Well, I took the plunge this week.  One project I was possibly going to wind up working on involved the Unity game engine, which is available on two desktop platforms; Windows and MacOS X.

Being that I’m an absolute 1000% fan of Microsoft!!! (yeah, sarcasm got lost in the text there)… I’ve never used MacOS X, and someone was selling one second hand at what I thought was a reasonable price, I thought, what the hell.  Give something new a try.

I’ve spent the afternoon downloading the various applications that I’ll probably use.  First point of call was Firefox (I’m not a Safari fan) and Thunderbird (nor a Mail.app fan).  I’ve got a few other applications installed too, including VirtualBox 4 OSE, and I’ve moved my Windows XP virtual machine over from my desktop to the MacBook, and it’s happily running in its new home, installing updates.

The machine in question is one of the 2008 models.  Apple have the full specs here.  It’s a little bit lighter to pick up than the old P4 laptop, but solidly built.  Despite being second hand, the battery appears to have quite a bit of life in it too, and it easily trumps the P4 (and the Yeeloong).  I turned it on in the car on the way home (I wasn’t driving), and watched MacOS X flash up with “Welcome” in some 16 languages, before going through the process of creating the first user account and setting things up.

Some things have taken some getting used to, for instance, setting the hostname is done under “Sharing”, not “Networking” where I thought it would be.  The key bindings are completely new to me, and slowly I’m getting the hang of it.  Exposé and Spaces make switching easy.  The machine is nice and responsive running its stock OS X 10.5.6 installation.

I’m considering whether I buy the upgrade to OS X 10.6, I’ll probably take the opportunity to buy a new HDD, and will perform the new install afresh on the new drive.

I was a bit disappointed to discover that Apple do not make available a basic C compiler toolchain as a stand-alone download.  They offer Xcode in their “app store”, for $5.00, okay, fine, but how do I pay for it?  I don’t have a credit card, Pay Pal or other means.  Then I look and see it’s a 4.5GB download.  Bugger that on a 512kbps link.  I’ll see if I can purchase a disc of it from an Apple store, and may look at Parallelis at the same time (although VirtualBox is doing fine for now).

Multimedia has always been Apple’s forté, and this machine does not disappoint.  I did a quick test with the internal microphone, and found the audio to be very clear, with no AC mains hum or other artifacts.  They only provide sockets for headphones and a line-in, surprisingly.  I thought maybe the line-in was switchable to provide the microphone bias needed for a headset, but no.  That said, a couple of mating USB connectors, two resistors and two capacitors, and voila, I should be able to interface a standard headset to the MacBook’s line-in no problem.  It’ll certainly be nice though when it comes to recording some of my LP records to CD.  It also could play DVDs out of the box, something Microsoft Windows XP (in my experience) could not do.

I’ll be looking around at an alternative to iChat.  It has crashed at least a dozen times in the time the laptop has been on the network, and I only turned the machine on for the first time at after 1PM today.  Given its 100Mbps Ethernet between XMPP server (running OpenFire) and MacBook, I don’t see why it should be so unstable.

I have Fink installed, I plan to look into Gentoo/MacOS X when I get gcc installed (even if I have to cross-compile it from my Linux/AMD64 desktop), and for now things are putting along nicely.  I might look at dual-booting (or tri-booting) when I upgrade the HDD, as 160GB doesn’t give me a lot of breathing room.

For now though, I’ll see what the native OS does for me.