The first item on my list is the suspend mode. I love closing the lid, leaving to walk the dog, and returning to find that opening the lid restores my desktop. Windows users will understand my surprise. Closing the lid on a Windows laptop gives you a fifty-fifty chance that it will come back. It might, or it might not. On the Mac, it just works. 

2. Battery life.

Battery life on the MacBook Pro is good. I can manage 5 hours battery life doing the simple things: web browsing, blogging, etc. Its not over-the-top fabulous, but I don’t think there’s a laptop out there that is. 

3. Look & Feel.

To appreciate this one you need see the laptop in person, and hold it with your own hands. It has a nice sleek silver finish, great lines, and smooth edges. Its almost as if I were describing a performance sports car. Its that good. Its also relatively light for a full-sized laptop. The screen is crisp and clear; the keyboard is soft and responsive. A very well designed machine.

4. It just works.

“It just works.” A popular phrase with the mac community and number four on my list. A lot of features on a mac just work. The previously mentioned suspend mode, system updating, and software installation. Adding peripherals, connecting bluetooth devices, and joining wireless networks are also painless tasks. The list goes on and on. I’ve had exactly one problem that required a little research on my part and it turned out to be a bug in the latest release of the GIMP printer drivers. It was fixed the next day and now my printer… just works.

5. Software installation.

Software installation was one of the hardest things for me to figure out coming from a Windows world. You just double-click, right? It took a few double-clicks to figure out that the install file was mounting and not installing. Once I realized that a simple drag-and-drop installs the app I was amazed. Simple and easy. Even the apps that don’t support drag-and-drop have a nice installer that requires more clicks but works well.

6. Community.

The mac community is great. It rivals the Linux community for helpfulness and general friendliness. There are tons of Mac web sites out there with tips and tricks. Forums are full of helpful users. My experience on the Windows side was just “ok.” I didn’t find any extremely useful forums and had to wade through several posts and pages to find a hint of a solution to my problem. The Mac community is just a friendly (and helpful) bunch of people.

7. Available Software.

One of the best things that Apple did was to convert to a BSD-based system. This opened up the Mac to a wide variety of open source software. With marginal effort linux community can build in support for OS X. Even when the software is not free its inexpensive and usually feature-rich. One of my concerns in switching away from Windows was finding equivalent software. I was happy to discover plenty of mac-based software choices to replace their windows counter part.The MacBook Pro is a nice machine. I’m very happy with my purchase and would do it again given the same opportunity. Apple knows how to put together a good, reliable system.