Recently my computer has been taking a LONG time to reboot.

I installed this networking program, DAVE 7.1, the other day and thought maybe it was the culprit. Nope.

So I started digging into the Console system log and son of a bitch I found out that my external modem was the last entry in the log, then 4 minutes of NADA then the next entry. Oh, let me say that from the time I hit the power button to the time I started booting into my personal account's GUI was taking 5 minutes! Well anyway, I had moved the modem a while back from the back of my iMac to my powered USB hub. I moved it directly to the iMac and voila, I now go from shutdown and hit the power button and in 30 seconds I'm booting into my account GUI.

Phew!

I was starting to think that I was going to have to do a Windows'esque reinstall of my system to fix things up.

Note to self, the next time I have issues remember to disconnect ALL peripherals and see if that resolves the issue.

We have all been bombarded from our favorite Apple and Technology sites about the Jesus Phone 2.0, aka iPhone 2.0.

Just couple things to note from the first day of WWDC 2008.

First is the lower initial price of the 3G iPhone. It is great that the new iPhone cost less money upfront, however, it is a bummer that the monthly service fee will be more expensive than the current Edge Network based iPhone. I don’t know if the 3G service plans being offered for the 3G iPhone are more or less expensie than what other carriers are offering for the 3G phones they sell - nonetheless it’s sort of a drag that the monthly fee is increasing - even if the speeds are better. I’m sure that you’ll likely be better off paying a few more bucks a month and hundreds less for the 3G iPhone anyway.

MobileMe, I’m actually very excited about the upgrades to MobileMe as it replaces .Mac. I recently became a paying user of .Mac, I came around to seeing the value of it but admittedly I was banking on the fact that it would be revamped and upgraded at some point. I didn’t expect the overhaul to come so soon, and neither did I expect it to go away from .Mac and to MobileMe. Time to change my email address with everybody yet one more time...

I have a feeling that the move from .Mac to MobileMe is a very deliberate one. While I know that Apple is extremely proud of their Mac computers, it seems that they are trying to sanitize .Mac from being a Mac only offering. By calling it MobileMe and working with Microsoft’s Outlook they appear to be trying to make MobileMe appeal not only to Mac users but also Windows users who use an iPhone. Given the success of the iPod on the Windows platform it is hard to argue this strategy if it is in fact something that Apple is trying to do.

It does seem to me that Apple should give away a year free subscription to .Mac/MobileMe with every Mac computer purchase, and slash the annual fee from $99 to $49. I’ll bet it would grow exponentially in the number of users, and the profits they make from it.

Net Applications tracks the market share of computers in use by a proprietary method of monitoring web activity. So these numbers are only as good as their logic behind the data - however, it should give relatively decent numbers in so far as trends go. And the Mac has been and is continuing to trend upward.

I saw the other day that Apple has a 66% market share in computers over $1000, wow - that’s pretty impressive.

All around me I see Apple making inroads, both in notebooks and iMac’s. It’s great to see more and more people realizing how nice an the Mac ecosystem is for us users.

I recently decided to upgrade the internal hard drive in my iMac. What surprised me was how simple it really is to do, and how much of a performance benefit I gained.

Time Required: About 1 hour.
Tools needed: 1 new large and fast SATA hard drive, screw driver kit with Torx 6 and 8, 2 or 3 suction cups, can of compressed air, LCD cleaning cloth.

iMac ready to undergo surgery

I picked up my current 24" iMac September last year, it has suited me very well. But I've never been pleased that you can't add additional hard drives to the iMac like you can a Mac Pro, or most PC's. I have a couple of externals that I use for additional storage and for cloning with SuperDuper! Finally I decided that I'd be better served with a large drive in my iMac and a large external drive to clone it onto. Just a two drive system, no other externals for extra storage capacity - this is simple and easy and fits my lifestyle better.

Once I realized that a ReadyNAS NV+ really wasn't be best and easiest solution I began to look for information on how to go about upgrading the hard drive in a new iMac, I knew it wasn't a user accessible drive but figured somebody had figured it out. Sure enough - Tom Sawyer over on the MacRumor forums had been a pioneering fellow and posted a tutorial on how he did the deed. I read his write up twice and decided I could surely do this myself.

Tom has written a nice guide, but there were some things that I felt could have been elaborated on a bit more so I am writing up my experience in a guide.

• I'm sure you're wondering if you have what it takes to upgrade the drive in your own iMac. If you have ever put together a PC or maybe swapped out a motherboard in a PC, hell if you've ever watched McGyver I think you're qualified to take on this task successfully. Seriously, all you need are the right tools and some patience and care.

• Before beginning you'll need to get a new hard drive, I chose the Samsung F1 750GB drive which was $140 delivered from Newegg. I would have loved the extra space and outstanding performance of the Samsung F1 1TB drive, but it is almost double the price so I went with the 750GB instead. Hard Drives are like operating systems and religions, people firmly believe in the brands they like. I don't think you can go wrong with the Seagate drives, I'd stay away from the large Western Digital GP drives because they are only 5,400rpm despite being labeled as variable 5,400 to 7,200rpm. The new Samsung drives are getting mixed ratings at NewEgg, but most of the problems are because of some issue with these drives, Vista and nVidia drivers - nothing that affects us Mac users. I've used Samsung drives before and they've always been fast and dead silent, so my choice was easy.

• I read Tom Sawyers guide to doing the upgrade over at the MacRumor's Forums.

• Snagged a screw driver kit for the weekend from our IT guy at work, complete with Torx size 6 and 8, two most used items in the upgrade. You need suction cups to pop the protective cover off the iMac, instead of buying a set of them at Home Depot I opted to use the side window Sun Shade in my car which has two suction cups (happy to save a couple dollars in the process.) You'll definitely want to have a can of compressed air for cleaning out your iMac and getting all of the dust off of the LCD when you put it all back together.

My new 750GB Samsung F1, screwdriver/Torx kit, window shade (with suction cups), and Tom's tutorial

• I first removed the iMac from my office, and placed it lying facing up on my kitchen counter on top of a folded bath towel which was protect the iMac from case scratches.

• Next I attached the two suction cups to one side of the [plastic, not glass] cover on the front of the iMac. Here's one of the first mistakes I almost made. You really need three suction cups, two on one side at both ends, and one suction cup on the opposite end of the screen in the center. When I pulled the screen off with the two suction cups and started to pull it up higher, I heard a bad noise. It turns out that there are pins attached to the underside of the plastic cover, and unless you pull the screen relatively straight off, you can break these pins and or the entire plastic cover. I was working carefully so didn't damage my cover, but this was a close call. You can probably do it with just two suction cups if you pull the one end up only a couple inches then reach over and lift up the other side with your fingers. The red dots indicate where I would put the suction cups, lift with the side with two cups, when it pops up, lift with the third cup to fully remove.

• Be sure to take extra special care to not touch the LCD screen after removing the protective cover.

suction cups attached, ready to remove the cover.



protective screen now removed

• Next you need to use your Torx screw driver and remove all the screws surrounding the LCD screen from the aluminum front bezel. I put red dots on the picture above to show where the screws are that need to be removed to get the front bezel off.

• Remove the memory access panel now.

• Life the aluminum bezel from the top of the iMac, be careful to not lift very far, you need to disconnect the iSight.

iSight cable to disconnect

• After disconnecting the iSight cable, (be sure you removed the memory access panel, keep lifting the bezel from the top and wiggle it a little and it will fully come off the body of the imac. Where the bezel fits at the bottom of the iMac is just a tongue and groove type fit, you may have to push the bezel downward slightly at the bottom of the iMac after lifting the bezel at the top of the iMac. The bezel comes off very easy after disconnecting the iSight.

iMac with the bezel removed

• Next is to free the LCD from the iMac. First remove the 8 Torx screws holding it to the iMac (I show 6 of them with red dots in the picture above, there are 4 screws on either side of the screen.) When you begin to lift the LCD panel away from the computer, I found it best to lift it from the top by the iSight, pivoting at the bottom. When reinstalling the LCD panel, set the bottom in first then carefully put the top back down into the iMac.

• Side note - the main fan had a fair amount of dust in it, so I covered my LCD screen with a clean kitchen towel and cleaned the fan out with a can of compressed air. Look at the visible dust in the first picture, then how much cleaner it is after blowing it with air. Note - I also cleaned the other fan I noticed near the hard drive, I think there is a third fan also but I didn't notice it.

Dirty Fan



Clean fan

• There are two sets of wires that you need to disconnect from the iMac which prevent you from lifting the LCD away from the iMac. I didn't snap a picture of the fist set, but it is a set of 4 wires and they are just to the right of the main fan at the lower left of the imac. I've drawn a red line next to the wires in the picture just above.

LCD DVI connection.

• The next set of wires I think is the DVI connection, it is shown in the picture above, circled in red. Tom's guide talked about this being difficult to put back in upon reassembly but I found that it just snapped right in without any issue at all.

• Tom recommends removing the power connection to the LCD which requires removing a small circuit board, I think it's much easier and safer to leave it connected and work on the iMac with the LCD still connected to the power. If you have somebody to help they can hold the panel up for you, I did it myself, by putting the LCD just inside the lip of the iMac's back plastic case and tilting it up, then I rested the LCD panel on my head while I worked on the hard drive.

LCD panel tilted up



angled view

• The picture above shows where the hard drive is installed, my drive is out at this point but I outlined where it was in red.

• Before you remove the drive, you need to disconnect the thermal sensor, it is under a 1" foam square. Pull off the foam square, and remove the sensor attached to the wire from the plastic mount on the drive. I show a picture of the mount down below.

• To remove the hard drive you need to remove the two Torx screws on the top side of the drive, from the black plastic handle / mount.

• Carefully lift the drive up (where you just removed the two screws). There are two screw/pins mounted on the bottom side of the drive, pull it towards the top of the iMac to remove these pins from the mounts.

• Carefully remove the SATA and Power cables from the drive and lift the drive out of the belly of the iMac.

• Using a knife or screwdriver, remove the thermal sensor mount from the hard drive. I pushed it onto my new drive, and used a little Gorilla Glue on either end to ensure that it would stay put.

Thermal sensor mounting bracket.

• This item I either missed from Tom's guide, or he didn't list it, but on the other side of the hard drive is a small square of foam tape attached to the drive, it's about 3/8" square. I only noticed this after I'd put my iMac completely back together again, but you can certainly transfer it to your new drive now that you know about it.

• Now you being the reassembly of the iMac. Everything goes back together in exact reverse as the disassembly took place.

• One thing I messed up was when I sprayed my LCD panel to remove any dust, I tilted the can of compressed air too much and it sprayed liquid onto my LCD panel! I freaked out momentarily after seeing a reside remaining after it dried. Luckily an LCD cleaning cloth cleaned it up very easily. I would highly recommend you have one of these clothes handy, it's very likely that you will get a small smudge or two on the LCD during the drive upgrade - these clothes make quick work of them. I got my cloth with my LCD TV when I purchased it, but I think it's the same cloth used to clean optical glasses too.

I think I could do the job in about half the time the next time I do it, I was going slowly and cautiously, but it really wasn't as difficult of a job as I had been anticipating. In fact it was darned right easy to do.

Now that it's completed I'm really seeing the benefits. I've got a large internal drive with enough capacity to warehouse all of my data on a single drive. I only need 1 external firewire drive to Clone my main drive for safety (using SuperDuper!). I've decided to just go with a SuperDuper! clone and not use Time Machine.

SPEED, there's the great thing, my new hard drive is far faster than the stock Western Digital 320GB drive that it replaced. My Xbench score on my original drive was a respectable 72.91, the new Samsung F1 750GB measures 93.02, a 28% increase. This change (and going from 3GB to 4GB of RAM) increased my overall computers XBench rating from 151.17 to 164.95, a 9% overall increase. These are benchmarks you say, they don't mean anything! But I am seeing dramatic improvements in speed in real life usage as well. It now only takes about 6 seconds to launch Windows XP in fusion, about 3.5 seconds to close it. I'm seeing DOUBLE the transfer rates when doing the initial clone of my drive to my external FireWire drive. My iMac definitely is faster with disc activity than it was when stock.

I couldn't be more pleased at how easy this upgrade was to do, the increase in performance, and the simplicity it brought to my storage needs.

Thanks again to Tom and his guide for giving me the information and courage to attempt the upgrade myself.

If you are interested, I have posted a 20mb zip file with full size images of all the pictures in the guide.

The new MacBook Air is a cool computer, sure I'd prefer it had a gigabit ethernet port and preferably FireWire but otherwise I think it rocks. My friends think that Apple blew it and that they should have closer replicated the old 12" PowerBook which was narrower.

But the Macbook Air is what it is, like it or not.

My question is, would you rather have a MacBook Air 1.8ghz, or a standard 2.0ghz MacBook, an AppleTV, an iPhone, and a 500GB Time Capsule? Because the MacBook Air 1.8ghz actually costs more than all of those other items combined.

Door #1
$2,099 - MacBook Air




Door #2
$2,026 - MacBook, AppleTV, iPhone, 500GB Time Capsule

I would certainly pick door #2.

Red [HD DVD] has seemingly taken it in the shorts recently with Warner Bros. going exclusively with Bluray. But might they both take it in the shorts by Take 2 (AppleTV Take 2) or other video on demand services?

I recently upgraded my entire AV system and a part of that upgrade was the cheapest HiDef DVD player I could find - a Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player. Admittedly I was pulling for the HD DVD format but it looks like a long shot now for it to become the dominate format over Sony's Bluray.

My consolation in buying the HD DVD is that it was very inexpensive at $140, came with 5 DVD's, and NetFlix has a really decent selection of HD DVD's that I've been watching. After I've watched all the HD DVD's from Netflix that interest me, what is my next choice? I ask this with the assumption that Bluray will be the dominant HiDef DVD format out there.

Well, actually, I don't plan on picking up a Bluray player in the near or medium future. Now that Apple has upgraded the AppleTV software to the 'Take 2' complete with HD movie rentals - I'm quite likely to hang up my long standing NetFlix subscription and simply rent HD movies from Apple directly to my AppleTV. Yes, a Bluray disc would have higher quality than an AppleTV HD movie rental due to the enormous capacity and high bitrates used. However, I have a feeling that the HD movies will look very good via the AppleTV. I've transcoded some HD rips that were on the Usenet, purely in the name of research. The resulting AppleTV compliant HD files are around 2.5 - 4GB in size and look awesome. I'm assuming that the AppleTV HD movie rentals will be encoded in similar or better quality, especially since they aren't going through multiple encoding steps (HiDef DVD -> MKV -> AppleTV MP4).

5.1 Dolby Digital audio will be offered on the HD movies, this is fantastic. As of now we're all waiting to see exactly how this is being accomplished since the MP4 format does not accommodate AC3 sound. It would be great if they are taking a 6 channel AAC audio stream and transcoding it to AC3, this would save a tremendous amount of disc space since AC3 is so very inefficient with regards to size.

The new menus for the AppleTV rental screens are simply gorgeous, well done, I can't wait to check it out very soon and rent an HD movie to scope out the quality.

Have you seen how the OSX86 'Hackintosh' crowd have been successfully running Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard on that new super cheap Asus Eee PC?

If I'm not mistaken Asus OEM's the current MacBook's for Apple, so what in the world is holding The Mighty Jobs from introducing something similar to the Asus Eee PC for the Mac Market. Engadget noted that Asus estimates it will sell nearly 4 million of these PC's next year. I don't know about you, but I'll bet Apple could move a boatload of these babies if they were Mac's.

The cheapest Mac available is the Mini, and it needs a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The Mini itself starts at nearly $600, add in the other goodies and you're easily over $800. I'm not going to argue the merits of Mac vs PC, but it's arguably a tough to sell for somebody who has always had PC's and they can get a complete Dell system with Windows, keyboard, mouse, and monitor for under $500 on sale.

Throw the dog a bone, offer a sub $500 notebook Mac and watch the masses flock to it.

After a few more days with Leopard, I've got a few other thoughts.

1. I really like how the Finder now has a 'Green bar' effect with colored stripes. I tend to show files/folders in my Finder in the list view with is wide, the new colored lines makes it much easier to follow left to right.
2. Spotlight. Oh, I'm so sad about this one that I may have to go get another glass of this fabulous Malbec that I'm drinking. If you click on the Spotlight icon and enter some text to do a search, the resulting window looks the same as it did in Tiger, but if you click the 'Show All' button things are quite different. In Tiger, the Show All was a bigger version of what the initial search displayed, it grouped/categorized the results, but now in Leopard it's a scatter listing much in the same way how Windows search results have been displayed since I can remember. Well, I'm no fan of the non-categorized list. It's really sad that a feature I used many times a day is now gone!
3. Spotlight. Hey wait a second, see that Plus button to the far right on the Show All screen??? You can select document type, date criteria and more. Don't misunderstand, for how I used Spotlight in Tiger - Tiger's Show All page was superior to the new page. However, these new features are good, just not as good as it was to me.
4. Many of the programs I use daily have already been updated by the developers, I have to think that within a few weeks most common apps will have been updated.
5. Time Machine, it's going crazy doing backups all the time - but it's pretty behind the scenes not much to really notice. I haven't tried to restore yet. Also not sure if I'll still use SuperDuper! along with Time Machine or what. The Time Machine backup drive is not bootable, MacOSXhints.com had a good tip on how to make that drive bootable, read more here.
6. I'm liking the new Dock even more, can't believe people are getting rid of the new "3D" dock.
7. Windows Explorer is ugly, but is very good at what it does. Leopard's finder is a nice improvement over Tiger's finder, admitedly it's not as good as Windows Explorer from what, 2001? But it's not bad, I don't get in a huff about it - I've learned to work with it very well. I am a bit amazed though that so many people are in agreement with me that Windows Explorer is still better. Well, that's not what amazes me, but rather than Apple - the king of Human Interface Design hasn't been able to best Windows Explorer after all these years.
8. Doh! My brother bought a new 24" iMac a couple of days ago from Amazon, and it didn't include an upgrade to Leopard - only computers bought from Apple or a subset of Apple resellers qualify for the upgrade. LAME.
9. I'm still having trouble connecting to shares on my WinXP machine on the LAN, and digging to the discussions on Apple's forums have shown that I'm not the only one having this problem. Note to self: next time wait a month after release to install the new Apple OS.
10. On Tiger, using Camino - I was always able to just enter a domain name and hit enter and it would go to it. For example, I could type in the word "ford", hit enter, and it would go to http://www.ford.com however, now if I hit ford, and enter, it doesn't go there. WTF? I do use OpenDNS, I'll have to turn that off and see if anything changes - but I used OpenDNS with Tiger. This sort of backwards functionality rubs me the wrong way.

It does sound like I'm down on Leopard doesn't it. Well I do like the new bits, but also feel like some of the functions and features that I was very fond of have been reduced - this isn't going over well with me.

1. Stacks (on the Dock) sounded really cool until I went to use them. I'd much prefer that clicking on it opened the folder in Finder, I don't like the springboard or grid options.
2. I see that there are already hacks to axe the Shelf and 3D look to the Dock - I rather like it.
3. Make sure you uninstall UNO before upgrading to Leopard, whoops - live and learn.
4. I used to be able to connect to a Windows machine on my LAN by using it's network name, now I can't do that - am forced to connect to it via it's IP. And I'm having some issue connecting to certain shared folders with full read/write privileges. Not sure wtf is going on here.
5. The expanded use of CoverFlow is really nice.
6. Quick Look is awesome.
7. I'm using Time Machine, but don't have any experience with it to report just yet.
8. Dockless, a great util to keep some Apps from showing up in the Doc no longer works, this saddens me - hopefully it will be updated for Leopard soon.
9. Gizmo Project is not working in Leopard, I'm sure an update is not far off.
10. Spaces is nice, and there are some good things about it. But honestly, I miss some of the features from Desktop Manager, like being able to show the virtual desktops in the Menu Bar, complete with outlines of open Apps. It was a one click affair to change virtual desktops via mouse with Desktop Manager, with Spaces you have to click the icon on the menu bar and then click the desktop you want. This may sound trivial, but it's far more effort if you do it frequently.
11. Partitions can now be re-sized without destructively losing data in Leopard, wow, that's fantastic.
12. I used to use VineOSX VNC server because Apple Remote Desktop wouldn't allow me to connect with low bandwidth settings, and it doesn't work with Leopard. And unfortunately, the new ARD in Leopard also only works if I connect in high bandwidth mode.
13. Preview, I felt this was one of the unsung hero's of Tiger - and it's far improved for Leopard.
14. I'd swear that I read somewhere that Time Machine would give you the option of backing up USER data only, or everything including all system files. I see no such option available, however.
15. The Red, Yellow, and Green buttons on the top bar of windows are higher contrast now and much easier to distinguish.
16. Installs have more graphics when completed, easier to see.
17. iChat now has a tabbed interface, I just wish it were interoperable with other services.
18. Terminal is something I rarely use, but I can see that it's really beefed up. Not only is it tabbed - you can grab a tab and tear it off, move it back to being tabbed. Neat stuff for you command line junkies.
19. Mail.Appetizer no longer works with Mail, guess I'll move to a growl notification for mail.
20. The Menu Bar is better contrast now and easier to see items on it. Also, the Spotlight is no longer a garish blue, but a simple black icon.
21. The new Folder Icons are far better than Tiger.
22. Damn, have you seen Apple's stock price!

I'm not trying to be critical, I like Leopard - a lot. The itemized list above is just some of the observations I had. The connecting to local machine and mounting volumes is my really only issue I'm having right now. There's a lot of great stuff, and more stuff that I haven't had time to explore. But this is a worthy upgrade to Tiger.

My fingers are crossed that it's stable and runs as well as Tiger did.

IMAP is great, it's one of the mail reasons I've been using one of AOL's free email services, AIM for several years - free IMAP support.

If you're not familiar with what IMAP is, it's a setup where you keep your email on the main server, you don't download and delete from the server like POP. Gmail was accessed via a web browser, which is stored on the server like IMAP. But with IMAP protocol you can use the email client of your choice, say Mail[.App] or the iPhone two name a couple...

Great stuff. The news is currently breaking everywhere, but this is big for a lot of people so I'm posting it here.

From EngadgetMobile:

It's absolutely no secret that Google has a few humble fans of their email service, whose prayers have finally been answered. G's giving its users free -- yes, free -- IMAP access to their inboxes; great for desktop users, sure, but the people most likely to benefit from this development are those on mobile email clients (especially those unable to use the Java Gmail app). Hell, Google knows it and even whipped up an iPhone setup page to help Apple users get the real Gmail experience (instead of that crap out of box implementation someone so wrongly thought we'd be satisfied with). How do you get IMAP enabled? Well, if you don't see it in your Gmail options, log out and back in again. Still don't see it? Wait. Wait, and check the blogs, friend.

While Apple's stock is reaching stratospheric levels and everything is firing on all cylinders. The new cat, Mac OS X Leopard 10.5, is about to be [officially] released at 6PM this Friday. However, sources have confirmed that the final version of Leopard can be found on both the usenet and torrent sites as of today.

Microsoft monitors the uploading of their software and contacts people's ISP's, Apple could be following suit. In any event, support our favorite computer and OS developer, do the right thing and purchase it.

By the way, if you are a student, or know one, in the USA college and university bookstores will be selling Leopard for the nice price of $69. If you don't qualify for the education deal you can order it for $99 plus reasonable shipping here.

I did my first Keynote presentation the other day, then came the fateful moment... How was I going to play this on the Windows based Dell at school.

It turns out that Keynote does a bang up job of exporting a Keynote presentation to a Quicktime movie. The cool thing is that it acts much like it would playing it back in Keynote, you advance and back through the slides, all the effects how and everything. It's really pretty awesome. The only real downfall is that the files are much larger because it's a movie, and you can't quickly back up or go forward multiple slides.

If you want to check it out, here's a link to the Keynote Presentation that I did, I exported it to a small 320x240 size to keep it small, 7 megs. open the file and it'll start in Quicktime (Mac or Windows) hit enter or click on the screen to start it, you can keep clicking or use the right arrow key to advance, left arrow key to reverse.

I was putting together a Keynote presentation this evening, it included a quote that contained the word "whilst". Keynote put the red squiggly line underneath it, indicating that it was either misspelled or that it wasn't in the dictionary. In order to double check the spelling, I opened the Mac OS X Dictionary and it had the word and definition, whilst.

I wonder why it is that the Mac OS X dictionary contains words that are not in the spelling function of programs from Apple? Don't they utilize the same dictionary?

I ran across an article today on the International Herald Tribune about Quiet Computing. It quickly caught my eye because I used to be in the PC Quiet Computing Camp, and I heavily relied on SilentPCReview.com which contributed to the article. In fact, when I switched from PC back to the Mac in February '06, I wrote an article for SilentPCReview.com to talk about, of the many benefits, how incredibly quiet the iMac is.

What is interesting to me is how much money people pay for a nice quiet PC, often up to $5,000! Wouldn't it just be cheaper, easier, and more elegant to get an iMac and run Windows on it if that's the OS of their choice? They'd save a ton of money in the process. If the purpose is for a living room type installation, then the iMac with it's integrated screen may not be a good fit, and it's questionable if the Mac Mini has what would be required.

Anyway, the one sure thing is the iMac is not only a great computer, but it's really quiet too. I certainly appreciate this reality.

September 2007 Keynote Address: Everybody has seen all the news on todays Apple Event going over the refreshed iPod line and the new killer $399 price on the 8GB iPhone.

Huge stuff. Not just the new iPod's but the pricing on the Nano blew me away, significantly cheaper than before. I think Apple is keeping the heat on the competition. Sure we can nitpick, where is FM tuning on iPods (no, really, where is it?), where is the ability to record to your iPod using a high quality microphone or other low level source, etc. But in general, these are really impressive devices at very reasonable prices.

I am not, however, interested in upgrading my trusty iPod RED Nano 4GB that I got for Christmas last year, still love it, and plan to continue using it for the the foreseen future. The new Nano is cool and all, but my Nano suits my needs very well.

DAMN, $399 for the 8GB iPhone which was previously selling very well at $599, that's going to tempt a lot of people who were on the fence. And it has already pissed off a lot of people who paid $599 for the same phone. Come on Apple, the least you can do is credit those people with $200 in their iTunes account.

Check it all out, Apple has now posted a decent resolution video of todays event (480x270).

I'm glad to see that Microsoft doesn't look to be monopolizing the new "open office" document format standards, in my opinion it should be with a group like the OpenDocument Foundation, not Microsoft. Mark one up for a good practice.

From the International Herald Tribune: The fight over the standard, while technically arcane, is commercially important because more and more governments are demanding interchangeable "open" document formats for their vast amounts of records. Currently, the only standardized format available to government purchasers is OpenDocument Format, developed by a consortium led by International Business Machines, which the ISO approved in May 2006.

Full Story from IHT

ThinkSecret posted some commentary on the latest build of Leopard OS X 10.5 build 9A527, and many great screenshots, this is well worth a few minutes to read the text and few the gallery.

The MacBU has just sparked up a new site for Mac Office users, Art of Office. Art of Office is a place for people to submit artistic and/or useful content made using Office applications (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). Whether it’s creating pixel art using Excel (a la our Post-it Notes) developing an animated short story in PowerPoint or artistic pieces in Word, this online community allows you to share, rate, remix and discuss user-submitted content with other Mac Office users around the world. It’s a fun way to show unique applications of our product and helps people think of Mac Office in ways they may not have thought of before.

Uncle Walt [Mossberg] did a nice quick video review of Apple's newly updated iWork suite, now complete with a spreadsheet application.

He sums it up very nicely by saying that if you're a Mac user and you want a nice Office suite and you aren't primarily a power Office user, then iWork may well be a great option for you.

Apple Insider did a nice review of the new aluminum 24" iMac. I found that I was very much in agreement with their review on most every point they made, except their final rating.

Despite the fantastic package that the iMac is, it's new lower price point with a faster system, AppleInsider only rated the new iMac a 3.5 out of 5.0??? This seems quite odd to me, 4.5 would have seemed more in line with the review.

Sure I would prefer a matte screen, at least the option, but other than that I don't think there is much to complain about with this machine, in virtually everything you look at with this new iMac - it excels very well. It's an amazing machine at a very reasonable price.

Maybe they were secretly disappointed that Leopard did not come pre-installed?

I read through the Engadget liveblog of today's Apple event like a junkie looking for a fix. And I certainly wasn't let down.

The highlights are (you can click on the images for that page at Apple.com)

An all new iMac [Pro looking computer.] Gone is the 17" from retail, 20" and 24" both in glossy screen formats, drat, I really prefer the Matte finish. The base 20" iMac is now $1,199 - wow, incredible computer for the money! Other goodies like an all new aluminum case, aluminum flat keyboard with MacBook type keys, FireWire 800, the 24" can even be ordered with a 1TB drive and a 2.8ghz Intel Extreme. I would rather they not focus so much on how thin the iMac is, I'd much rather see it be able to hold two internal harddrives.... As sweet as this baby is, I'll be sticking with my shiny white 20" Intel iMac for a while to come, it's not that outdated just yet.

The bastard step child Mac Mini finally gets Core 2 Duo's and faster speeds of 1.83ghz and 2.0ghz. Man would I love the new Mac Mini powering CenterStage for my home entertainment. If only CenterStage were prime time....

iLife '08 finally emerges with a complete new iMovie and very updated iPhoto. Count me in!

iWork '08 adds Numbers, a new spreadsheet program that can read and presumably write Excel files. Number's isn't aimed at the Excel power user, but the casual user, and it looks to have great flexibility in formatting and generating nice looking spreadsheets, something that Excel doesn't, well, doesn't excel at.

dot Mac gets a big improvement primarily in the area of sharing photos. Major integration with iPhoto '08, you can even send photos from your iPhone, and alloted space is increased from 1 to 10GB. I'll pass on this one at $99.95 per year - but glad to see improvements all the same.



Other news...

Steve said of the AppleTV" "..., we'll have some news for the Apple TV soon, but nothing to talk about today."

This is news that was most important to me, I seriously hope that the direct the AppleTV towards full HD and 5.1. It's almost laughable how the AppleTV requires a high end TV but yet doesn't officially support HD content and high definition 5.1 or 7.1 sound. Let's get the AppleTV HD party started!


Engadget has great coverage and details of all the Apple Event items today. Check it out here.

Back in February I panned the new Airport Extreme for only having 10/100 ethernet switch, it needed a gigabit switch, especially when all Mac's ship with a gigabit ethernet connection.

Well today Apple finally corrected the problem!

I hereby grant Extreme status to the Airport Extreme. Now if it only had a 5 port instead of 3 port integrated switch we could refer to it as the Airport Uber Extreme

IGG Software's upcoming iBank 3 won the runner up for the best designed Leopard Application, behind Delicious Library 2.

Previously I've talked about how I found the Mac personal finance applications lacking and that I'm still running Quicken 2007 for Windows. I had looked at iBank, but the main drawback to iBank 2 for me was the fact that it doesn't directly download your data from financial institutions. Rumor has it that version 3 will be able to do this.

This could be very good news for a lot of people, there is a lot of talk on the internet similar to what I have said about the sad state of affairs for Mac personal finance.

Instead of just bemoan the situation, I'm going to see if I can get onto the Beta, possibly even the alpha for this project, and see if I can help in some small way to influence it towards a world class application that we can be proud of the fact that it's a Mac app.

Here are some screenshots of iBank 2, you can click on the large thumbnails for full a size view. You can see that it is a very nice looking application. Hopefully if direct downloading happens, and a few more features come into it, this could be what Quicken should have been on the Mac.

1) I installed the VMware Fusion 4.1 beta today. I've never used Parallels or VMware previously. I did try Q which is a freeware alternative, but they don't have virtualization working on it yet so it's much slower, probably more like VirtualPC was.

VMWare installed very easily, and installing Windows 2000 Pro on it went smooth as silk. I installed a Virus program and a few utilities, all seemed to go well. Although after I adjusted it to use more of my system memory, it seems to really slow down my entire system - yeah I know that may happen, but here's the odd thing. After I closed out of VMware my system was still really sluggish. I didn't have time to go back and retest, it could have been NeoOffice or something else that was the culprit. As I get more time to play with it, I'll post my experiences.

2) It has been a very long time since the last update, so the new Plaxo for Mac which came out today was a much welcomed update. Plaxo is fantastic. Consider it one more reason why you don't need to pay the .Mac tax.

3) I may have to shoot somebody if the iPhone fever doesn't end. The iPhone is either going to be the most successful new [electronic] product ever released, or the biggest letdown in history. I certainly hope it is a huge success, however it goes, we'll know soon enough.

I talked about RAID NAS options the other day, and I couldn't help myself, not leaving well enough alone I kept researching and thinking about my home data needs and different options and solutions. What was niggling me about the RAID NAS solution was this - if your RAID box has a failure then you are f*cked! Seriously, even though a RAID box has some level of protection against one of the drives failing, if the NAS box itself suffers a dire fate, you're hosed. And believe me when I say that I truly feel so sorry for those