January 31st, 2008
For being basically Dell’s hometown (well Round Rock is just a few klicks north), and having literally every classroom staffed with at least one rat’s nest of wires around some crappy refurbished Dell tower — and there’s often way more than one — you sure do see a lot of Mac laptops around the Austin Community College. Both Rio Grande and Northridge campuses.
They’re not even new ones, although there are plenty of black Macbooks. You’ll have your 12″ PBG4’s and iBooks too.
I might bring around my 1.83Ghz Core Duo MacBook Pro (the lowest spec of any MacBook Pro but what a price I got on it!) except only hours after installing Windows Vista on a separate partition, it was ruined by a water spill. At least it was only water.
Somewhere someone is watching. And they’re angry.
Since I’m sleeping with an Apple Authorized Service Technician — whose attempts to distract me induced this accident — I indicated with a subtle glance that I would like her to field-strip the machine to assess liquid damage.
She did so surprisingly quickly. I had forgotten that the Apple Store I used to work at was perpetually under-staffed with Geniuses so we shipped out stacks of portables to a repair depot every day. My AAST’s store is not over-staffed, but they do have a good In-Store Turnaround Time.
I have replaced hard drives in Titanium PowerBooks and in (plastic) Macbooks. But the number of screws required to open up a MacBook Pro really surprised me. Even so it’s apparently fewer than the PowerBooks of yore.
Once the roughly 20-something screws had been sorted into an ice-cube tray and the top-case left out for drying, a rambunctious kitten decided to help by jumping on the table and spraying microsopic laptop screws here and there throughout the thick carpeting.
Well it’s just as well I don’t have a concealed carry permit since I might have turned it on myself or maybe one of the cats. They all wanted to come play on the floor as we searched with flashlights for screws smaller than the grains of crystal cat litter our feline friends have already strewn about the room.
I must admit, I was very cruel in locking them in the bathroom and bedroom.
Somehow my Authorized Service Provider found most of the screws in the carpet. I thought I was good at finding shark teeth in the wash on a beach but I must be retarded by comparison.
So the machine re-assembles, and boots. And behaves fairly normally for a while except no down-arrow key. And then the whole keyboard goes crazy. And either the logic board or the power inverter whines while running Windows under low CPU load (again … this was a pre-existing condition but I thought the last logic board swap had fixed it). But now I have to convince Amex to fix it instead of Apple. And irony of ironies, they are apparently tempted to just refund me the entire purchase price.
But I can’t buy a MacBook Pro for a thousand bucks. I don’t want some crappy Macbook. Have they ever had a cardholder plead for them to pay for repairs instead of replacement?
Regarding Apple Computers | No Comments »
January 16th, 2008
Apple doesn’t advertise it yet, but the song in the new MacBook Air commercial is by Yael Naïm, from a self-titled album.
They’re getting really obscure, but I really dig the song. I wonder if I should get the whole album. It’s on iTunes Plus at 256kbps with no DRM.
Regarding Apple Computers, Music | No Comments »
January 16th, 2008
The MacBook Air gives the Air Jordan a run for its money, huh?
I think we found the new laptop for a mister D. Woo unless he’s already gotten one. The Communists will be nothing but impressed by the way it hides its girth beneath its sightlines.
Although there’s not much girth there. Lithium Polymer batteries, nonexistent permanent storage, and a pliable chip manufacturer have made this Mac the closest to an iPod yet. If it succeeds (well even if it doesn’t) it’s the best endorsement yet for a switch to Intel chips. Not only did Intel deliver custom (although probably eventually widespread) miniaturized packaging for the Core 2 Duo, you probably couldn’t even fit a 4 year old G4 in this little bastard. Nevermind the chips IBM produces to burn up XBoxes.
MacBook Air may be the first Mac since 2000 to lack a FireWire port, but you have to go back farther to lack an ethernet port. And what’s the last Mac that didn’t have a CD drive? I know our SE/30 didn’t. History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
MBA is the first Mac ever to lack any kind of removable storage.
Rumors just prior to the announcement wondered if “Something In The Air” (as the MacWorld banners proclaimed) meant a device that was always connected, like an iPhone or a Kindle. I’m glad the various pundits haven’t thrown up too much of a stink that this isn’t the case. It might be nice to build a notebook computer with constant roaming cell-network internet access. Someday. But this is too much of a burden on a new product today. WiFi is everywhere. Who wants to pay a monthly bill after buying a $1800 laptop. And hell any Mac can pair with a Bluetooth phone that will let it share a network (not the iPhone), or a MacBook Pro can have an EVDO or HDSPA card shoved in its left side.
… If the forthcoming iPhone SDK makes it possible to run a proxy server on the phone again, that will solve the problem too …
Frankly I’m not too worried. I’m only growing to love my iPhone more.
The EDGE internet access around where I live is quite pokey. And since with the new update, the iPhone thinks I live a mile south of reality, that might indicate where the nearest cell phone tower is.
But lately I’ve been spending a lot more time in Downtown Austin, and the iPhone’s EDGE network speeds are surprisingly much faster there. Today I even watched some of the Guided Tours of the new products on my iPhone in a sandwich shop without WiFi. Sure they were the lower bitrate movies Apple was careful to provide, but honestly I think they sacrificed more on sound than video. As long as I’m paying $20/month for unlimited data, I might as well be using it more, eh?
Maybe I’m behind the times, and people who complain about the iPhone are those thirsting for even harder and faster wireless internet. But I’m just appreciating what I’ve got, and realizing I’m only beginning to use my iPhone to its full potential.
Today I reordered my icons, added a web page to the home screen, and dropped a pin in the map. MacWorld 2008’s best product is from a year ago. And it keeps getting better.
Regarding Apple Computers, iPhone | No Comments »
January 4th, 2008
Regarding Politics | 3 Comments »
January 1st, 2008
Hot Damn, indeed. The New York Times neatly sums up what’s gone wrong these past 7 years, and what it will take to right it.
… the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
Regarding Politics | No Comments »