Musings of a Marketing Maven

Today I man­aged to have fun while work­ing. At long last I set up a per­sonal Face­book page and uploaded some fam­ily pho­tos. At the same time I trans­ferred files and apps from a 2-year-old Mac­Book Pro to a brand new Mac­Book Pro (one of the mod­els released ear­lier this week). I got the first 15-inch i7 model sold by Apple’s Belle­vue location.

My office has sev­eral Macs side by side, so it was easy to work on mul­ti­ple par­al­lel tasks. When the file/program trans­fer process fin­ishes, my hus­band will be the lucky recip­i­ent of a Mac lap­top that also runs Win­dows 7.

Trans­fer­ring Files & Pro­grams to a New Mac

When you have hun­dreds of giga­bytes worth of stuff on a Mac lap­top, the process of trans­fer­ring from one to another takes a cou­ple hours over a Firewire cable. But it requires no super­vi­sion once the process is under­way. (Hence the Face­book project as a pro­duc­tive use of time while trans­fer­ring files.)

Every time I go through the process of trans­fer­ring files and pro­grams from an older Mac to a newer one, I’m reminded of how well Apple has sim­pli­fied this process com­pared to what you expe­ri­ence when fac­ing a sim­i­lar chal­lenge with Win­dows PCs. The Mac trans­fer is almost flaw­less — espe­cially if you remem­ber which pro­grams (like Adobe’s Cre­ative Suite) need to be deac­ti­vated so you don’t get into license conflict.

Get­ting my doc­u­ments and apps installed in the Win­dows par­ti­tion of my new Mac­Book Pro will take far longer than it took to set up the Mac side of this com­puter. Tran­fer­ring the files is no prob­lem, but I have to rein­stall all the pro­grams, which means look­ing through my office files for all the license keys and typ­ing them in with no errors. (Not an easy feat.)

Proud Owner of a Mac­Book Pro i7

Luck­ily for me the Belle­vue Square Apple Store’s busi­ness con­sul­tant treats me well. He knew I was inter­ested in the new 2010 Mac­Book Pro mod­els, and kept me informed about inven­tory sta­tus, as he knew I wanted to see the new high-res anti-glare screen before choos­ing which con­fig­u­ra­tion to buy. His first i7 mod­els arrived in the store today, so he con­tacted me this morn­ing to let me know he had a few in stock.

There’s a lot to like about the new Mac­Book Pro with Intel’s i7 proces­sor: fast and sweet. It has all the usual Apple fit-and-finish finesse, but with supe­rior graph­ics, a ter­rific screen, and a big boost in per­for­mance, when com­pared to my older laptop.

After lunch I ordered a copy of Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional from Ama­zon, and took advan­tage of their local deliv­ery option (for $2 more than it would have cost to receive the soft­ware on Sat­ur­day). It arrived in time for me to begin the install before sup­per time.

As I write this, I’ve set up Boot­camp, par­ti­tioned the Mac, have installed Win­dows 7 Pro­fes­sional (64-bit ver­sion), and am now installing Apple’s hard­ware dri­vers for Win­dows. Com­pared to how long this process took on my older lap­top, albeit with the 32-bit ver­sion of Win 7, this install is just scream­ing fast. It’s so fast that I keep get­ting dis­tracted from this blog entry.

Real Time “Social”

But the truly fun part about today was exchang­ing com­ments and photo tags with my niece Melanie, who was closely mon­i­tor­ing my Face­book progress. She lives 3 time zones to the east of here, so her work­day has ended and she’s relax­ing in the evening while I’m still plug­ging away. She made sure fam­ily mem­bers are get­ting tagged prop­erly in my Face­book photo albums.

No sooner did I get a photo or two uploaded, but Mel had tagged the fam­ily mem­bers whose faces appear in the photo. Except she for­got to tag her father in one of the shots. I won­der if that was a Freudian slip, or if the image appears cropped on her com­puter, so she didn’t see his face…

So here I am, installing Win­dows, and exchang­ing com­ments with fam­ily back in New Eng­land. Jug­gling fun, social inter­ac­tions, and work all at the same time. Thanks Face­book, thanks Apple, thanks Ama­zon (for same-day ser­vice on Win­dows 7). You all made my fun day possible.

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