I was curious about this, so I hunted around and found an online version of the Guided Tour of Macintosh, including screenshots and an mp3 file of the cassette. It begins with totally New Age-y piano music. The tour includes a lesson on how to click with the mouse, how to open and close and change the size of windows, etc.

Kinda fun.

I’m psyched. It’s pretty nifty. Especially compared to my seven-year-old PC. After I unpacked it and set it up on my desk, the first thing I thought was, Jesus, this thing is huge. It’s a 21.5-inch widescreen, compared to the 15-inch 4:3 monitor I’ve used since 2003.

I’m not completely new to Macs. In 1999-2000, I worked at a small company for 10 months where my work computer was a Mac. It must have had OS 8 or OS 9. I didn’t particularly like it. I thought Windows 95/98 looked sleeker, and I was completely unfamiliar with how Macs worked. But I’ve always thought OS X was a lot prettier.

So now I’ve got my own Mac! There are a few things I’m getting used to:

One, the green “maximize” button doesn’t do the same thing as the maximize button does in Windows; it doesn’t fill the whole screen but maximizes to as much space as the program needs. Or so I’ve read. I can’t quite figure out exactly what it’s going to do before I click it, especially when I click it a second time.

Two, if you close a window, the program doesn’t actually shut down unless you make it “quit.” It’s weird to see a menu in the top left corner for a program I thought was closed.

And three, I don’t yet fully have a handle on how to install programs that I’ve downloaded.

But I’m slowly figuring things out, and I’ll figure that stuff out too. This evening I bought Switching to the Mac, by David Pogue, because it’s convenient to have a book by my side to look stuff up instead of having to Google things.

One other thing of note: I have an external hard drive, so it was easy to copy all my personal files from my old PC onto my Mac. And I realized that I’ve been copying some of these files from computer to computer for years. I have a folder called “College papers and letters,” and the “Date Modified” on the earliest of those files is from October 1991. Holy crap. I wrote my college papers with WordPerfect 5.1, but I think I found a way to read them on my PC, so there must be some way to open them.

I’m looking forward to playing around with this thing. I know it’s just a computer, but really, it feels like a more enjoyable experience than a PC. I’ve promised Matt that I’m not going to turn into a crazy Mac person — but for a while I may be experiencing the zeal of a convert.

So, that’s that. This is gonna be fun.

I ordered a Mac.

I’d been thinking about it for a while, but it seemed like they were getting close to releasing new ones, so I decided to wait. Apple announced the new ones this morning, so I had no more excuses to dither.

It still took me forever to get up the courage to press the Order button. Then I finally decided what the hell, just do it. So I did it.

I bought a Mac.

My Dell has worked fine since 2003, but I’m not sure I want another one, especially after reading about all the problems they’ve been having for the last few years. And most megaseller PCs (Dell, HP, etc.) seem to get their parts from the same place. So I started thinking… hmm. Maybe a Mac this time.

I’ve thought about buying a Mac in the past, but I wasn’t sure I could get used to it. This time, though, I might just do it. Even if I bought a new PC I’d have to get used to a new operating system (Windows 7, instead of my current XP).

I went to an Apple Store yesterday and tried out a 21.5-inch iMac, and… my god, they’re so big. Maybe they just seem big because I have a 15-inch non-widescreen monitor right now, but… wow. Macs are enormous.

Also, MacRumors.com recommends not buying an iMac right now because there might be new ones “soon,” but I don’t know how reliable that is. Anyone have any idea?