Actually, it landed late yesterday afternoon, and I've been working to get it set up to my liking. I decided that the best thing to do was to rebuild the content from scratch, so I'm not just doing a big copy from my backups. Needless to say, this is the long road back.

I was fairly concerned because I have read a lot about noise related problems with the MacBooks, and I am noise picky, so I feared the worst. I don't have the whine that is associated with a bad display inverter, but I do have the whine that is related to CPU usage / power management. It only happens when the machine runs on batteries, and it's not as annoying as I feared. I'm not sure whether its worth it for the machine to go back to Apple to remedy the problem.

Other than the whine, my impressions are favorable. I haven't had any spurious reboots or other hardware related problems. The performance is pretty good, especially since this is a 1.83 GHz, 5400 RPM configuration. I did stick some more RAM in it, and it's been stable so far -- the RAM came from Other World Computing, which has done right by me in the past. I ordered their house brand, but they sent me TechWorks DIMM's instead. Either way, I had problems with OWC DIMM's in the old machine, and they cross shipped replacements which took care of the problems. Just Apple machines being picky about their RAM - par for the course.

I've been installing apps slowly, and I've tried to keep to Universal Binaries where possible in order to avoid the RAM hit from Rosetta. So far I've got Adium, Chicken of the VNC, DeerPark (an unofficial Intel build of Firefox), iPulse, iTerm, the Lightroom beta, the NetNewsWire beta, the OmniOutliner Pro beta, Quicksilver, Snak, SubEthaEdit, and SuperDuper!.

Normally I build my own Emacs, but this time I am trying the packaged Carbon Emacs first. It's hackerly to say that you built your own Emacs, but mostly it's a pain in the neck, and the folks working on Carbon Emacs have included a bunch of nice stuff.

Performance is pretty good. I have been running lots of background copies and diffs, synchronizing IMAP mailboxes, and other background tasks at the same time I was trying to use other apps in the foreground, and I've been pleased. NetNewsWire downloads have speed up dramatically -- I know that Brent has been working hard on performance in the beta, so there's a nice reinforcing effect, I am sure. I can't use my PCMCIA compact flash reader anymore, so I'm back to using the USB cable to get RAW images out of my camera, and I was pleasantly surprised by the speed. It was a lot
faster than before.

I haven't had much chance to play with the new hardware bells and whistles. I used PhotoBooth to take a self portrait for my account picture, and Julie, the kids and I took one just for laughs. I think PhotoBooth will be worth some fun. The Apple Remote starts up Front Row, which is cool, except that when it exited it left rcd.app hung and not responding. I hope that this is just a software problem, but I haven't had much time to research it.

On the problems. So far, I've talked about the CPU whine and the rcd.app thing. I've also plugged in my external Keyboard, which is a 6 year old Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro. I've noticed some weird keyboard bounce problems. I haven't installed the Microsoft drivers (yet) because they aren't Universal (but I'm also a long way from being done installing).

The last "problem" area is non-Univeral applications. So far I have installed a few PPC apps: Path Finder, Ecto, Skype, xchm, and Aperture. Path Finder and Skype definitely plan to go Universal, and the Ecto support boards say Ecto will go Universal for Ecto 3.0. I need to mail the xchm folks and see what their plans were. Apple was supposed to release a Universal Binary of Aperture, (along with a bunch of fixes/improvements) by the end of March, but apparently, that's been delayed until April. I also built SSHKeychain from sources to get a Universal version.

That's my first report on the MacBook Pro. If anyone has an experience restoring an iTunes library from an iPod, or restoring the Address Book via Bluetooth (or other) iSync, I'd be interested in hearing from you.