microsoft for making me think everything has to be complicated!
- Wireless networking: I have never seen a laptop connect to a hotspot and get an IP so fast than my MacBook Pro!! In the life of my Mac, it has never been more than 6 seconds for the Mac to find the right hotspot and get an IP! Talk about productivity!
My goal for the end of the year is to get rid of my wife's Windows XP desktop. Her birthday is coming up in July, time to start shopping around
. (and hope that this also counts towards her X-mas gift
)
P.S. The Twitter-sphere was going crazy this weekend with many IBMers twittering about their new Macs: Frank Jania, Gia Lyons, and Michael Coleman. Welcome to the club guys; hope to see you in the Mac community soon.