My new Mac arrived on Friday, a full business day ahead of when UPS said it would come. I was so happy to have the weekend to break it in, but it barely took an hour before I was up and running with it.
Moving to a new computer is just so easy in the Mac world. I made one final Time Machine backup on my old unit, ejected the external backup drive, plugged the drive into the new computer, booted up the computer, told the computer to restore my data from the backup, and then walked away for about 30 minutes.
When I came back, just about all my data and settings were on the new machine. For some reason, my Filemaker Pro database is never up to date in the backups, so I retrieved that from the old unit. Then, I checked to make sure all my apps were working by opening them up one by one. I had just jumped two operating systems (from Mountain Lion straight to Yosemite without going through Mavericks), so I was surprised that the only thing that wasn’t working was iPhoto. Even iWorks ’08 was working fine.
I was also surprised that I only had about 2GB of space left on my hard drive after the move when I was only using about 100GB on the old machine. This hard drive is only 125GB, down from 250GB. So I moved my iTunes folder to an external drive to clear up a little space. I tend to only keep my backup drive accessible when I’m traveling, but I’ll now have to keep the media drive handy, too. A bit of a pain, but I wasn’t going to spend something like $300 on the 250GB hard drive when I have about 2TB of space in my external drives. Solid state drives are expensive!
The only thing I couldn’t get working right with the new computer was my external display. Its resolution isn’t compatible with Yosemite’s, which is programmed for the super high definition ‘retina’ display, so the colours were off and everything was blurry. I also can’t use the Mac in clamshell mode (lid closed) while connected to the external display unless I’m plugged into power. That wasn’t an issue with the old unit since its battery was dead, but I don’t want to kill this battery, so being plugged in all the time isn’t an option. I’ve decided to do without the external display. The resolution on the 13″ Macbook Air is such that I can see everything just fine. I’m going to move the external display to the living room and get the cable I need to hook my iPad to it so I can watch movies more comfortably out there.
Physically, my new MacBook Air isn’t much different from my old one. Only the power port has changed as I now have the wider Magsafe connector. That means that my collection of chargers, including the DC one, is now obsolete and will be part of the sale of my old unit.
Yosemite hasn’t been too bad so far. It is hideously garish, but I’ve been tweaking settings to make it a little less offensive. My biggest peeve with it so far is that the green button that used to maximize your window now takes you into full screen mode. I don’t like full screen mode and I’m annoyed that I have to remember to hold the option key before pressing the green button to get the maximize effect.
I am so far unimpressed with the new Photos app, but after spending some time talking with an Apple tech, I made the decision not to hack my Yosemite installation to make iPhoto work for me. Part of making this huge purchase was to get up to date and if that means learning the new Photos app, I will.
There are other things about Yosemite that I look forward to exploring this winter when I am on decent internet as there is now a greater compatibility with iOS. Apple is trying to get users to move everything to the cloud, but even if I had decent internet in Canada, this makes me nervous. I prefer to keep my data local, but I’m so far liking keeping the calendar and reminders in the cloud.
I am appreciating the extra RAM as this machine is much zippier and I’m also liking that I haven’t had a single runaway kernel since Friday. I really thought the old machine was going to implode before the new one got here and it just seemed to get worse and worse the closer I got to delivery day! I know that I’m going to be happy to have a working battery tomorrow when I’m forced to go up the hill to send emails and won’t have to bring the charger with me, just the computer and phone.
I still have some updates to do to a few apps and to iOS, but even though I’m unthrottled, my internet connection is terrible and I can’t get them done. This is also what’s keeping me from wiping the old machine so I can list it for sale since internet recovery doesn’t work well on this connection.
I just can’t get over the fact that I live in a first world country and I have all this amazing tech and I can’t do something so basic as download security upgrades. My government is too busy fighting imaginary boogey men and trying to rig elections to care about things like connectivity… My booster should be in Plentywood tomorrow so I’ll have it by Friday and hopefully it will make the ‘night or day’ different I was promised. If it doesn’t, then I’ll have to start thinking pretty hard about where I’ll be spending next summer. 🙁