Posts Tagged ‘Apple Fanboy’
iPad. Less Exciting than Cat Woman.
Well Apple finally released the long rumored Apple tablet computer. Amazingly enough it was one of the most dull and uninteresting product releases I can remember. I was honestly excited for a potential Apple tablet. While I was pretty sure it wasn’t something I would rush out to get, I did believe it would have a fairly high drool factor. What I wasn’t expecting was all that Apple was releasing was an iPod touch with a thyroid condition.
I’ve watched the videos, read the reports and Steve Jobs spiel and still I am amazing overwhelmed. Sure, it may have just been the massive amount of hype that has been surrounding this thing, but I don’t think so. I can pin point a few of, what I consider to be, pretty glaring short comings.
- The very first thing I noticed about it was that it’s not a widescreen device. For something that’s only 9.7″ when I’m watching video I don’t want to have to deal with black bars when watching wide screen content. For a media oriented device this just seems silly to me. No, not a deal breaker, but something that rubbed me the wrong way from the get go.
- While the iPad seems to have a more polished version of the iPhone OS, it seems like too stripped down, and too locked down to be a “great” product. Sure, it’s still useful, and the iPhone OS is entirely serviceable. But in a time when other companies have touch screen machines running full OS versions this just seems a bit silly. Especially after how much he cuts on netbooks and then releases a product that is more stripped down than “a cheap laptop”.
- Again it seems as if Apple wants nothing at all to do with Flash, as, like the iPhone/iPod Touch, the web browser lacks a Flash plugin. A device like the iPad would be great for Hulu video, or any number of streaming content sites. However without Flash these sites are a no go. While some people see Flash as becoming irrelevant in the not so distant future as HTML 5 brings its own embedded streaming standards, it is however relevant now. They are releasing this device now, not in the future, and to ignore a current dominant standard seems absolutely silly.
- Finally, what I see as the biggest deal breaker of them all, is the lack of multitasking. Only being able to have one app going at once is short-sighted, and something I’d expect from a device from several years ago. On my 1st Gen iPod Touch I can understand there are hardware limitations. On Apple’s much touted “blazing fast” A4 chip I’d expect it to handle the running of multiple applications like a champ. Why is this feature lacking? I wish I knew, but it sets the iPad behind devices that are less technologically impressive. Big fail on this one Apple.
It’s true that three of these four complaints could be addressed by software updates. I certainly hope that they are. Currently, however, this device seems aimed at a very small niche market. It looks to me more like a proto-type than an actual prime time ready release. I can see the iPad, however, sparking competing devices that will force innovation in this newly emerging market. The iPad might be a precursor, but in its current incarnation its nothing more than an overgrown iPod desperately seeking a market.
Tags: Apple Fanboy, mobile tech
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Jan 28th, 2010
AT&T losing (or giving up) its iPhone exclusivity?
The newest rumors in the mysterious Apple announcement on January 27th apparently come from an AT&T insider who claims that on the 27th Apple will announce that other carriers will soon have the iPhone available on their networks. While Verizon is one of the more likely candidates, hardware issues make the current iPhones unusable on their network. This would mean that Apple would also have to be releasing new hardware. There has been some speculation that Apple may be releasing a new iPhone on the 27th – if so it certainly helps lend credibility to the idea that one of the most drooled after phones will soon be available on competing networks.
It certainly seems like there is a good chance of this happening. While AT&T has moved a lot of iPhone’s, it has also burdened their service like no phone before it. They’ve been getting a lot of negative press, so losing exclusivity could help relieve some of the burden and allow them to push more of other variety of phones that they see better financial returns from. It would also be a boon to consumers who lust after the iPhone as it would give them choice, and competition, in theory, helps to lower price and give new incentives to the consumers. Verizon’s recent price cut on unlimited plans was followed by a nearly identical price drop by AT&T.
The iPhone’s on another network rumor sound more plausible to me than a tablet announcement after so many disappointments in the past. Still, no one said the event on the 27th has to be limited to one device. Apple is the master of “Just one more thing…”. Perhaps a networked tablet from Apple riding on Verizon’s airwaves? We’ll just have to wait until the 27th to see.
Tags: Apple Fanboy
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Jan 24th, 2010
Pitter patter of a little iPad?
If you’ve even glanced at a website in the last month you’ve probably heard the speculation that Apple will be releasing some type of tablet device at their event on the 27th. This certainly isn’t the first time that there has been rumors spreading across the net about the mythical Apple tablet. Time and time again the rumors proved to be false. This time around there certainly is a lot more evidence than there has been before – and with all these other eBook readers and the like coming out of the woodwork it certainly is possible Apple wants to continue take grabs its piece of the media pie.
I’ll be honest, I won’t really believe it until I see it. Too many times in the past there were indicators that Apple was about to release one, and they ended up releasing something else. So yes, I’m skeptical.
The tablet market has also been a rather niche one, more so than many other technologies. Things like the Kindle, or the recently released Nook, have come along that are a bit of a compromise between a touch computing platform, and media enabled device. Both are geared towards being a digital replacement to the shrinking dead tree industry. Multi-functionality is something that we don’t see much of in these early renditions. While this may change in the future, right now there is a window for a combination of a media device (music, movies, and books) and a device to deal with our online lives (social media, e-mail, web browsing, etc.). If anyone can take a fledgling market and make it a must have experience it will be Apple. The question is, is it the right time? Is Apple even releasing this beast? Or will the 27th leave all the Apple Tablet fan club kiddies sad little pandas?
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Jan 22nd, 2010
The New iPods
Apple’s event today was, in short, a snore-a-thon. Maybe that’s unfair, but if it is, it’s Apple’s own fault. They set the bar so high for their special events years ago that anything short of ground-breaking new technology is going to be a severe disappointment. There was nothing at all ground breaking about todays event. There were, however, a couple interesting things.
The most notable was the surprise everyone experienced when they announced the iPod Nano was receiving a video camera whilst the iPod Touch is not. There was much speculation that the Touch would be getting the camera, as well as the possibility of it getting GPS capabilities. It was expected that the Touch would realize its place as the iPhone minus the phone. Apparently Apple has another direction in mind. After hearing several tech blogs state that the iPod Touch was a capable portable gaming platform it seems that Apple adopted that mentality. The touted all the games available for the iPod Touch, and talked about all the developers making their latest and greatest for the iPod Touch. I also don’t think its unfair to say Apple is worried that the Touch could cannibalize iPhone sales. There are a lot of people looking for a lot of the features of the iPhone, but not be forced to pay the AT&T tax. I’ll admit I really like my iPod Touch, and it would be nice to pick up one with more capacity (and in theory a bit better battery life).
There’s a new iTunes in town, and this is perhaps the more interesting of the announcements today. In particular, to me, the best part is the Home Sharing feature. This feature allows you to share the music and videos on up to five machines over your home network. Home Sharing is something that people had been hoping to see in iTunes ever since it debuted. It removes the hassle of having to have multiple copies of things housed on each computer. It allows you to not only stream from one machine to another, but also to copy the music and videos between the machines. I like this feature because it allows me to keep all my media on a desktop machine, but if I wanted to have some movies with me when I traveled I could easily copy them over from the desktops library and then delete them at a later date. Sure there have always been ways to do this, and most of them aren’t all that complicated. But they are a bit of a hassle, and what Apple has done is make it as simple as opening up iTunes and dropping and dragging the media you want in to your local library. So far I’ve only played with the streaming features of both music and TV shows that I had purchased from the iTunes Store. The streaming worked great – there were no hiccups at all.
Finally, to all those people hoping to see the Beatles come to the iTunes store (yawn), it seems you’ll just have to continue to hope, wonder, and dream along with all those Apple Tablet people who swear its going to be announced at the next big event.
Tags: Apple Fanboy
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Sep 9th, 2009
OS X 10.5.8 Update Fouled Up my Time Machine
Last month my laptops hard drive died. It went from a little wonkiness, to a loud clicking, and then straight to sudden death. Mostly I was annoyed. I’m good about backups. I have a cloned image of my drive. All my important and irreplaceable documents and pictures also get their own private onsite and offsite backups. I have also been using Apple’s Time Machine. While I was annoyed that I would have to replace the MacBook’s hard drive (which, fortunately, is far easier than it was to have to replace the drive in my old iBook), I was eager to see how well Time Machine worked at recovering from backups. So after I got the new drive installed I booted up from the OS X disc and selected to recover from Time Machine. It went smoothly, and in about an hour all my data was on the new drive and it booted up and looked and felt like nothing had ever happened. I was impressed.
Two days later I installed the 10.5.8 update via Software Update. It appeared that everything went smoothly. It wasn’t until the next day I realized the little indicator for Time Machine was constantly spinning. When I checked on its status it seemed to be stuck on “Preparing…”. Hmmm. This wasn’t happy behavior. I fiddled with the settings a bit. Stopped the backup and started a new one and again it hung on the same thing. I decided since I had created a new cloned drive image after getting the new drive up to speed I would reformat the drive I used for Time Machine. I don’t really deal much with incremental file versions so I wasn’t worried about losing months of access to those. (for the record I have an Airport Extreme (pre-dual band versions)with a 500GB USB drive plugged in to it that I back up to via the wireless network). After reformatting the thing I began starting it up as a new Time Machine drive and once again it stuck on “Preparing…”. Checking out Console.app showed it was having problems accessing Spotlight related files on the new drive image. This of course was odd as it was a brand new sparse.image file, but all the same it could neither read/create/nor find whatever it was looking for and was throwing up several errors a minute. Searching around the web revealed a few other people with similar problems, but no solutions at first. After awhile some people began posting that they had that issue but let it keep going for a few hours and suddenly the backup kicked in. The theory being that Spotlight needed time to reindex everything after the 10.5.8 update. Okay, I could buy this. So I started up Time Machine and let it go overnight.
Fast forward over 12 hours and the machine was still preparing. There’s only 40GB’s in use on this drive so I find it hard to believe it was still attempting indexing. Next I invoked mdutil -E to the laptops hard drive to force it to index. Spotlight showed it was indexing, and I clicked on it so I could watch its progress bar. 20 minutes later the drive was reindexed. Awesome I thought. Fired up Time Machine… and again it stuck on “Preparing…” I let that go for hours before finally giving up.
Hopefully this is a widespread enough problem that Apple introduces a patch, or some instructions on fixing the problem as I would like to be able to use Time Machine again, especially after seeing how while it recovered my machine after a drive failure. In the time being I will continue updating drive clone images with Carbon Copy Cloner, as well as continuing all my other back up practices.
Edit 1 (13:13 EST): This is the error message that I receive over and over: “8/8/09 1:13:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B)(Error) IndexCI in CIMetaInfoCreate:Tried to create index when index already existed /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B”
I’ve also gotten: ”8/8/09 1:14:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Could not open /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA/0.; needs recovery “
Edit 2(August 14, 4:11 EST): Well it seems that the problem actually has to do with 10.5.8 and the most recent build of Mozy for the Mac (1.4 I seem to recall). While Mozy was working fine it was doing some weird cosmic thing to certain sets of permissions that caused Time Machine to throw up all sorts of errors. I uninstalled Mozy (saved the prefs) and Time Machine immediately started working like nothing had ever happened.
Tags: Apple Fanboy, deep geek
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Aug 8th, 2009