On Friday I switched from a Thinkpad to a MacBook Pro and over the weekend I pretty much installed the core applications I need and configured it to meet my needs. I’m not new to the Mac. I have an iMac at home. It’s fine, not great. I’m not an Apple fan boy. I think of computers and operating systems like user interfaces; the best ones get out of your way and just let you get things done.

My motivation for switching was primarily hardware, not software. Regrettably the keyboard on my Thinkpad has been awful for the entire 9 months I’ve owned it. Sorry to say this, but Thinkpad’s are worse since Lenovo bought the business unit from IBM. I’ve owned 5 Thinkpad’s and the latest (T61) is by far the worst. The two most important keys - the spacebar and the tab key require serious pressure (pounding) to register. I’m fairly confident that I can have the keyboard reseated by an authorized Lenovo service provider. That process requires keeping my laptop for a day or two. That’s not very realistic, unless I have a backup computer. So, I figured I’d try the MacBook Pro and have my Thinkpad repaired. If I don’t like the MBP, I can always switch back.

By the way, I find the external Mac keyboard greatly improves the whole Mac experience. Having functioning [home], [end], [page up], [page down] and forward delete keys is a big improvement. Along these same lines, it would be nice if the MacBook Pro had some kind of docking station.

The secondary motivation was that XP is getting a little old and I’m going to need to upgrade to some other operating system before too long. We have folks in the office running XP, Vista, Leopard and Ubuntu. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. I decided that a platform with good VM support was the best way to go to meet all my needs, not to mention it makes it great for testing various combinations of operating systems and browsers for compatibility with blist.

I’ve been using the MBP for about 72 hours now. In general, I’m happy. The keyboard is excellent, although the absence of home, end, page up and page down is annoying. I love the feel of the keyboard.

A couple of the guys in the office asked what I’ve installed so far. One commented that you can learn a lot about someone by what they install first. Maybe so. Maybe not. Sometimes it’s just a function of installing the applications you need right away. Regardless, I took the bait and shared my list. So here are the first 10 applications I installed on my new MacBook Pro:

*) Firefox 2.0.

*) WideMail. Candidly I probably couldn’t switch to the Mac without this software. It adds some features to Mac Mail that make it feel more like Outlook. For example, it adds multi-line preview and a right/bottom preview pane.

*) MacVim.

*) twhirl.

*) Cisco VPN client.

*) Adium.

*) Growl.

*) VMWare Fusion with XP and Office installed. This is mostly so I can run Excel with VBA support.

*) Skitch. Very handy screen capture tool.

*) iWork ‘08

And there you have my base setup. I’m not done. I still need to install an SVN client so I can do local checkouts and builds on my laptop. There are also a few programs I want to try - OmniGraffle and Quicksilver soon as well. I’d love to hear your thoughts and about your MacBook Pro environment.