[Kyle]

Hey everybody... question time!

I'm going to Japan in September as an exchange student (my University has a sister school in Tokyo) and I am planning to fiiiiiinally get a MacBook (switching!) when Leopard come out in October-ish. This is good news but raises a couple of questions for me...

1) The Japanese Mac website says "Your Mac can be ordered with an English language (U.S.) style keyboard, or Japanese - the choice is yours." Does anyone know what a Japanese Mac Keyboard looks like? Is is all hiragana? Katakana? Roman and Japanese characters? If it is a mixture then that would be cool, maybe a bit easier for my Japanese typing even, but I want it to be useful for typing in English too.

2) Electricity. If I buy the MacBook in Japan, will it get screwed up when I plug it in back in Canada? If I buy it here will it get scewed up over there? Of course if I buy it here I could use an adapter over there, but if it's the other way around I don't really want to be forced to use an adapter over here for the entire life of the computer. Hmm.

3) Shipping. I'm pretty sure that the Apple Canada store wouldn't ship to Japan, so if I decide to get the Canadian one does this mean I should get it while I'm still in Canada if having my family re-ship it over there will be prohibively expensive/dangerous?


Aaaaanyways, just thought I'd put all that out there in case one of you crazy people has any knowledge about electronics in Japan. Thanks in advance for any tips!

PS, I was just surfing CanadaRam's website and noticed you're based here in Vic... so if you convince me to buy it in Canada that's a bonus for you when I come by to bump my ram, lol.

 

[Kyle]

thanks for the replies...

that's pretty good thinkin on apple's part about the voltage switching, good to hear.

jonmon...
that's good to know. however, missing apostrophe aside, wouldn't it be a goot thing to have hiragana on the keyboard? was it just too cluttered looking or was there some other problem this presented?

ender...
yes, i also thought the keyboard would be a cool thing to have. good to know about the warrenty, thanks.

 

[Kyle]

it would be good if you were typing in hiragana
but i wasn't going to and i didn't want to learn a new keyboard layout

right, but if all of the roman letters are in the same place...? I still feel like I may be missing something.

dona83
if that's the case then I think that I would be totally ok with a japanese style keyboard, just switch the OS to english and I should be fine.

BlueMax
ha ha ha... maybe. And maybe this will turn out to be Godzilla's genisis and then none of this will really matter I suppose. Well, iMovie might be a little more crucial if i end up filming the destruction of Neo-Tokyo. Hm...