The MacBook Pro arrived, after a long and painful waiting period, a week ago today, and I’ve spent considerable time playing around with it and setting it up to my liking. It’s gorgeous. The screen is so bright that I can only keep it on its full brightness setting in a dark room for several seconds before my eyes start hurting; in full daylight, the brightness eliminates most of the glare on the screen’s surface. It’s quite snappy too, which has been great for manipulating the 20 or so journal articles and sequences and browser windows I have open most of the time.

Perhaps the best thing about it so far is the size of the screen, on which I’ve found I can read two pages of a journal article side-by-side in Preview. This is extremely useful, especially for articles in Cell, for example, which commonly publishes figures several pages away from its corresponding text, making for a difficult on-computer read typically. On this setup, I can read a given portion of text and look at its figure three pages ahead on the same screen, avoiding the need for constant scrolling back and forth and relocating one’s place. Small detail, but incredibly convenient and, ultimately, both time- and paper-saving.

Other really cool things, even unexpectedly so, are the ability to scroll and right-click using only the trackpad, which also saves a whole lot of time and prevents the need to find the scroll bar every time I want to move down a page.

Very cool. My life is so much better now. Anyone in the market for a 12″ Powerbook?