Macintosh Archives - Sky's Blog

I am finding myself increasingly tempted to swipe my fingers across the screen of my new Macbook Pro!^[1]

I already use a touch screen iPhone all day long, so I’m used to swiping and tapping a lot.

And the touchpad “gestures” on the Macbook Pro^[2] allow me to work essentially the same way I work on the iPhone (tap instead of click; and two-finger tap instead of “right click”; and two-finger drag to scroll things in a window; and so forth). In fact, I have almost entirely stopped using the mouse (with scrollwheel) that I used to use on my previous computer in favor of gestures on the touchpad of the Macbook.

I couldn’t believe how intuitive they were. Each gesture totally makes sense in terms of what it does, finger positions, and direction of swipe. Kudos to Apple on this. It almost makes it worth the entire price of the upgrade just to get this one feature.

Punchline: But when I run my greasy fingers across the glossy Macbook screen it sure smudges things up. LOL Can’t wait for a full-size “tablet Macintosh” to come along!

[1] I haven’t blogged about this new computer (which is only 2 weeks old) but my five-year-old Mac Powerbook just got too slow to be usable, given the load of software that I run on it, so having a computer that is roughly 5x faster is a real joy. I was beefing up the old Powerbook over and over again (doubled the RAM, tripled the disk size, got a new keyboard, and so forth) but it still couldn’t run fast enough most of the time and the CPU was clocking 100% useage at all times when I had my hands on it. So it eventually had to be replaced.

[2] And the other thing I like about the new Macbook Pro is the unibody aluminum construction. My old Powerbook flexes considerably when I carry it in one hand, and this new single-piece-of-aluminum construction does not flex at all, making it very much more solid! This is different from any other laptop computer I’ve ever owned.

Apple Computer had already announced that there are problems with power bricks for the old PowerBook and iBook computers (now officially discontinued) – the small cord coming out of the brick (carrying low voltage) is under a lot of stress and strain, and can short out right where it comes out of the brick’s case. So I was kinda ready for this intellectually. My brick is carried in my backpack almost every day, with the cord wound around the brick, and I can attest that the stress at the point where the cord comes out of the body of the brick hasta be a factor in weakening the cord, even though I’m always careful. Over the course of four years, being coiled and uncoiled every day, that’s thousands of flexions we’re talking about.

So on Saturday, I was sitting on the floor using my computer, with an external LCD monitor attached to it (also sitting on the carpet), and noticed a plume of smoke rising from the top of the monitor. I thought a little bug had probably crawled into the monitor and been tazered to death by a high-voltage supply. But I noted the acrid electrical/plastic smell of the smoke…which didn’t really smell like delicious fried bug.

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Can’t keep my hands off that laptop’s screen!

The smoking gun (er, actually, the smoking power brick)