I was waiting for a long time for the new iMacs to be released. That happened, but it seemed soon that Leopard would come out (the new operating system) so it would have been daft to jump into Tiger when I could wait just a little longer for Leopard. That happened a few weeks ago and I placed my order: a 24″ iMac 2.8 Extreme Edition. It arrived last Friday (took about six bloomin’ weeks mind) and came with Tiger installed but a Leopard disk. Just how long does it take for Apple to get Leopard pre-installed boxes shipping!

Anyway, it came and it’s nice. I upgraded to Leopard immediately and it’s now sat in our living room. Lorraine is finding the learning curve to be rather steep and I remember that from when I switched a year ago. Well, I say switched. What I really mean is that I bought a MacBook, installed Windows on it (in Parallels) and used OS X for pretty much nothing other than web browsing on Firefox (which I use on the PC also). So I never really got over the learning curve either.

It’s little things like getting used to using Command instead of Ctrl. The fact that many sites talk about an option key and they really mean the alt key. I try to delete stuff in the Finder using guess which key? Yep, the one that says “delete” on it, but it doesn’t work. I’m a keyboard shortcut junkie so it makes it harder for me I guess. Lorraine is more of a mouse gal and I thought it would be a little easier for her, but she’s having trouble too. Why does maximise not , well, maximise? I have to get used to bringing the cursor up to the top left instead of the top right for the close (although I’m getting used to Command W and Command Q now).

My wife’s main production tool is Word. It came with a nagware trial version of Mac:Word 2004. It’s troublesome. You can’t create a new folder in the Save As… dialogue box – that’s mind-numbingly frustrating. The non-breaking space and space characters are so small as to be virtually invisible (also VERY frustrating).

And iPhoto will NOT import my photos. Seemingly it’s a bug caused by the fact that my jpgs and raw files are all tagged with Lightroom. So the “it just works” thing failed on day 1 of having the iMac. And there’s no work around. How about that ladies and gentlemen?

So, all in all, it has been rather a negative experience. I want so much to like OS X. All those people can’t be wrong, surely? You know, the Mac evangelists. I do get sick of Windows XP trouble, but I’ve been using it for so long now that I pretty much can fix most things or at least know how to Google and where to look to troubleshoot. I’m rather in the dark with OS X though. However, I shall persevere (although saying that I’m actually sat in front of the iMac right now but typing this in a Remote Desktop window hooked up to my XP PC — hmmmm….)