The new MacBook Pro

I am in the midst of setting up my MacBook Pro (13") which replaces my four-year-old 12" Titanium PowerBook. The Titanium had pretty much recovered from The Cat Pee incident, but it wasn't able to run Snow Leopard. As I'm now commuting to Olympia, I needed a reliable laptop, and I want to be able to use Snow Leopard's "Back to My Mac" feature to access the iMac at home.

First impressions:

• The new environmentally aware packaging is pretty elegant for cardboard. It was nice not to wrassle with a lot of plastic wrapping.
• I like the magnetic power cord (not new on MacBooks, but new for me).
• I love the backlit keyboard (again, not new for MacBooks, but new for me — I remember when this was just for the highest-end models).
• Choosing an account photo made me smile — I recognized several of the images (flowers) from the early iCards galleries I worked with.
• The screen seems wide, but not very tall.
• The new track pad with one, two, three and four-finger controls looks intriguing.
• I noticed that I will have been a member of .Mac (Mobile Me) for 10 years come Valentine's Day.
• The set-up, including settings and a complete sync of mail, contacts, calendars, bookmarks, via Mobile Me was complete 30 minutes from when I opened the shipping box.

All that remains is to install Microsoft Office, iWork '09, Yojimbo (which syncs), and Storyist.

Tomorrow.