So on Tuesday my new MacPro arrived, completing my move to the Mac platform. I've been using a MacBookPro for almost a year now so OSX wasn't new to me, but this marks my compete move to the Mac platform. And I love it. Absolutely love it. Let me point out a few complaints first.

I was surprised by how few USB ports are on the system (3). My Dell has something like 7 I think. Luckily my Dell monitor has 4 by itself, so I'm ok.

Sound is a bit weird. When I booted up - sound wanted to output from the box itself - not my speakers. I was able to fix that easily enough - but so far I've not been able to get Firefox to make any sound (which isn't such a bad thing). Also - when I plug in the headphones I have to tell OSX to output into the headphone jack. That should be automatic.

The next problem is the keyboard. I've got a MS Natural Keyboard that I absolutely love. MS provides a OSX driver for it, but I'm having issues getting used to Cut and Paste using the Alt key instead of the Ctrl key (maybe I haven't set things up right). Also - "End" doesn't go to the end of the line. Instead it goes to the end of the document.

Next - my external USB drive (full of legally purchased MP3s) only mounts as Read Only. This is because I used NTFS. I've found MacFuse but haven't installed it yet.

Lastly - there is no button to open and close the drive bay. F12 works fine to open the CD, but hitting F12 again will not close the drive. It does make the icon show up - but it refuses to close. I've been pushing it in gently - but as we all know - the cd rom is the flimsiest part of the hardware.

So far all of the above are minor and I'm not terribly concerned about it. This machine screams. I only got the 4 core option with 2 gigs of RAM, but it runs like hell on wheels. In fact, I installed a certain piece of software (sorry, can't say what it was) in about 40 seconds where it took 4-5 minutes on my PC. Oh, and speaking of PCs - it runs Windows far faster than my PC did. And maybe I'm biased - but I just like the OSX interface.