Christmas in November

Santa came early this year. Seven and a half weeks before the Holy Night, a big cardboard box was dumped on my desk this afternoon, just when I was about to meet a friend for coffee. Socially skilled as I am, I contained my excitement over the new MacBook Pro and had a chat and a brew, despite everyone in the lab bugging me when I left: "Aren't you gonna open it?"

When I came back, I did. I unpacked the silver star of the show, flat and slick but also heavy and with a large footprint, and the half dozen accessories that came with it, all spotless and white. I plugged the computer in, turned it on and fell immediately in love with the screen, wonderfully wide and bright.

I didn't start watching movies right away. Instead, I opened the handbook. "Congratulations. You and your MacBook Pro were made for each other." From what I know and have experienced, I have serious doubts. I'm a Mac skeptic on a good day and a Mac hater on a bad. The new laptop is probably not going to change that.

There is no right button on the touchpad. How do you navigate the web in the coffee shop, one hand on the cappuccino, the other on the laptop, and no mouse nearby? Short of cruising up to the arrow icon, there is only one way to go back. You have to activate two-finger tapping as secondary click. Works, but try mouse gestures with that.

There is also no delete key, only backspace. The enter key is one of the smallest on the keyboard, on mine anyway. Do Apple designers really use it that rarely? Strangely, there is another enter key just right of the space bar. What's it doing there? How did it get separated from his pal further up?

On the other hand, the back-lighting of the keyboard is lovely, putting to shame the lonely white diode above the screen of my ThinkPad. I also love the low noise level, almost silent with a barely audible hum of the fan. That's all I've noticed so far.

Why did I get the thing? Science – and in particular crystallography – can be done much more productively on a platform that combines hard-cord scientific computing traditionally done under UNIX and Linux with Microsoft and Adobe's office and image manipulation capabilities. As is only appropriate for a necessary tool, the lab paid for it. When a hard day's work is done, I get to play with it for free. That's what I call Christmas.