OK campers, I know that a lot of you have been desperate for the next installment, but unfortunately finals at university conspired to delay it. I’m now done with finals, so here we go. So far this series, I’ve laid out some reasons you might want to get a Mac, and I’ve talked about how you might go about getting one from Mr Jobs. Now its time to talk about your first day as a Switcher.
That moment that your delivery guy shows up with a big box for you to sign for is special. Savour it. Take photos, perhaps even take a photo of the delivery guy holding the box (provided he looks like he won’t kick your ass for even suggesting it). Its an experience you want to savour because its probably going to mark a whole new chapter in your IT life. For the uninitiated, this kind of outpouring of emotion is commonly referred to as “Unboxing”, where you celebrate the receipt of the box, and the removal of the item from the box. This is not to be confused with Amazon’s Unbox service which is totally different. My MacBook unboxing experience is documented over on my Flickr page, and was a very exciting time for me. It was also over very quickly.
The thing about the Mac that is refreshing when you get the box is that its simple. Heres a box, open the box, there is your machine, there is a power cable, here is a neat little box with DVDs and quickstart guides in it. Contrast this with what you get when you buy say a Dell or HP machine (the two suppliers I have first had experience of – I would assume that they are all as bad). There you get 15 different pieces of paper, you get CDs for AOL, Pipex, Tiscali and anyone else you can think of. The cables are bound together with those nasty wire twisty things (the poor man’s cable tie), whereas Apple send you neat little polythene bags of cables, one per cable. Its a much neater experience, and it is kind of how it should be – I just paid a lot of money for this device, I don’t want to be bombarded with crap as a result.
Obviously the first thing you do is plug in your machine, and turn it on. I had read elsewhere that there is a widget you ought to run first from one of the DVDs that is a dead-pixel checker (for the life of me I can’t remember its name). This is probably a good thing to do – there is nothing worse than a dead or stuck pixel on your screen – I have one on one of my other TFTs, and one on my DS, and both bug me. But I’m impatient, so I dived right into getting into OS X, and a month later, I still haven’t bothered running the check – although at this point, I know there aren’t any since I’ve used it for so much fullscreen video, I would have noticed. So with that either done, or ignored, you are presented with the OS X setup screen. If you’ve installed Windows previously, this is fairly familiar – it wants to know stuff like what country you are in, what keyboard layout you want to use and it tries to auto-detect your network settings. Its fairly standard stuff, but the interface is the thing that should capture your attention at this point. Its really really clean. Its presented as a window style form at the top of the screen, square in shape. When you move to the next screen of the form though, you realise that it isn’t a square, its a cube – it rotates the cube to show the next set of options. It seems like a minor thing, but it blew me away – this is what a user interface should be like, its not just important to show the options and then switch them for the new ones, but how you switch them. Under Windows (under 99% of applications going really) the transition between screens like this is instantaneous, giving the illusion of actual interaction, whether that be turning a cube round to show a new face, or turning a “page”, or even sliding form out of the way to reveal the form below – this is an important thing that I didn’t even realise was missing from the user experience until I sat down with OS X – that being said though, this setup process is the only place I experienced it, although I’m sure it is being used elsewhere too. One other thing to note about the setup process that is pretty important is to make sure you are looking decent, hair brushed and whatnot, since if your Mac comes with an iSight camera, it is going to want to take your picture to associate with the user account that you will be creating (I had to leave the machine at this point to make myself a little bit more presentable).
This is a pretty swift process all in and it won’t be long before you are up and running on your new shiny OS X machine. Next time around I’ll be trying to remember my first steps on OS X to share with you, and picking up some important details that maybe you don’t know about.