Wednesday, December 27, 2017

A most pleasant surprise...

A most pleasant surprise...  In yesterday afternoon's UPS delivery, there was a giant, odd-shaped box from Apple: my new iMac Pro, two days early.  Furthermore – unusually for an Apple product, and especially for an expensive one like this – there was no signature required.  Yay!  This morning I unboxed it, which, as always with Apple's products, was a memorable experience all by itself.  The box engineering is superb.  The iMac Pro was swaddled in clear plastic, then wrapped in a cloth-like cover.  That went into a fitted inner box made of formed paper.  The formed paper inner box went into a display box of ordinary cardboard, but very well made with a glossy printed paper outer cover.  That went into an outer box whose insides were covered with shock-absorbing foam.  No tools were required to unpack it; there were little pull tabs that allowed the whole thing to be opened very easily.

Once I had the iMac Pro out of its cocoon, I set it up on a table and lit it off.  As always with an Apple computer, it was ridiculously easy to set up.  I was led by the nose through a series of “do this” screens that got the keyboard and mouse (both Bluetooth) connected and a WiFi connection established.  At that point it slid into the “Migration Assistant”, as I had indicated that I wanted to transfer my stuff from another computer (my Macbook Pro laptop that has been my main computer for ten years now).  Again I was led by the nose through running Migration Assistant on my laptop, getting the Migration Assistant on the laptop talking to the one on the new iMac Pro, then starting the process of moving my stuff over.  At this point I have just over 500 gigabytes of stuff on my laptop, and it's moving over WiFi, so it's going to take something like 7 or 8 hours to do the job.  But – it's completely hands-off for me, and I know from past experiences that when it has finished my new iMac Pro will reboot into an environment that looks exactly like what I've been using on my laptop. 

It's been ten years since I last had my working environment on a workstation-class machine, and of course these machines have become far more powerful over those years.  I can hardly wait to see what it's like to work on this!  My new iMac Pro is quite a machine, with ten 3 GHz cores, 128 GB of ECC RAM, 4 TB of SSD, and a hot Radeon GPU with 16 GB of RAM for itself.   The iMac Pro has a built-in 27" screen, of course, and I'll be using my additional 27" screens as add-ons to it – so I'll have three full-sized screens to work on.  That will be so nice when I'm programming!

This afternoon I'll get to try it out...