At the end of September I returned my work laptop (an old, almost dead Dell) to the office. With a battery life well under an hour and terrible performance it was almost unusable; I thought I would not miss it but I did. Within a couple of weeks I was looking at the Apple website and a couple of days later an order was placed for a MacBook Pro with a Core2Duo processor and 4 gb memory.
When the laptop arrived I quickly started to configure it. It was even easier than with my daughter’s laptop, partly through further practice and partly because of the wonderful Dropbox program. Simply by installing Dropbox, entering my ID and passsword, all of my working files were transfered without further intervention. I should be clear that Dropbox runs on Windows as well so this is not a Mac-only benefit. I rank Dropbox alongside Google, both search and Gmail, as the most useful services to be found on the internet. Long may they all succeed.
One issue that has arisen from routinely using two Macs relates to my To Do list. For the last nine months or so I have been using Things on my desktop and on my iPhone. It is a lovely program: good looking and more functional than the other To Do managers that I trialled. However, there are two drawbacks with it: 1) it can only sync with iPhone over Wi-Fi and 2) it cannot sync with another Mac. The first is annoying but not a showstopper (for me) but the second soon started to get in my way. Cultured Code, Things’ developer, has promised that cloud sync (the solution to both) is being worked on but they have been saying this for over a year. Which triggered a rethink, I will post about the conclusion separately.