I’m leaving my current job and starting a new one here soon. As a part of the job I’ve been issued (yes, a bit early) a MacBook Pro for home/office use. Actually, there’s a way to buy it off the company and I think I’ll be looking at that.

What gets me is that I’ve been using an iBook since about early 2003. The original was replaced with an iBook G4 at one point, but it’s really just the same little machine with some additional horsepower. The iBook is a weak and tired little machine in comparison. Up until now I’ve been happily complacent with the 12” screen and the “fast enough” processor and graphics card. Most everything I needed to do, I could do on that little machine. In fact, I’m quite proud to say I managed to live in 30GB of drive space for many years without exploding too much over the rim (I offloaded data to a home server now and again, and deleted the other things like download archives or whatnot).

Then I get this monster. I’ve never owned a PowerBook of any kind, so stepping from the iBook to the MacBook Pro is quite the leap. The first little shock is the size of the 15” itself. It’s huge. I mean, it’s huge to me because I’m used to the 12” screen, but it’s more than large enough to really do some crazy things.

After using it for a bit, and still being in iBook “mode,” I walked to my bedroom and before I had a chance to turn on the light the screen dimmed and the keyboard lit up. I almost dropped the damn thing. I mean, I know it has that feature, but being reminded of it like that was a bit in the “oooooooh” category. In fact, I’ll confess to turning the lights on and off a few times for the sheer manic-gigglyness of it.

It gets a little warmer than I’d like, but not insanely-so. I really wish Hardware Monitor or Temperature Monitor worked on this, though. On the iBook I always had it handy so I could tell when it was time to stop doing crazy things and let the computer rest. Here, I only have the hard drive temperature to go by, and that’s not accurate for what I’d like to know.

Like others, I’ve never heard the fans come on, and I’ve done a lot of DVD transcoding these past few days for Front Row. That’s kind of disturbing.

We’ll see what comes of that soon, surely. I hope they get smart about that. We’re not all Steve Jobs; we don’t mind the fan sound if it keeps the computer running.