Having sold my PowerBook for a little less than I was hoping for, presumably due to the wear on the palm rest, I decided to take some precautions with my new Mac. Shortly after ordering the machine, I also purchased the Marware Protection Pack for the MacBook Pro. The one piece of the kit I was most interested in was the palm rest cover, made of a gray, rubbery-leathery material with just the right texture.

Applying the palm rest cover wasn’t too hard, but took some nudging to work out a few small air pockets that developed. Overall, I’m quite pleased with the feel of my new palm rest, and can work without worry that every minute the metal finish may be degrading under my wrists. Small bubbles aside, the only real drawback was that the display no longer closed easily, despite the advertisement that the cover didn’t interfere with the latch mechanism. I debated removing the palm rest cover altogether, but instead I looked more closely and saw that the small rubber nubs on the lid of the display were keeping the latch at too great a distance from the hook in the base. After peeling up the corner of the cover, I cut off two iny triangles, as seen at right. The display now closes as easily as before the cover was applied.

Overall, the kit is a nice improvement with a few little hangups, but it should really pay off in about three or four years when my palm rest is still in great condition! For all the photos, check out the ones I’ve tagged with ‘macbookpro’ on Flickr.

My PowerBook sold, and my new Santa Rosa based MacBook Pro arrived Friday from Shanghai via FedEx. It’s almost identical to my previous machine, except for the display and insides, of course. The new LED backlit display is pixel perfect and very evenly lit, while the Intel CPU is proving plenty capable.

Overall, I couldn’t be more pleased with the new Mac. With any luck, the palm rest won’t wear away as badly as the one on my PowerBook — I might buy a Marware palm rest cover just to be safe. Has anyone dealt with them in person?

6/17/07 Update:
Some screenshots of Half Life 2 running on the new MacBook Pro at its native resolution. FPS displayed in the upper-right corner.

6/27/2007 Update
After owning my MacBook Pro for only a day, I noticed a small but annoying problem: The spacebar squeaked when tapped just below the division between the ‘b’ and ‘n’ keys. I really wouldn’t have worried about it, except that’s where I tap the key almost every time. Since AppleCare comes standard with all Apple hardware (and I also opted for the 3-year extension), I called up Apple support. After some initial shoulder shrugging on their part, they agreed to have a look at the issue. This was Saturday afternoon. Monday morning, a box was at my door. By Friday, the MacBook Pro had gotten to Apple, been diagnosed, a new keyboard installed, and made it back to my door. A five day turnaround – not bad at all. Like the blinking orange-green troubles I had with my original iPod Shuffle, Apple came through with outstanding support. A big thumbs up is in order for AppleCare and their staff for taking care of an arguably small matter so quickly and efficiently.

I should have posted this earlier!

A brand new high end 15″ MacBook Pro is on its way to me from Shanghai, so I listed my current PowerBook on eBay. If you’re in need of a decent G4 portable (1.25 GHz), this one’s loaded with 1.5 GB of RAM, a 100 GB 5400 RPM hard drive, and a dual layer superdrive. It has some wear on the palm rests, but otherwise it’s in very good shape. Check out the auction for full details and photos.

If you win, mention Command-Tab in the payment notification, and I’ll ship it for free!

Tom’s Hardware has an excellent article on the technology of 1.8″ iPod hard drives and their increasing capacity. Hard drives are now being produced in 100 GB sizes, which may very well find themselves in new iPods in the near future (although not too soon, as to steal thunder from the iPhone…). Other details noted include transfer rates, access times, and power consumption — all the gritty specs you’d need for building a low-power 1.8″ hard drive based device.

One very surprising fact I learned is that the tiny ZIF connectors on these new drives are rated for a mere 20 insertion (plug/unplug) cycles, which isn’t very many if you plan on moving the hardware around a lot. If you own a 1.8″-to-larger IDE adapter, you may want to consider leaving the ribbon cable connected to the adapter at all times. The article is quite a few pages long, but well worth a read.