Mike Seminaro's Blog: A forum for the voices in my head

I finally broke down and bought the new 8-core Mac Pro earlier this week. I've been wanting one of the Mac towers for years now, and I finally decided to take the plunge. After a few days of usage, I'm wondering why I waited so long. The experience has been nothing short of amazing so far. My Mac came bundled with Leopard, so this is my first extensive experience with the new OS as well. I plan to blog more about my experiences in the next few days, but here are my initial impressions:

Mac Pro

• Unbelievable fast. Faster than I could have imagined. Of course speed is relative, but I've never worked on a faster machine.
• It's also really quiet. I have a standards Intel machine (which I built myself) running next to it and that box is about 3 times as loud as the Mac. I'm primarily talking about the fan, which is virtually inaudible. The only thing I do hear is the hard drive occasionally.
• You could break your back lifting the thing. Definitely the heaviest desktop machine I've ever owned. I think most of the heft is in the case, which is extremely well built.
• I love the styling. I know, it's a computer, but it looks cool to me. I was inclined to keep it on the top of my desk, but my wife convinced me to put it underneath. Obviously, we have different views when it comes to decorating ;-)

Leopard

• Spaces: I was initially quite excited about this feature because I always have A LOT of apps and windows open at once, and the promise of reigning in the clutter was appealing to me. My experience, however, has been a bit disappointing. I find that things are too often in some other space when I need them. I'm not giving up yet though as I feel like maybe I just haven't figured out the best way to make use of this feature just yet.
• Spotlight: Whatever the did between Tiger and Leopard to speed this thing up has made all the difference in the world. I find myself using this feature all the time since the upgrade. I use it as an application launcher and to find files I need. It's been so good as a launcher that I haven't even installed quicksilver yet, and I probably won't.
• Mail: I haven't used the new notes or To Do features, and probably won't. I use a new tool called Omnifocus to keep myself organized (which I highly recommend, BTW). One feature that I have used, and love, is the ability for Mail to detect meeting invitations in the body of a message and create an iCal event automatically. Mail is doing some really clever parsing in the background and seems to usually get everything just right. In the few cases it hasn't I can correct the issues with a quick edit. Nice feature.

Those are just my initial impressions. I'll be posting some more details soon...