I picked up my brand new aluminium MacBook yesterday afternoon. The Apple Store on Michigan Avenue had two of them on display. Because they had just arrived and had not yet been locked to the tables as everything else is at the Apple Store two employees had to stand at the table at all times to ensure nobody walked off with one.

Then I had to go to work for 8 hours. I wasn’t able to actually turn it on until around one o’clock in the morning. I then spent about three hours transferring files, setting it up, and generally getting a feel for my new notebook.

Things went remarkably well, all things considered.

There’s been considerable outcry from the peanut gallery over the lack of a FireWire port on the recently released MacBooks. This means no Target Disk Mode. This means that Setup Assistant: the nifty little application that runs when you boot up a Mac for the first time, and Migration Assistant: the same application run at a later time, won’t be so easy to use. It probably means a number of other things, but the only FireWire devices I’ve used thus far have been old iPods and external hard drives and I’m not savvy or demanding enough to tell the difference.

As it turns out though, the lack of a FireWire port didn’t affect me too much. Setup Assistant gives you the option of transferring data from another Mac on the same network or direct ethernet connection, another volume on the same Mac, or a Time Machine backup.

I tried the first option via direct ethernet with the hopes of daisy chaining an external FireWire hard drive to the wife’s iMac. The external drive is split into multiple partitions, one of which contains a backup of each of our computers. This is probably not the safest idea, but I’m going to correct that shortly. This did not go smoothly. While the two computers did see each other, I never seemed to get past the handshake step. Furthermore, Migration Assistant on the iMac shut every application down and seemed to unmount the external drive.

So, I tried the second option of transferring data from another volume on the same Mac with the same external drive connected via USB. This would have worked swimmingly, were it not for one very major problem. I mentioned earlier that my previous notebook — a 5-year-old PowerBook G4 — had finally fallen victim to the ravages of age and, amongst her other problems, had developed a rather nasty hard disk failure. Well, this slow decline left me completely unable to perform a full system backup. I did, however, manage to backup my user folder.

The other volume transfer immediately saw the partition that contained the wife’s backup. Had I wanted to, I could have neatly transferred her settings and information to my new MacBook like a charm. What it did not recognize as a valid source was the partition that contained my user folder and nothing else. I hadn’t really expected it to, but I kinda sorta hoped it might. Had I another, larger, external drive I probably could have just added my user folder to backup of my wife’s computer and gotten pretty close the effect I had hoped.

If the lack of FireWire port on the new MacBook is giving you pause simply because you didn’t think Setup/Migration Assistant would run without Target Disk Mode you needn’t be too worried. With a program like SuperDuper! and an external USB hard drive you can get the same results by making a bootable backup of your system. Now, this won’t help you if you need to use Target Disk Mode for some other reason, but it does make the initial setup nearly as easy.

In any event, I just proceeded through the steps as if it were my first Mac and then moved everything I could on over. I’m amazed at how well it worked, honestly. I copied my copious music collection (I think fully half of my old PowerBook’s hard disk was devoted to iTunes) and the associated library files and album art via USB, then moved on to the iPhoto library, the Documents folder, and everything else I wanted to keep. Here, a poorer designed OS might have choked. Even manually copying iTunes and iPhoto libraries from another computer with an older OS and different chipset caused no more than a 30 second hiccup as the library files were updated. Three hours to copy something like 5 years worth of digital life doesn’t seem that bad at all.

*By which I mean “me.”

It’s official, new MacBooks will be announced next week. I’ve been waiting for these quite a while. My 5-year-old PowerBook G4 has been steadily dying over the past few months. This Sunday — or was it Saturday? — I knew she was finally done.

It must have been Saturday because I had followed a link to a temporary YouTube video from SNL mocking the recent vice presidential debate. Flash has almost always been a difficult thing for my PowerBook to handle, more so in recent versions. YouTube usually does pretty well, many other Flash video sites do not. This time the playback stuttered and limped along. I could sense a general wheezing slowness to every part of the OS. Tinúviel had a failed hard drive.

Backups with SuperDuper! failed repeatedly. No matter what I did I continued to have I/O errors at some level. I gave up on a full backup and concentrated on the Users folder. After deleting several files I had success, and I shut down both the PowerBook and external hard drive with a sigh of relief.

It was time, without a doubt, to say goodbye.

Rumors had been swelling for what seemed like months about new MacBooks. I had heard that October 14th was the date we’d see a refresh. I had a rough couple of days checking rumor sites for any news. Surely, if these new notebooks were to be as drastic a revision as we expected Apple would want to do a big event. But I despaired as each day passed without an invitation. I couldn’t risk buying a new MacBook if new ones were so close, but what if they weren’t? I’m just not capable of living without my own computer.

So, now they’re definitely coming. I’m ordering one as soon as the Apple Store comes back online.

This PowerBook is my first Mac. With my most recent bout of schooling drawing to a close it was time I thought about getting a real job. I would need to create a résumé. I would need to email said résumé to prospective employers. My father thought I might need a notebook.

At the time — 2003 — my computer was a somewhat elderly PC cobbled together from parts I had been hanging onto in some cases for years. It had something in the neighborhood of 15 to 20GB of hard drive space on two different hard drives purchased years apart. I had built the whole damned thing from scratch. Finding a heat sink to fit the oddball motherboard I had purchased took at least 4 tries.

I don’t know what I had decided on a Mac. Not long ago I had railed loudly against the platform to my housemates. I was doing a bit of web design at the time, struggling with CSS. Safari hadn’t yet made any inroads. Firefox was still in its infancy. Neither one existed at all at the time of my ranting (2002). We had Internet Explorer and Netscape. Maybe Opera, but I never touched it. As most of the web designers used Macs, most of the ones who talked the loudest online, I heard a lot about IE5. That it was so much better than anything on PC, and that any problems I was having couldn’t possibly be blamed on it. Maybe I’m exaggerating but one fact is abundantly clear: Coding CSS was a lot harder then than it is now.

So when my father announced over Thanksgiving break that he was going to buy a notebook for me we looked at some Dells and some HPs, but that wasn’t what I really wanted. I must have indicated as much because he asked what I really wanted and I pulled up the iBook page. I distinctly remember him asking if that was what I really wanted because I remember saying “Well, no, what I really want is…” and then pulling up the PowerBook. There was a much bigger difference between the PowerBook G4 and iBook G4 than there is between the MacBook Pro and MacBook, at least there seems to be where I’m sitting.

So, we ordered the PowerBook. It arrived a few days later and I was struck, immediately, at just how goddamned right it was. I’d been using a computer since our first 386 — or was it a 486? — many years ago. I thought I knew how these things worked.

I was wrong. They could be so much better.

Everything was where it was supposed to be. I was used to hunting for things. For just knowing things. I was used to autoexec.bat and config.sys. I was used to the registry. These were the things you grimly accepted on your way to being able to use a computer. But it didn’t have to be.

I can’t remember any sort of learning curve. If anything, there was an un-learning curve. Remarking on the process of switching I’ve often said that it would probably be easier to pick the Mac OS if you had never touched a computer before in your life. It just worked the way you’d expect it to.

In my years of using a computer these past 5 have been the best. I wish I’d gotten here sooner, but that’s ignoring a pretty substantial dark period of Mac history I took no part in. The important thing is I got here.

And, on Tuesday, I get to make another important step: I get to order my second Mac.