Though the title of this post may seem fairly complex and all confusing, I assure you it will not be so. It’s merely a collection of thoughts that I decided not to name ‘More thoughts’ or something along those lines…

As for the logic part, while looking around Waterstones (that would be a bookstore) in Edinburgh early last week, I found a very interesting book among the ‘… for Dummies’ and computing books - ‘The Fundamentals of Logic Design’ by Charles H Roth Jr. When leafing through it then, I realised that though a lot of the information contained in it may be really quite obsolete, and not necessarily relevant in these days of computers and so on, it is very fundamental to the understanding to all of the current technologies. To be honest, ever since reading iWoz (Steve Wozniak’s autobiography) and reading about how he managed to redesign computers with fewer (and a more optimal number of) chips, I’ve wanted to be able to learn how this was done, and essentially work out how to do this myself - as it would undoubtedly lead to better understanding of logic systems (which are just slightly fundamental to lots and lots of things!). Anyhow though, this book didn’t even have a price tag in Waterstones, it was obviously too deserved to have one or maybe it just fell off, but later checking of it on Amazon revealed it to be a University level text costing between £45 and £80 - pretty damn expensive. I also found that there was a newer edition that then the one that I had briefly read. Luckily though (and Amazon marketplace comes to the rescue here) I managed to get it for £5 or so! There was a slight delivery charge on it too, but that really was pale in comparison to the £5.75 had to pay to ship it to me (I only had to pay the Amazon flat charge of £2.19 or something like that). So ultimately though I didn’t get the newest edition (I got the 4th) I got it such a reasonable price that no-one can complain! Haven’t started reading it yet, but I’ll definitely mention something once I have!

The other thing I feel compelled to mention is this glaring error in Leopard:

It should obviously be ‘None of your preferred wireless networks IS available’ but obviously there are still some bugs present in Leopard.

Once upon a time I used to go ecstatically crazy over a Macworld launch and write all sorts of stuff about it and so on and so forth. These days I find it easier just to sit back and look at all of the cool things unfurl.

If you’re very new to the internet, or never really look at newspapers or take part in any other forms of communication between people, then you might not be aware that firstly, Apple has launched a new laptop (or notebook (which I believe is the more generally accepted term (at least in the US) these days)) and secondly, it has received lots of criticism.

Fair enough some of this criticism is probably due, for it has one USB port and no media drive. You can make up your own opinions about what you think of this, personally though, I don’t really mind these things. The one USB port seems limiting in most ways, is it really though? How often do you have more than one peripheral connected (AND IN USE) when you’re out and about. Most likely you’ll have a USB key, a printer, an external mouse, or an iPod connected. These wouldn’t all be at the same time though. You might want to use a USB key and a mouse at the same time, which is understandable given the frustation of most trackpads… (AAAGH eeePC!) As we are told though, the MacBook Air’s trackpad is a) multitouch and b) larger. This should hopefully make it more tempting to stick with the trackpad instead of changing to an external mouse. I say ‘might be’ in this case because to be honest I haven’t a clue what the trackpad is like on these things, but if the iPhone is anything to go by, then I’ll probably be impressed. With printers, enough of them are WiFi enabled, or connected to a WiFi network so that the need for a USB cable with a printer these days (unless it’s some huge image files…) is waning. That said, you would only use a printer to print off a document and then most likely unplug the cable and walk away, so having one usb port would not be too annoying. Same goes for an iPod, you’d only sync it on there (that would take a comparitively small amount of time), the charging could be done at the wall. The only usb object left would be the usb drive, something that might be useful, but not always used. So I come to the conclusion that only one USB port might just be bearable and usable!

The DVD drive (or lack thereof) is a different case altogether… But it does resolve itself in a similar way to the USB issue. Apple probably have thought (and fought) long and hard about this and have come to the conclusion that it is not necessary to have one. That is, assuming you follow their way or living (in reference to digital media that is). As explained in the keynote, there are a few things that you would commonly use CDs and DVDs for. In my case these would be…
-Installing BIG new programs (like Leopard, and someone raised the case of Windows w/ Boot Camp)
-Adding CDs to iTunes (I despise the iTMS in terms of listening to music and the culture surronding it as it kills the album, which is an entity in my opinion)
-Watching DVDs
-Converting DVDs to iPhone format.
If this MacBook is not your primary computer, then there’s no real need to do most of these things on it except the installations. You might want to watch DVDs, but you may have a DVD player and a widescreen TV for that, or there’s the iTunes Movie Store, or even you could convert it to a suitable format before you leave home and stick it on your HD. In any case, you could probably manage without it.

Though the MacBook Air has been receiving lots of criticism about it’s revolutionary new features/things that it doesn’t have, most of them are not particularly well deserved. The obvious drawbacks all have reasons behind them, most of these are pretty legit given a fairly normal scenario. So in essence, I think it’s a great little product, with some excellent engineering behind it all, even if I wouldn’t buy myself one in the near future…

Apropos Engadget’s story on a new iPod dock entitled “Jibe Audio’s Sound Machine iPhone dock — designed by Apple alumni.”

The article states that this company’s new iPod dock is, and I quote,

Designed in part by Robert Brunner who led Apple’s design team from 1989-1996, an era which birthed the Newton and the first Powerbooks.

Whilst this is true (I’m not contesting this fact), I don’t see the need to boast that this is by the same Apple alumni from ’89 to ’96 as this wasn’t particularly the best era of Apple products. Think Performas, think Quadras, think unreliability, think no Steve Jobs and most importantly think different from what Apple is now… Why boast this? Seriously, I wouldn’t buy one of these having known it was from the same design team that let the Performas be produced. What a bummer for that company… Then again, maybe they’re proud of the Performas that they made and after all (according to the article) they did make the first Powerbooks, so they can’t be that bad can they?

Other exciting things that I have found all around include a glaring grammar mistake in Leopard! I mean a huge one! I’m not on my iMac at the moment, so I can’t grab a screenshot right now, but it involves this grammatically incorrect sentence:

‘None of your preferred wireless networks are (sic) available.’

Terrible…

In other news, I have some freakin’ sweet concert tickets for next year already lined up (at some cost). These would include The Mars Volta, Radiohead and Neil Young and Crazy Horse!

Finally I get my computer back from Apple. Much better. So, so, much better! You don’t realise how bad it is to be stuck using Windows all the time at work, and then going home to no beautiful *functioning* iMac. Well now its back. It works this time, but what I actually mean is I haven’t found any more faults yet…

I’m not sure why or how I’m finding it so hard to cope with the general shitness of Windows at the moment. It might be because I actually have to do something with it. I was expected to use Paint to create images for documents… What is that about? I had some completely stupid restrictions on my computer so that I couldn’t install any more software, so nothing even like The GIMP to do work with. Then again for the stuff that I’m doing, the program really needed is OmniGraffle Professional.

The GUI is just terrible. There was no effort, absolutely none, put into the creation of Windows XP. I assume that’s generally accepted by everyone because it should be. They don’t even put in any effort to make the ‘taskbar’ look nice. It has the ability to go to one side or the top of the screen, yet, the rendering of it is awful in that position. The icons aren’t even centered, and the buttons (even the start menu) doesn’t even have rounded let alone finished and joined up edges. Why Redmond why?

Then again I suppose its difficult for people without proper Human User Interface Guidelines and such a thing as Aqua. When you’re copying another operating system, everything just happens to be that little bit behind. Shame really… Linux managed to make it all look pretty polished.

But why bother polishing a system that is flawed from its very beginning? I mean why attempt to make GUI look half respectable when the idea of having a window that fills the whole screen as the basis for the OS is around. Firstly, in Windows, Gates wants you to have two window sizes, full window, and not full window, which is usually just too small a size to be of any use! When you’re in full window mode as one could call it, you can’t have any windows on top, or at the side, or available to pull down or quickly glance at… You just can’t!

It makes it so impractical. Well maybe if you’re writing a report, and you want to be so focused and in a ‘I’m so not going to look at any references’ frame of mind, then just one window is great. The other 99.5% of the time, no. ‘It can’t happen here’ as The Mothers Of Invention might say. The impracticalities of it are outstandingly huge. Yes you might need to try something different to realise what you’re missing. But once you’ve seen the light, no going back! Also have a go at hovering your mouse cursor over a window that can scroll, and try scrolling, it’ll only scroll if its active. What an annoyance!

Another nice impracticality and general annoyance is perhaps when you’re thinking ‘hmm, I’d like to open an image in one folder, and compare it with an image in another folder.’ Let’s also assume in this case, you’re one of those many people who doesn’t possess a decent image organiser/editor (even Picasa anyone?). Well in Windows, provided you’ve got over the full screen window problem, you’ve got no hope! If you’d act as a normal person and double click on the file to open it, you get a nice ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ window popping up with the image in it. By this point you should be thinking two things; wow, it actually works and why call it a fax viewer too? Who ‘views’ faxes on their computer, I thought you read a fax as well (providing it had words on it, but thinking about it, who sent complex images by fax? like no one.), then again that might be me with rational thinking again! You might want to open the next window now, so you can go about the action of comparison between the images. You’d navigate to the other folder, open the file with a (swift) double click and… it would open it in the same ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ that you already had open. Oops! Now you’d just have to go back to the other file and open that again. But most likely it will open it in the same window. How useful. Isn’t it just great how Windows lets you have lots of Windows (or not) of the same application, sorry I mean program, open.

Yes, at the end of the day the solution is inevitably obvious, but who cares. The point of this is to again reiterate how terrible certain things are about a too popular OS.

Leopard would be worth getting, I might have to get it soon! I just love some of those new features!

I will start out by apologizing for my lack of posting things in the last few weeks. I have been conducting a test of the iPhone in the best way possible, that is thru not actually having a computer to use and having to rely solely on the iPhone for internet and the management of various forms of communication that I would regularly do…

My computer or iMac to be more precise is currently being repaired by Apple to sort out this annoying issue with the Cd drive importing things at hideously low and slow sped, and unlike the Apple store, this repair is taking its time… AAGH! Still, it gives me a good chance to a) show off my iPhone to the nice Apple store employees when I’m at the store b) show it off to everyone else at various Apple events that were on, such as the Leopard launch and c) try out my iPhone to its full potential an thus write a kind of review.

First that I should say is that it does exactly what it says on the tin… Everything Apple says about the iPhone, it can do. Plus more. The amount of ‘more’ that you want to add to it completely different for everyone, but its really up to you. In my case I unlocked it for Orange Uk, activated it, installed Installer and now I can use Navizon and message people using MSN or AIM. Pretty cool.

Instead of just treating this as a normal kind of review, I’ll just assume the iPhone is perfect and talk about what’s bad with it (its easier that way!).

-The recessed headphone jack is rather annoying. The Apple headphones/headset that come with the iPhone aren’t that bad though. If it wasn’t for the lack of the noise canceling ability I would happily use then as the button to answer calls and pause music is pretty good, I’m getting used to using the headset, isn’t that sad! I will however probably invest in the Shure headset thingy that enables you to use any headphones with it, and it includes a button and a mic! That might go well with my soon to arrive replacement headphones (3rd pair 4th pair!).

-The lack of anything telling you when you are coming to the end of the 155 character limit in a text message is irritating. Especially when you’ve on pay as you go and are trying to save money!

-When the phone is on silent and you are listening to music via the headset, there is nothing to tell you that a call is being received other than the vibrating thing. This is marginally annoying especially when they could implement a thing to ring in the headphones only!

-The battery is weird. Sometimes it lasts for ages, or at least seems to never go down. Other times its not as good. Its probably related to my Wi-Fi usage but hoo haa, the battery’s better than I expected so its all good. I couldn’t imagine listening to 6 or 7 hours of music on my 4th G iPod and seeing very little hit on te battery meter. Isn’t that cool!

To be continued…

EDIT:

Another annoying thing that I’ve found with my iPhone happens to be that when I have a voicemail message, the red dot will show on the voicemail indicating this, which is all well and dandy, but when I’ve listened to the message it doesn’t want to go away and will sometimes persistently keep bothering me about it! It did eventually go away, but I haven’t a clue why!

Its strange isn’t it? Most of the time when you complain about something in today’s society most people really don’t give a damn, so as a result you really don’t expect to get any results!

Well as I mentioned almost 2 months ago I went to the efforts of getting the logic board replaced on my iMac so that it would actually recognise the 2 512Mb RAM sticks that I put in it… Initially I got it replaced by none other than the brilliant Scotsys (yes I’m being very sarcastic), An Apple Authorised Repair Provider. How they managed that feat is pretty amazing, they really do suck at repairing computers, or maybe they don’t; they probably fix them fine and then kick them about a bit, who knows? Anyway the point is that if you send your computer to them then its gonna get damaged and come back (if it comes back) in a worse state than when you sent it away!

In my case I was having the logic board replaced. This really isn’t that hard a job, I could probably do it if I was allowed to open up my iMac myself. Scotsys DID manage to replace the logic board with a new (working!) one, which was a feat in itself. But they couldn’t just do that, so in addition they left the case open at the top, scratched the screen, broke the iSight camera and seriously impaired the Airport signal. As you could imagine I was rather pissed off! I phoned up Apple, explained my (terrible) situation and was eventually transferred a proper customer services dude, the kind that expected you to be irate, so spoke in a calming voice and told you not to worry. Don’t worry though, he’d happily jerk you around too if you left it too long!

I was told that the only option was to take my iMac back to Scotsys and get it repaired (yeah right) by them… This I did, having it picked up and Couriered there (I’m lazy!). It returned a not-unreasonable week or so later with a new iSight camera cable, the case closed but with a scratch on the screen still and very little Airport reception! Yet again I talked to the calming rep at Apple, who suggested I took it there again, or maybe take it to another repair place even further away, maybe 50 miles or so… Little did he know that Apple had opened up their Glasgow store, so instead of risking it with some other cowboys I thought it best to take it to the genius bar and get it properly looked at and hopefully fixed.

I checked out the Apple Store Buchanan St. website and arranged an appointment at the genius bar. A few days later I appeared at the store (finding that I could have basically turned up at anytime and had it looked at, oh well…) and had my iMac looked at. They ordered a new screen and an Airport antenna without even looking at the unit, which was pretty trustworthy of them! I was told it was going to take around 7-10 days which to be honest when you don’t really have another computer to use is quite a long time!

Fear not though! I had a call merely 2 days later to say that it had been repaired and that it was all good and ready to collect… Another longish trip to Glasgow to get to the store followed. I picked it up, checking that it looked okay and that there actually was NO scratch anymore (luckily it had been repaired!), not taking time to turn it on and find out if it ran/booted up okay. Oops. Maybe I just assumed that Apple Store = good service.

Unfortunately I got it home and booted it up to find a very pleasant whining noise coming from the unit. From the sound I could easily tell that it was some cable or the ESD wrapping stuff that had got in front of the fan at the bottom right and was now brushing against it, making more noise than the fans usual silence. Oh, and I should also mention that the airport was no better and that getting reception in my room still was fairly challenging if at all possible (from THAT computer!).

I took my usual course of action and phoned my now good friend Ibar at Apple. He didn’t seem too impressed with what had happened (at least he acted that way), but he agreed with me that this was not the kind of service that I should be getting, which is very true! He agreed to replace my unit with a new one. Specifically the new model, the 20″ aluminium and glass iMac with the 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, the base model I know, but a fairly good improvement to my current model, you must agree. He said that once I had returned the old unit, he would send a new one out. Well he didn’t actually say this, but that was what happened in the end. He actually said something more along the lines of I’ll send you a new model and I’ll also arrange to get your old one picked up. Mentioning nothing of the timeframe that he had implied/imposed. Anyway, in the end I had to wait a week and a half and have another phonecall before the old unit was collected, which was a bit slow. And then wait another 5 days or so before my new one arrived.

So eventually I did get a new model, but it took a bloody long time! Now I have to contact him about Applecare and transfering my subscribtion to the new computer. Hopefully, yet again, some complaining will get me far!

Points Worth Considering

1. I could have repaired the majority of these problems myself. The initial situation involving the case open, the airport reduced and the iSight not working could have been solved by me. The fact that the case was open at this point enabled me to look inside to see how much of a shoddy job they had done. There is normally black ESD tape/paper around the inside of the unit, just under the white casing to act as a Faraday cage or similar. This was non-chalantly ripped off and just placed back on top. As a result I could see the inside of the iMac and see where a) the airport card antenna was and b) where the iSight cable was not routed properly. In the later scenario where there was the noise coming from the fan, that could have been sorted with much greater ease! It would have just required opening the case and removing the obscruction! At the end of the day though, I’m not actually allowed to open the case and sort out the problems myself. I would have voided the all important warranty by doing that, not a good thing! Also, by repairing the problems myself I wouldnot have shown up Scotsys’s dodgy work, and not get a brand new iMac!

2. I could have complained and got a better iMac. I bought mine back at the start of 2006 for £929, I also bought some more Apple RAM, worth around about £60 at the time (although I tapped a bit of eBay to get it for £18). The new model that I received cost considerably less than this, around about £700 or so. I don’t have the exact figure to hand. But, if I asked for a refund as opposed to a replacement model, then I would have been able to purchase a considerably better model, and even chip in a bit of my own money to afford the 24″ one! That is if they had let me, which I’m not entirely sure they would have. But, then again I think there’s something in the Sale of Goods act that mentions a refund or replacement must be given. Could have been worth a go, but would have taken more time I suspect!

3. I could have kept my old iMac (temporarily at least) so I could have used migration assistant to transfer the old data smoothly. This would enable me to transfer the data more smoothly, have my old (noisy) computer with me for longer, and give them the chance to forget about it and not pick it up. I know someone who has done this and now has 2 iBooks, although one doesn’t really function as a laptop after Scotsys repaired it! In that case I could have sucessfully repaired the unit myself and get another computer out of it. Probably fairly unlikely to happen, but then again always worth a go if it happens again!

EDIT: I think the CD/DVD drive might be broken, importing CDs into iTunes at 5x isn’t normal is it?

As the title might slightly suggest, yesterday was a pretty good day. Firstly there was the opening of the first Apple store in Scotland, in Glasgow on Buchanan Street. I was lucky enough to attend this, and wait in the queue and be one of the first to be in the store, obviously I wasn’t the first as I hadn’t been there since last night… but if that floats your boat! It was a pretty cool store though, they’d completely redone the building on the inside so it looked really immense with the glass stairs, granite tiled floor and open stone work on the walls which looked pretty cool! I grabbed a few pictures which I’ll add at a later date… I got the Apple T-Shirt, the classic one that everyone gets if they’re one of the first to the new store. I missed out on one of these in Shibuya in Tokyo, but at least I got one now… Finally an Apple store has opened, hopefully putting an end to the monopoly in central Scotland that is Scotsys.

The other awesome thing that happened yesterday was the reopening of Fopp. As I have mentioned in previous posts, Fopp had ‘died’. But luckily or should I say unluckily HMV has bought it and reopened some of its stores, so the best way of CD shopping has been revived! It was just great to finally go to a proper CD shop once again. The times without Fopp had made me so annoyed and pissed off when I went into HMV and saw their attempt at good deals - 2 CDs for £10 or Virgin’s deal - 4 CDs for £20, when Fopp managed to sell them for £5 each in an even more pleasant record environment. Unfortunately though, I think some of the prices have risen slightly, especially on the new/chart CDs. Well at least its back…

Now that the exam results have arrived (as of 16th August actually) I found out with great pleasure that I got 4 A’s at A-level (Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry) and will be attending Pembroke College Cambridge from October 2008 to read Engineering. Pretty good chat eh?

Meanwhile I’ll be working for a year at Selex Sensors and Airborne Systems in Edinburgh. Gaining some experience for my engineering degree and making money (hopefully)!

At the moment, I’m in a slight feud with Apple (well actually more like Scotsys!) because I sent my beloved iMac to have its logic board replaced by them, it then returned with the screen scratched, the airport signal greatly weakened, the case still open at the top, no serial number and the iSight not working, not good for an Apple authorised service centre! I have taken photos of the damage (If you’re reading this Scotsys!) and will be sorting it out…

As the holidays have now been upon me for almost 3 weeks now, I have finally got round to getting my iMac repaired. It would refuse to start up when there was a stick of RAM present in one of the slots, it was fine with the other slot filled up, but would not even make the startup chime with the first one. Thus I concluded that it was probably a logic board problem and that the logic board needed replacing. Oh and this also happened almost 6 months ago. The only reason I continued using it was that I found a temporary solution with only 512Mb of RAM. Fairly slow, but really not that bad once you get used to it; I’m now using a Celeron 2.67Ghz and 1.25Gb of RAM on my Hackintosh and in some respects it feels faster, which obviously shouldn’t be happening…

Still, when when you phone up AppleCare, try explaining that you pretty much worked out what the problem was, and found a temporary solution based on your diagnosis of the problem. It just doesn’t get through! Firstly I assume they are trained/told to regard the customers that phone them up as fairly stupid and ignorant: the majority of the customers
probably just say “Its broken… what should I do?” This should work well in theory as most people are like this and haven’t a clue what they’re going on about. Although in practice, some of us know what we’re talking about and thus in essence sound like we know considerably more than the ‘technician’ at the end of the phone. In that case it would be better speaking to someone who a) understands that we’re not stupid, b) is aware that we know something about Macs and c) doesn’t read through lots of flowcharts to sort out/attempt to diagnose the problem (I am making the brave assumption that they do this, it can’t be far off). One other problem that arises is the language difficulty. The call centre’s may not be based in India any more (apparently they were changed and I was sure Apple had at least one call centre in Ireland) but I was sure that the ‘technicians’ first language was not. This really isn’t a problem though, except when they fail to understand what you’re getting at. As in my conversation which went something like this:

Me: “Quite a few months ago I found that the problem was that the computer refused to boot up when there was RAM present in the top slot”

TechGuy: “So this happened to you just now?”

Me: “No, it happened back in January sometime, I found a temporary solution so it works fine currently as I’ve taken out the RAM from the bad slot and just using half the RAM.”

TechGuy: “What is the problem then?”

Me: “One of the RAM slots doesn’t work! I’ve just got it work temporarily by using half of the RAM. I’ve got it on and working as we speak.”

TechGuy: “Turn off the computer.”

… checks his notes I think …

TechGuy: “We are going to try resetting the SMC.”

Me: “Does it matter that I only have one stick of RAM in and that it is working fine?”

TechGuy: “Once the computer is off, unplug the power cable from the back of the computer and from the wall and wait 30 seconds.”

Me: “Should I put both sticks of RAM in?”

TechGuy: “You only have one stick in?” Sounds fairly surprised!

Me: “Yes, that’s why it was working, I’ll change it now.”

… I run upstairs to get the other stick of RAM, run back and begin changing it around with one hand using the end bit of the screwdriver as I’ve lost the rest of it for now! All whilst on the phone.

Me: “Its done now. I tried resetting the SMC and the PRAM back when it originally happened.”

He clearly pays no attention and/or assumed something must have changed thus goes through both!

Anyway, that was an interesting conversation I had, but at least it resulted in a guy being sent out to pick up/repair my computer. He, strangely enough, knew what I was talking about, then again he said it was a weird problem, blatantly hinting that I somehow did it myself, but then again if I was in his position I would say the opposite to reassure the customer. After all it just requires a new Logic Board. That can’t really (or didn’t used to) be a problem for Apple, have a look at some of the repair manuals from 1995ish. The solution was pretty much always replace the logic board. In most cases that didn’t fix anything as it was an underlying design flaw with the Performa Series, but that’s a story for another day.

Moving swiftly back to the problem of technicians not understanding you. If you happened to instead go to an Apple store, and go to the genius bar. Then the people there will speak your local language, whether it be Japanese, English, Italian or Spanish, they will also be able to see you in person and determine whether you have an idea about what you’re talking about, or if you’re lost… Its such a brilliant idea, pity they don’t have a store near me yet! What is so remote about Edinburgh anyway?

As my iMac is away, I’m using my Hackintosh, which I mentioned, it also looks very different and cluttered, so I’d thought I’d get a picture. Its annotated, but you might have to go to Flickr to see that bit!

In other news, I’m aware the ‘Album Of the Week’ has been around for almost 3 weeks, but I might get around to changing it soon, so hold out!

There’s a new version of Flock… yay! It has some awesome features such as tab restoring when you quit but most spectacularly a feature that allows you to restore recently closed tabs (I’m told that this is in Safari 3, but I’m more into Flock nowadays and haven’t tried Safari 3 yet). Even better, I has a cooler new interface with a split bookmarks bar with cool little buttons and other amazing features! I will try and get a writeup done sometime, but for now, do give it a go. I thought last release was great, this is spectacular!

Well I’m wondering, or maybe I’m pondering over a few things currently that I should let out or something along those lines, so here it it, or more exactly, here they are!

I’m starting to get annoyed by the Get A Mac commercials, this is sounding really picky and silly and childish but I think they’re really going in the wrong direction now! At the start, yes, they were pretty good at telling us all, and especially the unenlightened ones among us how good Macs are with the no viruses concept and the great instant compatibility and so on and so forth. BUT, as I just said they are heading the wrong way. I mean this in that although they originally intended to show off how great they are, they are now almost doing the opposite and digging a hole that will they are slowly jumping in to. By this, I am referring to the fact that they now state that Macs are computers for the home, creative stuff and untimately a kid’s computer, and PCs are for work, and anything important and business like! This is clearly not the case. Macs should in fact be used in the home, and at work. They are probably in fact better than PC’s in working in business based environments. They are highly compatible in most environments, they have a nack of just not getting viruses which can be a large problem in corporations large and small. They also tend to just work and dont get bogged down with innumberable amounts of crap. Therefore they should be utilised more on a work basis. Apple is kind of denying itself to this market by saying these things in the advert, for those who take it seriously though. They are a good idea overall and thus I think that they should continue, just be more subtle in their approach and dont close off any large potential markets…

Another thing that I though I should mention seeing as it is a fairly large topic in the whole tech world at the moment is AppleTV. So soon after its recent release it has been cracked/modded/whatever else you call it! This in itself is a great thing. Originally with the AppleTV, I was not going to purchase one. A few reasons really were to account for this. Firstly its lack of support for older TV’s with no DVI/HDMI or component input annoyed me, mainly because the TV that I use doesn’t have them on it, even though its like only 4 years old, actually maybe that IS why! Also the use of component input is such an American concept. Yeah TV’s here probably have it, but it just strikes me as an American idea invented because S-video or the standard AV cables weren’t good enough, when in fact they clearly weren’t! But still the use of 3 or is it 4 cables to carry the signals is a bit OTT when HDMI does it cleanly in one! The other reason which was hindering me from buying one (that is if my TV was good enough) was the lack of support for other formats. I like to watch TV normally, explore the likes of great shows such as ER, Skins and House currently. What do I do when I miss them? I get them from BitTorrent. Now, how many TV shows on BT have you seen in .mov format? Answer: none. Although this is the case with the iPod too, I can understand that as it is hardware related. In this case though, multiple format support should be included as default just so it would work a lot nicer with various downloaded videos (what iTunes doesn’t want you to really do though). Luckily though, this problem has been duly solved through the use of the Perian codec/package, and so this problem has essentialy been removed. The small hard disk could also pose a potential problem, or falling point for it too, as it will fill up easily being a media centre type gizmo. Apple assures us though that this will not be the case easily as we can only sync our music libraries and photos to it. This clearly has no chance of reaching the capacity soon…. NOT. If you have a fair amount of photos and enough music to fill up a new iPod, 30gb ish, then the 35gb given to you is not going to go terribly far! Thus the available hard drive upgrades being seen are a great and needed idea. One last downside is that Apple expects you to stream your videos to watch them across the house. This is alright for some if you have just upgraded to the latest and best wireless router, namely the new Airport. But not all of us have and thus the cost of an AppleTV, a compatible TV and a new Airport will be fairly steep to most of us and thus make the AppleTV a remarkably expensive and nische adventure. The idea of streaming video will certainly have some flaws, in that it will screw up your bandwidth… but maybe ‘draft n’ is much ‘wider’, that remains to be seen in my case… Altogether, its a great idea, and as shown over the last few days its presence on the market will iron out its flaws. Imgaine what it will be like in a month or so, they may even have the usb port working!

Last thing and on a lighter note. Shure, the nice audio company replaced my previously amazing E2c’s with newer and actually surprisingly small, lightweight and more immense E3c’s. so I am a happy bunny!