24 hours ago, I was unwrapping a brand-new MacBook Pro. Now, I'm back on the slower, but more reliable, PowerBook G4, as the first Intel-based Apple product I've ever had mad its way back to Apple home base in near-record time.

Following this morning's bizarre keyboard and trackpad outage, from which the laptop never recovered, I took the advice of Webomatica and others, including some suffering the same fate on Apple's discussion boards, and headed to a Mac Genius at a local Apple Store as quickly as I could.

While I had fantasies in my head of them removing my hard drive and placing it in a brand-new MacBook Pro casing, so I'd be in and out of the Apple Store in minutes and on with my life, but it was not meant to be. Instead, the Mac Genius opened the laptop, clicked a few keys, and unsurprisingly remarked, "That's not good."

Duh.

After more research, he said the parts needed to fix the laptop weren't available, and they'll be holding on to my MacBook Pro for a few days. Earliest I should expect to see it again? Probably Friday, though I'll be happy if I get it by end of day next Monday.

So, at least it wasn't my fault, and at least I still have my PowerBook G4, which up until yesterday, was the highest powered laptop in the house. I managed to live without the MacBook Pro up until this point, and now it looks like I'll have to wait just under a week more.

Here I am, all excited about my new Apple tech toy, and it's making me feel like a chump, after all the good things I said about it just yesterday.

I successfully loaded all programs and files last night, whittling the available space on the hard drive to a mere 129 Gigabytes. But after a morning's work at home, I came in to the office, and have been completely stuck since - as the laptop isn't responding to any keyboard or trackpad input, and at the same time, the laptop's fans are whirring noisily below. A pair of restarts and a single shut down later, and I'm still feeling like world's biggest Apple fanboy moron.

After about 30-45 minutes of messing with this, I finally unhooked a USB keyboard and mouse from the old G4 desktop and attached it to the MacBook Pro, so the laptop is sitting in front of the USB keyboard, making things awkward and ridiculously duplicitous.

So far, Apple's support site hasn't been much help, nor has any amount of Google searching, System Preference manipulation, or random key hitting. For now, while I can use the USB keyboard, it's no kind of long-term solution, and I'd have to say I'm seriously annoyed.

UPDATE: According to Apple's support site, I'm not the only one with the issue... and so far, the only solution is to get it repaired. Not good!

Any Mac fans out there who have a good suggestion for me so the MacBook Pro's first day isn't ruined?

Cross-posted to Athletics Nation...

By the end of 2007, the A's heroes weren't guys named Crosby, Chavez, Kendall and Kotsay. Instead, a ragtag bunch, including Suzuki, Barton, Cust, and Hannahan, helped the A's to their fair share of dramatic victories amid way too many losses. While injuries took their toll on this year's A's club (again), we are optimistic at the glimpses we've seen into what could be the future.


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Today, I unpacked one of the most-anticipated items to reach our shipping facility in the last few years - my new Apple MacBook Pro. Aimed to replace a 7-year-old Power Mac G4 desktop and a frustrating Dell laptop at the same time, I'm ready to migrate all my major applications over, and start using this magnificent machine for both Mac and Windows work - as soon as I can get hold of VMWare Fusion or another OS emulator, which would let me run Microsoft Outlook, Project, Visio or any other Windows-only apps alongside my Mac environment without hassle.

For the last hour or so, I've had my two laptops sitting side by side, the first in FireWire Target Disk Mode, as I migrate files, applicatins and preferences from my PowerBook G4 (1.25 GHz/80 GB) to the new MBPro (2.2 GHz/200 GB). Yes, that's right. A whopping 200 gigabytes - enough room for all my applications, and all my files, including the more than 30 Gigs of music I've ripped from my CDs and downloaded from the iTunes Music Store.

We're just getting started, but there is no question the new machine is faster, the keyboard is more responsive, and even the speakers sound much better than my 2-year-old laptop. I can't wait to run speed comparisons between it and the year 2000 model I've got at the office...