Welcome to your new Mac.

It was time…I pulled the trigger and got a new Mac. To be more specific, I purchased a refurbished MacBook Pro, one of the newer 15” models with the 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. Overall, I am quite happy.

Interestingly, Apple has tweaked the initial out-of-box experience somewhat since I bought my last Mac.

1. The first time you boot the machine, you are treated to a cute welcome video. This is somewhat like the animation you see when you reboot your TiVo.
2. One of the initial setup steps is to choose from the autodetected wireless networks. Nice.
3. If you’ve ever bought anything from iTunes, the computer knows your name, etc. after you supply that username/password.
4. You are prompted to take a picture that represents “you” with the built-in iSight.
5. OS X immediately downloads any relevant software updates. There are about 10 items to download, instead of the 80+ you’d see in Windows.

It just gets better and better.