The new machine has arrived — one day late, but just in time for the weekend.

First impressions:

• the screen is great; the additional pixels (extended width) is very usable
• the keyboard feels different — I don’t know whether this is because it’s new and the one in my PowerBook was so worn out already, or whether there is any difference
• the ability to transfer your home directory during installation makes the setup of a new machine extraordinarily easy. In fact, I booted the new machine up, and left it unattended (OK, almost — I checked every 5 minutes how far along it was) while it transfered 40 gig of data. Now I’m typing this entry on it — the only thing that has taken time is re-installing applications. I could have done this via the transfer mode, too, but I decided to take the opportunity to check for the latest versions, looking for universal binaries.
• I can notice no difference at all in performance of PowerPC apps — e.g. NetNewsWire, OmniWeb, ecto run without any noticeable reduction in performance. In other words: Rosetta, the on-demand PowerPC-to-Intel translator, rocks. I’ll check out Microsoft Office next.
• Safari seems super-fast, as well as the html rendering of Mail.app.
• Seeing MenuMeters display the CPU usage percentage of two cores is just totally cool :-)

Next up: Installing Eclipse (3.2M5 is supposed to be a universal binary).

Update: Eclipse feels about 10 times faster!