The next hurdle -- and it has proved to be a much bigger hurdle -- is Lotus Notes. IBM is promising better support for the Mac in the Notes 7.x time frame. We're using Notes 6.5.x and other than the pathetic Mac support, it's working just fine. (I may test the Notes 7.02 client in the near future though.) These are the problems that Mac users face the most -- integrating with IT systems in the corporate world. Sometimes there is no support at all for certain applications. Microsoft, for example, withdrew support for Internet Explorer on the Mac several years ago -- not that it really offered compatibility with enterprise Web-based applications anyway. There's hope, though, with the growing popularity of Firefox, which is platform-independent and works more or less the same way on the Mac and Linux as it does on the PC. (This is especially true of Firefox 2.0.)
For reasons I'm still figuring out, Notes has been troublesome on my Mac. During the first several days, I experienced frequent crashes of the Notes client. Working with my IT department, we weren't sure whether the problem was the result of issues with the MacBook Pro itself or whether it was my Notes installation. We reinstalled the Mac OS X 10.4 operating system from the ground up and then reinstalled Notes and my other corporate applications. The frequency of the Notes crashes diminished, but any crashing isn't acceptable. So we installed the Notes client on a second MacBook Pro 15 and found the problems were evident there, too. More than likely, there's something amiss in my Notes mail database or the client configuration. I figured out a work-around that keeps the client from crashing, and I suspect that it will lead us to the proper solution. But there's no joy yet.
Once the Notes problem is fixed, I will go through the wild and crazy steps required to migrate Windows Eudora to Mac Eudora, and move into the Mac. I've also ordered a , which is due in a week or so.
I'm far more comfortable with the higher resolution on the larger MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro 15 is great as a commuter notebook, since I use a large-screen LCD at work. But when I'm stretched out for serious weekend work away from an external display, the 17-in. MBP is the machine I need. I'll be duplicating the software on that machine and remote-accessing the MacBook Pro 15 for Eudora e-mail as needed. One of the few things I truly admire about Notes is its ability to run on multiple machines and be accessed from any of them. It's the power of a true client/server application. Notes doesn't have a lock on that ability, of course. I might use IMAP with Eudora, for example. But most of my mail hosts don't offer it.
About other aspects of the Mac: I'm having little trouble adapting to the differences between Windows and the Mac. I was a Mac user from 1987 to 1990 and a Windows and Mac user from 1994 to 1995. Mac OS X is a different operating system from the old Mac OS software. But my Linux experience, though not considerable, has helped me log in and out of root to change system settings on the Mac with relative ease (once I knew where to initiate the authentication). Exploring the way the Mac works is actually fun. I wouldn't call the more esoteric settings intuitive, but they're not difficult to find if you keep at it.