Yeah, I got my own Mac. I'm a dirty Apple Slut now.

But it feels good. It's really quite the experience. I ordered myself a nice little MacBook Pro, 15" Widescreen with 2GB o' ram, and 160GB of disk space. The rest of the specs you can lookup yourself if you're that geeky.

This experience, by far, has been one of the best new computer purchases ever. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of room for Apple to screw me over, but for now the experience is mind blowing.

Apple seems to be a company that cares about a users experience with their products straight from the start. This may sound very silly to some of you, but for myself being a very technical person, the whole flow left me in awe.

I got my Mac, i opened the shipping box (plain ol' brown.) and inside was a marvelously fit, minimally -- but flawlessly packaged box containing everything I needed. The MacBook Pro is a mere 1" thick, the box was 2" thick. That's half an inch of foam on each side with enough room for the AC Adapter and the VGA-DVI adapter. I've had laptops before, much larger ones mind you, but the product to packaging ratio on those has been insanely stupid.

The box also contained the user manual. No bigger than a CD insert in size (slightly ticker, mind you) it had everything I didn't even need. There was nothing extra, nothing that I need to just toss out. Two DVDs (system recovery stuff, standard for any computer) and that was it.

The magic began when I turned it on. The initial setup was flawless, and very streamlined. I didn't have to enter some cryptic 20 character alpha-numeric key to activate the product that I obviously paid for. I didn't have to answer unnecessary questions about my clock, or timezone, or country settings. They were all set and ready to go using data that I entered once. Again, the flow and design is just amazing.

After I was up and running, I really was up and running. It ran a small update -- and didn't ask me to reboot three times. In fact, it didn't ask me to reboot once.

The first few things I did, which is something I think everybody who owns a laptop should do:

1. Enable auto-locking on sleep and screensaver.
2. Enable the hot corners so I can lock it easily.
3. Delete Microsoft Office Test Drive 2004
4. Enable FileVault (data encryption)
5. Install a bunch of good, free software.
6. Install necessities for Work.
7. Enjoy using it.

The good, free software is some of the following, but I'm probably missing something: Smultron (Text editor with syntax highlighting), Fugu (SCP/SFTP Client for secure file copies), Adium (multi-protocol instant messenger client), Xvid codec (so QuickTime/FrontRow can play my videos), Thunderbird 2.0 (Email*), FireFox 2.0 (Web Browser).

The work related stuff is a little more complex, but it's mostly the following: Eclipse (a programmers IDE), Apache2 (web server -- the mac includes apache 1.3 though, which may be useful enough for some people), PHP5 (mac includes php 4.4), MySQL5, Fink (this is a handy tool, that once you figure out how to use, allows you to install many open source programs).

The fun stuff that I finally got to try out: Joost... Joost is an article all itself if I get around to it.

Enjoying the Mac isn't something I have had to try very hard to do. It's just damn pretty, damn fast, and damn useful. The keyboard is a bit finicky to get used to at first, but luckily I had some experience at work before I bought my own.

The Macs bundled apps also help a lot with enjoying it. Mail doesn't suck. iCal doesn't suck. The address book is simple enough, and useful. Photo booth is silly fun. iPhoto, iDVD and iMovie HD will all get their use in time - but the integration within them all and how smoothly they all work is just incredible.

Office-type productivity software is the only absent part. The mac includes a trial of Pages (word processor) and Keynote (presentation) - both of which have to be purchased at some point. The missing spreadsheet (to be answered this year at some point) is really the only downside to the iWork'06 package. Of course, there's always OpenOffice for the mac - but it's development is slightly delayed, and the performance on the Mac at work hasn't been all that great.

The battery life on this thing is amazing. I'm averaging 4 hours of use - with the exception of bones complaining about me disconnecting from IRC too many times when the mac goes to sleep, I think a 4 hour average would be completely acceptable for the long term. It'll probably end up being around 3 hours though. Still, much better than my ol' laptops 2 hours maximum under lucky circumstances.

So, there you have it. I'm an apple slut. I love it.

This of course by no means means I'm giving up Ubuntu. Any standard PC hardware I ever have, or use, will have Ubuntu on it.