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Meet Ronin

Things are still busy at work but I thought I’d post and notify everyone that my new 12” Powerbook finally arrived last week. I named it Ronin, because it’s small and agile like a ninja! And I couldn’t find any ninja names that I could pronounce so I went with Ronin which means a Samurai with no Master.

Look at some pictures of me opening it

As you can see I was pretty excited about it…

So far it has been perfect. The battery life is great (over 3 hours with normal use I think, though I haven’t put a stopwatch on it), and the screen has no dead pixels or the dreaded white spots (though that was never a problem on the 12” anyway). It seems very speedy overall, a little faster than my 1ghz eMac, since the eMac has more programs and files on it at the moment. I’ve used Photoshop on it however and it is quite speedy, though it slows down considerably when other programs are open, since it only has 256mb of RAM. But tomorrow another 512mb chip comes from UPS, so then it should be flying along without any problems at all.

The size is just perfect. I knew the 17” would be too big, but I liked the size of the 15” when I saw it in the store. However now that I have the 12” at home and on my lap, I really think it is the perfect size. It’s small and very lightweight, and fits comfortably on your lap. The relatively small screen size is not a problem, especially thanks to Expose’. I do keep a lot of programs full screen that I would normally have in a smaller window on my eMac, but like I said, Expose’ makes switching between them a breeze. I can also plug in a second monitor when at my desk at home or work, for when I am doing some serious Photoshop work or have Photoshop and a text editor open to work on a site.

I really like the keyboard as well, it’s solid but “soft” at the same time. I love typing on laptop keyboards since the keys are closer together and you don’t have to push them as far. It’s almost like typing on a flat surface but you can still tell where the keys are.

The wireless reception seems terrific. I just received my new Netgear 802.11G wireless router this morning and hooked it up when I got home. All I did was plug it into the power and the cable modem, then woke up the Powerbook and it was already online. I get 4 bars (full strength) all over my house, except on the couch in the living room where I get three bars. I walked down the street about 150 ft. and finally lost the connection. I could easily share my internet with the neighbors, assuming their computers picked up the signal as well. But I won’t do that, because my neighbors suck. The old lady anyway. Her and her freakin’ terriers don’t get to share my internet! So anyway I’m typing this on my kitchen counter right now. Wow! I really love wireless!

I haven’t had a chance to try out the DVD burner yet, since I don’t have any blank DVD’s. I’ll try to find some cheap somewhere though so I can start burning some of our videos to DVD. My wife Jenee’ has really been enjoying iMovie, and created a quite good and exciting video tonight of some footage we took at her parent’s house this weekend of her riding horses. I’m hoping to have enough good footage so that next year we can send out Christmas DVD’s to the family of our activities during the past year. Should be a fun project!

The left side wrist rest gets warm when you do some processor intensive tasks like playing a game or working in a graphics application, but it isn’t enough to really notice. It’s warm, but nicely so. The fans also rarely come on, and when they do, I have to put my ear right up to the keyboard to hear them. It’s a virtually silent machine. Very stealthy, just like a ninja!

This is definitely the nicest computer I’ve ever owned. I highly recommend them to anyone who is interested in a laptop.