Let me say first that I’m not in the habit of punching myself in the dick. I’m just illustrating a few minor changes I’d appreciate Apple making that would prevent me from spiraling down that path in frustration, reducing the possibility of my 16 planned Josh Jrs. Changes like…
It felt trivial to write this considering the thousands of other blog posts about Steve’s passing. However, none of them can tell my story so I opted to go for it.
Updates have been a little slim starting out this June, but I have a legitimate excuse- last week my iMac’s hard drive failed and I had to take it to the Apple Store for a replacement. It was especially unfortunate as work had a couple of video projects I needed to finish and lost them. Irritating? Sure. Catastrophic? Not by a long shot.
Thankfully, I keep a very limited amount of data on my local drive at any given point with most of my larger files on external drives, my Time Capsule, and also in the cloud. Ironically I was just gearing up to do a post about the importance of keeping sound backups of your data.
It was the first time I’d had to visit the Genius Bar for real assistance and it was a pretty good experience. The employees were all very knowledgeable and empathetic to my problem. They’ve also got a very streamlined process for assisting customers with their new Apple Store App for the iPhone so setting up an appointment was a breeze. As a bonus they no longer had 320GB drives in stock (paltry I know) and upgraded me to a 500GB (still pretty lax but an improvement nonetheless.
Anyways, regular updates should resume now and if any of you have had any good experience with the Apple store let us know in the comments!
Well shit on a biscuit, way to go, Apple! I was just thinking the other day how my daily life isn’t saturated enough with advertising and then BAM! iAd Gallery App KILLS it! Now I can literally look at an advertisement whenever I want. I mean, at first I was blown away like, WHOA I thought advertisements were supposed to be a revered commodity for people with cable television, radios, or that internet thing but now nothing can stop me from that sweet, sweet consumer euphoria.
I couldn’t be any more thrilled unless they charged me $4.99 and had a hobo punch me in the dick.
Nicole and I got our tax returns recently and save for a couple of bad decisions I decided to hold onto most of it. However, that doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t doing its best to rape my wallet and get my sweet, sweet tax return dough in exchange for a brand-spanking-new Mac. However, I shall now explain how I’ve been able to resist that temptation.
In truth, I don’t really need a new Mac but rather find myself salivating more over the idea of an upgrade than its actual benefits. For example, while the additional 3 inches of screen real-estate I’d get from a new, 27″ iMac would be most sweet indeed, it’s not that I truly need it for anything as I typically spend my time writing, surfing, and lately, editing. I do my best to be a single-tasker as well and as such don’t like having a billion windows open at one time if I can help it.
While we’re on want vs. need, another great feature I’d want in a new Mac is a Thunderbolt port. I don’t have huge need (but huge want is certainly present) for a MacBook Pro, but am intrigued by the idea of Thunderbolt. The only problem is the iMac line has yet to be revamped to have this connectivity included and until it does there’s no friggin’ way I’ll buy another one until I can have that sweet, 10Gb, bi-directional goodness as shown below.
Finally, save for the absence of higher speed external connectivity, my 24-inch iMac is humming along just fine. Despite wishing for a larger internal hard drive it’s still snappy and an all-around joy to work with. This may not be the case after Lion makes its debut, but just the same it’s working for now and if it keeps doing what I need it to then I’ll stand by my first (and thus far favorite) Apple product.
What tax return temptations are you facing?
If you’ve used a Mac at all you know how handy multi-touch gestures can be in a pinch (har har). However, as it turns out there are two ways you can enable multi-touch gestures on the iPad under iOS 4.3.1. Using one you can pay for as detailed by TUAW here, and the other method allows you to enable it for free provided you’re willing to jailbreak your device as detailed here.
Some of you may not have a huge need to do this, but I went for the free option and haven’t regretted it in the least. Chiefly the reason I wanted multi-touch enabled was so that I could four-finger swipe left and right between iBooks and Evernote so I could take notes about what I was reading quicker. Granted I could’ve used the ‘Note’ functionality within iBooks but I tend to use Evernote for just about everything as I have such a deep love for the application.
What about you? Any desire for gestures or does the iPad work just fine without it?
Let me first say that I love my first gen iPad. From meetings at work to casual browsing in my living room at home I’m a huge proponent of the device. Now that the iPad 2 is officially here though, do I feel compelled to run out and upgrade? No, actually. Let me explain.
The iPad 2 has some nice incremental upgrades. The enhanced speaker, smaller form factor, camera additions, and processor upgrade are all welcome additions. That being said, I don’t need any of those upgrades. I rarely have my iPad in a situation where headphones aren’t available to me and have yet to run an app that suffered due to hardware limitations in what I have. Also, while I love that FaceTime is becoming unified across nearly every Apple product, I rarely use it on my iPhone or Mac and can’t see myself dying for the ability to use it on my iPad.
So is the iPad 2 useless? Not at all! My take on it is if you’ve been on the fence about an iPad for a while then now is probably a better time than ever to pick one up. However, if you’ve already got a perfectly good 1st gen version then unless you’re a FaceTime addict I can’t really see the appeal. Granted I’m looking at this more from a casual user standpoing than a high-powered business position, but still.
Are you looking forward to the iPad 2 or are you holding out for iPad 3?
Courtesy of TUAW, it looks like Apple’s toying with us again. An obvious frontrunner would be iOS 4.2 being released, but I’d hardly call that a day I’d ‘never forget’. Now the release of The Beatles catalog on iTunes would certainly be momentous given their warring in the past, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Cloud storage? Possibly, but that seems like an awfully big development to simply be teased the day before launch. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
What do you think Apple is planning?
Apple recently revamped its Macbook Air and sheesh is it a sexy machine. That’s not to say previously it wasn’t sleek because it certainly was. Now however, rather than aiming at a tinier, business/design market with it’s previous price tag of $1499, you can now pick up the 11 inch version for a mere $999.99 or the 13 inch for $1199.99. That’s still a bit steep compared to Windows netbooks you can get for a few hundred dollars, but having that first step toward a true Apple Netbook is certainly alluring.
Now for some of the other things I’m digging about the Macbook Air-
Over the weekend I got a brand-spanking new Apple Time Capsule. I’d been needing a new wireless router for a while and was also looking for a solid way to backup my iMac and Nicole’s Mac Mini. Having now set it up and enjoying the peace of mind that having all of your data backed up offers, I thought I’d offer a few tips regarding the setup process. While the entire setup is pretty simple if you follow the directions, there may be some features/nuances you aren’t aware of.
