Tech-ish randoms, mostly Apple

[abortrephrase]

Having had the iPad for a couple of weeks, I'm finding it makes for a reasonable ereader. It's a bit heavy, so to use it comfortably I need to sit back, put a cushion on my lap, and then place the iPad on the cushion in the "landscape" position. But it allows me to read under almost any lighting circumstance, which is a big improvement over the Kindle.

Bought a Macbook Pro this weekend. Initial impression -- having not touched an Apple laptop since the Powerbook G4 -- is pretty good, very nicely designed/built bit of kit, though they really should've smoothed the front edge a little for comfort's sake.

I hadn't expected to find the trackpad particularly usable. It's a last-resort option on my old Dell. But the larger area plus the multitouch makes it genuinely useful. And using a laptop with the full OS X accessibility thing is a delight compared to doing the rough equivalent on Windows.

So I'm pretty happy with it so far. Haven't bothered trying to game -- I'm pretty sure I'll be wanting an external display/keyboard/mouse for that -- but for the general productivitiy/webby stuff it works remarkably well for me.

My one small gripe is that I can't move my data over from the Dell via wireless where I'm staying, as it's just too slow and flaky. Shall see about snarfing a short bit of cat5 from the office on Tuesday.

Comments

[thorfinn]

I bought the Magic Trackpad for my work on the basis that I was using the Macbook Pro trackpad multitouch extensively, and the iPhone multitouch extensively. It's very nice. MultiTouch + big trackpad with click-capability is great, usability-wise. Small trackpad single touch no click (which is what you get on most PC laptop trackpads and the older powerbook trackpads) is just annoying.

For gaming I still use my Logitech Trackman Marble - especially for WoW as a Holy Priest, I really need all three buttons plus scrollup/down plus key combos if I expect to have enough buttons to bind macros and spells to. :-)