Bwana.org » macintosh

New Core i5/i7 Macbook Pros

Bwana — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:21:55 +0000

Personally, I’m loving my Core i7 desktop here so I know you Macbook Pro users out there will enjoy the performance boost. I think it’s also insane that they’re actually allowing 512GB SSD drive upgrades for a mere $1,300!! What a bargain! *cough* Yeah, SSD is still too expensive for my tastes.

I’ll be in the market for a new Mac in 2011. I have a strict 5 year policy on my machines. I purchased my original Macbook Pro in 2006 and won’t get another Mac until Feb 2011. Hopefully I’ll be able to afford a Mac Pro by that time.

My Thoughts On the Macworld Keynote

Bwana — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 20:54:49 +0000

Now that everyone’s had a chance to digest the new announcements from Apple at Macworld 2008, I’ll go ahead and express my thoughts on each announcement:

Time Capsule [link]

From Apple’s perspective, this creates a great incentive for users to upgrade to Leopard. I believe users will see the benefit of Time Machine and also justify the purchase with a stable 802.11n router.
At $399/$499, I believe they are fairly priced considering the two main components cost about the same separately.
Will I get one? No. But I’ll definitely recommend it to new Leopard users who could use a 802.11n upgrade.

iPhone/iPod Touch Update [link]

Well, we can’t say it was a total surprise since Gear Live reported a leaked firmware a few weeks ago. This turned out to be the exact same release as the official one from Apple.
Customized home screen is a plus considering the SDK release is right around the corner. We’re going to need this functionality for other things.
The Google maps “locate me” feature is easily the star of the show. It was genius of Apple to take a step further and include wi-fi location features. This makes it useful for the iPod Touch and increases accuracy.
$20 for iPod Touch applications is madness. There is no rhyme or reason to such a dumb act. It really makes no sense to me and I feel sorry for all existing iPod Touch owners. They’re the exact same applications that are on the iPhone. Apple really didn’t have to change a thing. This is some kind of dumb tax for something else that iPod Touch users should not have to pay. Ridiculous.

iTunes Movie Rentals / Apple TV Take 2 [link]

This wasn’t a surprise either as it was confirmed by a snafu on Apple’s support website. It’s good to see Apple is doing this.
The real surprise was the support of every major movie studio. As far as I know, this is a first for digital downloads. Microsoft did well with their support but not nearly this much. Netflix as well. I think this will be a huge boost for digital downloads.
AppleTV‘s software update and price drop were a pleasant surprise. Both were welcomed by tech enthusiasts because with the addition of purchase power on the unit and HD rentals, the AppleTV is now a true standalone TV appliance. Removing the virtual tether to a computer was a great idea and really should have been done from the start.
The price point which was chosen is kind of a bitter sweet deal. We all hate DRM and putting a 24 hour viewing restriction on a movie should reduce the prices in my mind, but compared to on demand and Xbox 360 prices, it’s a fair deal. We need another revolution to reduce these prices and restrictions and I’m hoping Apple can lead the way. (Like iTunes really did help remove DRM. I don’t care what anyone says)

Macbook Air [link]

Thin is in? I hope so for Apple’s sake. Apple made a bold move in attempting to redefine the ultraportable laptop market. Apple says ultraportables shouldn’t sacrifice keyboard size and screen size, but they should sacrifice an optical drive and hard drive speed. I’m not in this market, so I can’t really speak for which is better, but I do think Apple is taking a chance here.
Again, the Macbook Air is not for everyone. With the limited battery replacement options, lack of optical drive, memory restrictions (2GB only), pricey SSD option (yes, I know it’s like that everywhere), this machine is clearly not marketed to your “typical” notebook user. The mistake a lot of bloggers and writers are making is that this machine was made for them, when it clearly wasn’t.
I suggest the following questions before considering a Macbook Air: When was the last time you used an optical drive for other than installation? Do you care about carrying extra batteries? Do you need a fast hard drive for video encoding and the like? Are you planning to play video games on a Macbook Air? Do you require a lot of hard drive storage while on the road? Do you need a lot of USB expansion? Do you drop your equipment a lot? Ask yourself these questions before even considering the Macbook Air. In fact, ask yourself these questions before commenting negatively on the machine. Realize, everything Apple or anyone makes was not meant for your exact needs.

I recorded my reaction to each announcement during the keynote on Chris Pirillo’s live channel. The community responded along with me and you’ll probably notice that some of my opinions changed after thinking about them.

The Leopard Upgrade

Bwana — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 04:01:27 +0000

Uploaded with Skitch!

Apple, Inc unleashed their newest operating system, dubbed, Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Es Ten”) Leopard, or just “Leopard”. You haven’t heard? I’m sorry. Well this update to the popular operating system, “Tiger”, has been on the hearts and minds of Apple geeks for almost two years. If you’re curious about what this operating system entails, view Apple’s walk through of the major new features.

The Back Story

Personally, I was looking forward to Mac OS X Leopard more than I was the recently released iPhone. I use Mac OS for a lot of my everyday tasks and I even mix in some of my professional tasks that involve audio and/or video. I’ve had a beef with Mac OS’s Finder for a long long time now. So much so, that I purchased Path Finder from Cocoatech to replace it. The additions of Time Machine and a much beefier iChat really got me excited.

So I used my iPhone $100 rebate to pre-order a copy and it arrived early Friday afternoon. Here’s my story.

The Problem With Expectations

Being a good geek that I am, I backed up my existing Mac OS X Tiger installation using SuperDuper. For some strange reason, the backup failed almost at the end for no reason. For some stranger reason, I threw caution into the wind and decided that enough was backed up to proceed. I booted the Leopard DVD and the fun began:

Leopard could not see my main hard drive^!

Hunh!?!? What happened to the seamless, worry free, problem free installations that I’ve experienced with past versions of Mac OS X. My expectations were too high. I hate when I do that. I booted to Tiger and ran Disk Utility on the drive (Verify Drive). Sure enough, I had errors. Partition table errors which reported inaccurate free space. Why now?!?! I then booted with the Tiger DVD and ran “Repair Disk” on my main drive. Get this: Repair Disk reported zero errors needed to be fixed. What is going on here?!?! Oh well, everything’s good, let’s go ahead and do this upgrade. Without hesitation, I picked the upgrade option and happily skipped away while my Mac upgraded.

After I rebooted, I got the dreaded Leopard Blue Screen of Death^!!

Oh no. Oh no. This can’t be happening. My expectations were too high. I hate when I do that.! I searched the Web: nothing. I searched Apple support forums: nothing. Welcome to early adopter land and it’s time to bite the bullet and figure it out myself.

So after a couple more failed re-installs of the upgrade option, I bit the bullet and performed a clean install. After many, many successful Mac OS upgrades, I felt betrayed. I set the bar too high for Apple’s upgrade and never thought it would fail me like past Windows upgrades. I really hate when I do that.

End result: Successful installation of Leopard.

The Fruits

When Leopard started successfully, I was greeted with the standard Apple video. These are always amazing so I was not surprised. The video showed various versions of “Hello” in different languages. It made me warm inside. I then began to dive into the features:

Finder

Since it was my most anticipated new feature, I tried Finder. I opened it by clicking the Finder icon in the new Dock (which I must say, looks great to me). I immediately switched to the new “Cover Flow” view which shows files like iTunes album art. I scrolled to a PDF file and hit the space bar. Oh my. Quick look absolutely rocks. Quick look enables one to preview files and folders without actually opening them. In this case, I was flipping through a PDF file without opening the PDF viewer. Snazzy. I also opened an Excel spreadsheet and was able to view the contents without having Excel nor Numbers installed!! Say what?!!? OOKAAAAYYY!!. File search worked great too. I must say, my first impressions of Finder were outstanding:

Click To Play
iPhone/iPod Touch users click here

iChat

Since Chris Pirillo got his copy of Leopard installed, I convinced him to help me test out iChat theatre. We were both highly impressed with the Photo Booth effects, File sharing and more importantly, screen sharing. Although the video quality was not stellar, we both kind of expected this due to the nature of our connections. Did I mention I had to do zero configuration with my firewall? It all just worked^TM. Chris and I had a blast testing all the cool effects. I selected the “Roller coaster” effect. It asked me to step out of the frame for a couple seconds and then told me the background image was captured. I stepped back into the frame and began acting the straight fool in front of a virtual roller coaster. Laughter ensued. Good times.

iChat has instantly become a juggernaut. What we have here is a bundled remote desktop / remote sharing / collaboration application which works with little or no configuration. This will turn heads, I guarantee it.

Spaces

As a user of virtual desktops for a number of years (on Linux and other Unix platforms such as Solaris), I didn’t expect to be too impressed with spaces. I was almost right. The difficulty in configuring Spaces was extremely simple and switching desktops with the mouse and keyboard worked as expected. What impressed me was Expose’ within Spaces. Whoa whoa whoa. You zoom out in Expose mode of your Spaces which shows all your spaces on the screen, then you show all your desktop windows within those spaces using Expose’. Here, look:

Click To Play
iPhone/iPod Touch users click here

Time Machine

I don’t need to say much about Time Machine’s features except it’s a built in backup system. Lose a file? Use Time machine to “go back in time” and get it. Time Machine had quite a few hiccups during the first backup. Since I was playing with so much in Leopard while it was backing up, it may have given it a stress test it wasn’t ready for. For example, I interrupted a backup to reboot and upon attempting to backup from where I left off, I got errors. I kept getting errors, until I changed to a different external USB drive. Very weird. At any rate, Time Machine works as advertised once backups get going:

Click To Play
iPhone/iPod Touch users click here

I think this is going to be a life saver for a lot of folks. Unfortunately, for you mobile users, it means carrying around a backup drive everywhere you go. Not convenient at all, nor practical.

The Billions of Little Things

There are a great deal of “little improvements” that make the Leopard user experience seamless and enjoyable. The integration between applications such as Mail, iChat, iCal, and Address Book are even tighter. This is greatly improved over Tiger which seemed like some things were just throw together. It’s kind of hard to explain this, but I believe Leopard feels cleaner. The UI seems more consistent than Tiger, the dialogs make sense, and things work as expected. I ‘m not a big fan of the semi-transparent menu bar, but it’s not enough to make me go in my room and cry.

Conclusion

I didn’t cover all the new features of Leopard since there are so many, and they have been covered in great detail in other places of the intrawebs. I gave you perspective on the installation procedure, Finder, iChat, Spaces and Time Machine. After a bumpy beginning, I can say that I’m satisfied with Leopard and I’ll continue to recommend it to users. I think for the next iteration of Mac OS X, I’ll know how to manage my expectations better and learn how to prepare.

Thanks for reading.

^{! This problem has been confirmed and it has been stated to simply wait 20 minutes for your drive to appear.}
^{!! This problem has been confirmed and it has been stated to remove custom hacks such as Application Enhancer. Funny, I didn’t have this installed, but I did have Uno installed. Hmmm.}

A lesson learned

Bwana — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 03:00:21 +0000

A little while ago, a company named Apple taught me a lesson that I should have remembered from Public Enemy in the late 80s: “Don’t believe the hype!” I’ve learned to recognize speculation for what it is and keep my expectations low. I saw in in endo today that there is another rumor that the fabled Video iPod will be released on April 1st. It’s time to put on the pessimistic hat and say: “YEAH, RIGHT! I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT BUDDY!!”

I’m not getting burned again. Thanks Apple, I need a good smack across the head every now and then.

(Please be true..)

Is your Mac sleepy?

Bwana — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 02:07:00 +0000

I saw a hint today on macosxhints.com regarding the ability to put your Mac to sleep using the Apple remote. This little cool feature works with Macs with infrared sensors (with FrontRow preloaded basically) I immediately thought, “That’s a cool feature”, but then I read on:

Note that if you happen to use a remote-equipped Mac in a public place, you may wish to disable the IR remote, lest you find your machine suddenly sleeping thanks to tricksters nearby with their own remotes! You can do this in the Security System Preferences panel.

I started to laugh.

This would be hilarious to watch like in say, an airport. Some guy is typing away, sending an email to his loved one and *BAM*, his computer goes to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I don’t know why I would be cracking up if this happened. Maybe I had a long day. So, if you have an infrared port on your Mac, be sure to disable it in public places. You might experience a prankster putting your Mac to sleep from afar.

Technorati Tags: apple, funny, macbookpro, osxhints

early flight = all nighter

apple new stuff reactions

Bwana — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:57:39 +0000

well overall i’m disappointed at apple’s new announcements:

new macminis – overpriced in my opinion, especially with only 512MB ram. even with the speed improvements, putting the 1.67 core duo @800 dollars base price is too much. they should have put a tv tuner in there. it makes absolutely no sense to keep the imac price the same and raise the macmini price. update: ok, it comes with standard bluetooth and wifi which makes it a bit better. i also saw a dual layer superdrive as standard on the high end model as well. But, it has 64MB of shared video memory which is God awful. the price doesn’t look completely terrible now, but the fact that it now has shared memory really really sucks. maybe this is a byproduct of using intel on the low end? who knows. such a disappointment here.
ipod speaker accessory – i already have one of these and it costed me $90. ~~what makes this one from apple worth $350? i have no idea. way overpriced.~~ just looked at the design and i can see why it costs so much. it’s not your ordinary 2 inch speaker setup, it looks to be pretty well engineered. i’m not in the market for this though. good for dorms and those lookin for a sleek lookin stereo in their bachelor pad. that’s not me.
$100 ipod case – who cares? i don’t.

well, i guess i can be happy that my pockets are safe. thanks apple for a lackluster announcement. my credit cards thank you even more.

macbook pro cinebench results

Bwana — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 17:53:48 +0000

got a request to do this over at macnn forums. thought i’d share the results with you here

update: just got some perspective on these results:

Athlon FX-60 (2.8GHz): 692
Intel Pentium 955 EE (3.46GHz): 666
Athlon64 X2-4800+ (2.4GHz): 638
Intel Pentium 840D (3.2GHz): 532
MacBook Pro (2.0GHz): 563

Technorati Tags: macbookpro

macbook pro xbench results

Bwana — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:59:31 +0000

i just ran a quick xbench on the macbook pro, here are the results. score: 63.56

update: per user comment, i disabled quartz beam sync and reran the test. results are here. new score: 80.16 It should be noted that XBench is not optimized for the intel platform and these numbers should be looked at as such.

macbook pro hath arrived

Bwana — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:26:43 +0000

yup, to my surprise it arrived this morning. i have posted some initial pictures over at flickr. check em out:

very good initial impressions. of course, it smokes everything in my house (all G4s). i tried running coconutbattery to get some indication of the max battery capacity/life, but the app crashed. darn. look for much more as i tinker with this thing today.

ready for macbook pro/intel switch?

Bwana — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:05:04 +0000

am i really ready to switch my mac experience to the intel platform? i compiled a list of my most used applications on osx, and determined whether they were universal binary or rosetta emulation. out of my 24 most used applications, 14 were universal binaries and 10 were rosetta emulation. only one i could confirm would not be universal binary until 2007, and that’s the well known adobe photoshop. here’s the list for those curious:

Feeder – Universal
Transmit – Universal
iLife 06 (Garageband, iTunes) – Universal
Terminal – Universal
Safari – Universal
Camino – Universal
Geektool – Intel build @ kung-foo.tv
AdiumX – Universal
Quicksilver – Universal
Connect 360 – Universal
Audio Hijack Pro – Universal
OmniOutliner – Universal
Growl - Universal
iWork 06 – Universal

Firefox – Rosetta
Desktop Manager – Rosetta
Photoshop – Rosetta
MPlayer – Rosetta
Azureus – Rosetta
Skype – Rosetta (ON2 video codecs are using ALTIVEC, which can be emulated)
tickr – Rosetta
TinkerTool – Rosetta
Snapz Pro X – Rosetta (Universal in works)
Asterisk – Rosetta

i was pleased to see that out of these 10 that have to be emulated, only 2 cost money: Adobe Photoshop and Snapz Pro X. when my macbook pro arrives on wednesday, i think i’ll be ready..

It shipped

Bwana — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 15:44:12 +0000

macbook pro eta: Feb 22

apple’s valentine

Bwana — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 19:55:33 +0000

just got this in my inbox. i’m sorry apple, but i already have a valentine. you seem to be pulling my heart strings, but this guy’s taken…

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Today we announced that this week Apple will begin shipping the new 15.4-inch MacBook Pro featuring the Intel Core Duo processor, a built-in iSight, Front Row with Apple Remote and more. The reception of the MacBook Pro has been tremendous and we are working hard to ship as many units as fast as possible.

Better still, prior to shipment we’ve improved the entire MacBook Pro family with configurations starting at 1.83Ghz up to 2.16GHz. We have upgraded your MacBook Pro from a 1.83GHz processor to a 2.0GHz processor at no additional cost! We anticipate shipping your upgraded order by February 28, 2006.

To learn more about the most recent upgrades to the MacBook Pro family, please visit http://www.apple.com/macbookpro. You might be interested to know that Apple is offering an even faster processor – the 2.16GHz. This is a custom configured option and is available for an additional charge.

If you decide you’d like to make a change to your upgraded MacBook Pro order, we’re happy to help. You may reach us at at 1-800-676-2775, Mon-Fri 7 am-10 pm and 9 am-6 pm Sat-Sun (Central). Some change requests may extend your shipment date slightly. If we do not hear from you by February 18th, we will ship the MacBook Pro 2.0Ghz Intel Core Duo.

Our systems will reflect the change to your order by February 15. Please visit http://www.apple.com/orderstatus for the most up-to-date information on your upgraded order. A shipment notification, with tracking information, will be emailed to you as soon as your order is shipped.

Thank you very much for shopping at the Apple Store!

Sincerely,
The Apple Store Team

(yeaaahyuhh)

macbook pro speed-bump

Bwana — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:17:27 +0000

what a way to start my day. apple has announced that they have started shipping macbook pros (mine hasn’t shipped yet), but they also announced this little gem:

All models of the new MacBook Pro will ship with faster Intel Core Duo processors than previously announced, delivering even greater performance at no additional cost. The $2,499 model now includes a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, up from the previously announced 1.83 GHz, and will begin shipping this week. The $1,999 model now includes a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, up from the previously announced 1.67 GHz, and will begin shipping next week.

i am so pleasantly surprised by this. i’m getting a 2.0ghz core duo instead of a 1.83!!

in the words of lil jon, “YEEEAAAAHHYYUHHH”

connect360

Bwana — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 04:26:16 +0000

i heard about it. tried it. it works. man does it work! took all of 2 minutes which included me turning off my useless osx firewall.

no, itunes music store songs don’t work, but if you’re like me, that doesn’t matter as 95% of my library is straight cd rips. now i can listen to tunes while downloading demos like the newly released king kong demo. also, my wife can listen to her favorite tracks when she plays bejeweled 3 or hardwood hearts. beautiful.

xbox 360 very first impressions

upsurge in pc vs mac debates

Bwana — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 22:15:41 +0000

have you all noticed the upsurge in pc vs mac debates on the web? usually around macworld, the debates are refueled since apple usually announces something new, but this year it’s a bit abnormal. i think i know why:

the line between macs and pcs is not so discrete anymore.

with the introduction of intel macintoshes, both pcs and macs have a more common architecture under the hood. what does this do? it causes the the pc (most pc and windows users) supporters to compare the new apple hardware to cheaper so-called “equivalent” hardware. on the other side, it causes active mac supporters (commonly referred to as “zealots”) to actively defend apple’s “quality package” which is usually the reason for investment. some have used the reasoning that a “computer is a computer” which means that both tools accomplish the same thing. basically along the lines of saying “a tool is just a tool”. from my experience, the more complex tools become, the greater the probability that they will NOT behave similarly.

i refuse to turn this into a pc vs mac debate but i will say this. people will use what they prefer and they will rationalize their choice until the cows come home. humans get accustomed to certain ways and usually changing these ways is not preferred. if you ever get into a pc vs mac argument, please consider that it’s possible that no matter what you say, it will not convince the other party that your computer is better for them. and that’s the truth.