I picked up a new 15" MacBook Pro yesterday.

Today, I've been setting some things up and migrating myself from the 12" PowerBook. I used the Migration Assistant for most of that, which was reasonably effective. However, there were things that I'd prefer to get rid of, so I've been cleaning up. Then there are things that need to have their license keys migrated, so I've been taking care of that. Finally, there was the handful of non-Universal binaries that I needed to replace.

Now, I'm up and running.

The screen on this new puppy (one of the LED-backlit screens) is phenomenal. At 1440 pixels wide, it's wider than my external display, which is humorous. At only 900 high, it's not as tall as the 1024 of the external display. All told, however, it's a better situation than with my PowerBook.

Why the change? Well, I've been writing a whole lot more lately, and I've found dealing with large documents on the tiny screen has been overwhelming. While I can often focus while at home with my larger external display, often times I cannot, and I go into school. Trying to deal with a 40-page paper on a 12" display was just too much. Then there was the screen that has had a yellow line down the middle since just after the warranty expired a little over a year ago. Plus, of course, I wanted something new.

Negatives so far? Well, the screen doesn't rotate back as far as the Powerbook, so it doesn't work too well with my Kensington Laptop Desktop stand. Second, I've now got connectors on both sides -- power on the left, DVI, FireWire, and USB on the right -- when I'm at home, I always hook up the DVI and the external keyboard and trackball.

Finally, it may look geeky wandering around with this, but I was hell-bent that this thing was going to be protected from the beatings that my two prior laptops have taken. I picked up new case to go along with it.