Having installed a few games to the Windows partition (already down to only 20 gigs free!), it was time to pop back to OS X.
Performance is definitely much better than the old iBook, of course, and I no longer feel as constrained about what I can run at the same time. It’s nice not having to worry about whether Firefox is chewing up too much memory or CPU to launch MythTV reliably, or if VLC is going to be choppy because of swapping. I should also now be able to run more things at the same time that I wouldn’t have bothered with before, like Skype.
There are still some hardware quirks I’m running into, too. The space bar is a bit insensitive in that presses on the very ends of it often don’t register, so I have to make sure I give it a good hard tap a little further in. Gaming might be a bit less feasible now that I’ve experienced it running at full load for a while; the fans aren’t too bad, and could be drowned out by the game’s sounds or by wearing headphones, but the CPU quickly makes my lap just a little warm…
I also had a weird time figuring out what was ‘wrong’ with the LCD’s backlight. It seemed like its intensity would fluctuate a bit, often noticed just out of the corner of my eye while typing, but if I sat there and stared directly at the screen for a while, nothing would happen. There were other weird cases too, where I would have the backlight at half-intensity, pick it up and carry it a bit, and the backlight would suddenly be set at full. What I didn’t realize though, is that the ambient light sensors on the Pro units aren’t just for the keyboard backlight; the LCD backlight is by default set to automatically adjust as well. I guess the ambient light in my living room and the typing of my hands were enough to make it a bit erratic, and it’s now stable after disabling the option in the system preferences.