Matt Charlton

Some of you probably read about the fun and games I’ve been having this week with trying to upgrade the hard disk in a 15″ June 2009 macbook pro.

A little bit of backstory – we bought a macbook pro for Sue in June and decided on the base 15″ spec – even the sales guy at the Apple store said it was easy enough and cheaper to buy a bigger drive to replace the 250GB drive supplied.  That was nice of them, I thought.

Anyway – after exhausting my technical support abilities and admitting defeat,I  managed to get an appointment at the Apple store in central Manchester yesterday and we raced over there in order to see if one of the Apple “Geniuses” could shed any light on the problem we were having.  I won’t be visiting that Apple store again.  I found the guy very dismissive and quite rude actually.  It was the first time I’ve been into an Apple store and had poor service.

His excuse was that althought 99% of drives would be compatible, that this one probably wasn’t.  Probably due to some anti-shock technology used in the drive that was conflicting with the built in anti shock stuff in the macbook pro.  I asked him if there was a list of compatible drives – he said there wasn’t.  I asked him if they sold compatible hard disks in store.  They didn’t.  I asked him why the drive would work in another macbook pro – albeit an earlier model.  He said they were different models.  I challenged this and said surely as newer motherboard revisions are released, more hardware is compatible, not less.  He said that this wasn’t the case – that there could be something new in some part of code somewhere that has just meant that the drive isn’t compatible.

As we’d taken the mbp in to the store with the original drive in and it was working he didn’t seem to be able to grasp why we were there.  The mbp was working in it’s current configuration and adding the new hard disk made it fail.  The problem was with the hard disk.  I’m pretty sure I lost him when I went through step by step everything I’d tried.  He tried to boot the mbp into diagnostic mode which he couldn’t do as we didn’t have the applications disc with us – he said that he was only going to run it to show us and that it wouldn’t bring up any errors anyway.  It felt like we were in the way, like we were taking up space and time in a place that was more about the selling than the service.  Not the same sort of experience we’ve had in either Meadowhall or the Trafford Centre.   You start to wonder if Apple is starting to become a victim of it’s own success and things are starting to creak.

He told me to send the drive back and try another brand/model.

I came away feeling quite annoyed.  We’d been stuck in traffic due to road closures in Manchester and it had taken us nearly 2 hours to get to the store and it just felt like a complete waste of time. I hate having a technical issue get the better of me – it just doesn’t happen.  When I was responsible for the Network at my last place, problems would eat me up inside until I’d fixed them.  I’d take my work home with me and just try to figure the thing out.  There has to be a logical reason why this problem exists.  If the drive isn’t at fault, it has to be something else.

I got home, booted into diagnostic mode and ran the diagnostics.  It looked like an apple version of memtester – only seemed to be testing the RAM and the extensive test just seemed to test the RAM in a more intensive manner.   The RAM is fine.  I started to do some more googling, varying my search terms and just trying to find someone with a similar issue – I couldn’t be the only person who had tried to upgrade a June 2009 mbp.

Then I stumbled upon the answer, or at least the cause of the problem.

It was the firmware update to fix the problem with SATA transfer speeds.  You might remember there was a bit of an issue with the latest model of macbook pro in that it had shipped with a SATA controller that was running at only 1.5GB – Apple released a firmware update to fix the problem.

(Click to enlarge)

The important part of this update notification is the following portion of text

While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported.

Quite interesting that they decided to add this disclaimer to the update.  As far as I know, Apple only supply drives that use a 1.5Gbps transfer rate – so anything running at 3Gbps is an “unsupported” drive.  Shortly after this update was released, June 2009 mbp owners started to experience problems with the drives.  In fact, there’s an 81 page thread on the Apple website about it.  The Register also ran an article about it.  How I didn’t find this stuff before going to all the hassle of travelling to Manchester I have no idea.  Probably because I wasn’t looking.  I presumed that the issue would be localised to a problem with this specific brand and model of hard disk. How wrong I was.

What’s interesting is that even people using the same model of hard disk as Apple supply seem to be experiencing problems.  The Apple supplied drives run on a different firmware revision.  Sneaky.

Somewhere buried inside that 81 page thread, theres a link to a .dmg file which will allow you to downgrade the firmware back to 1.6 which eliminates the problems.  This is a tool which has been rolled out to Apple Genius bars which someone has passed on to a customer and that’s gotten onto the Intenet.  I used it to roll back the firmware yesterday afternoon and I could now install the 500GB drive without a problem.  Only problem is – I don’t really want to.

What happens if we accidently apply the update in the future and I’ve got the new drive in?  Someone in the Apple thread posted that Apple were working on a new firmware revision to resolve the issues.  We’ll see.

All I know is that I’m not happy with Apple – the Hard Disk is a user serviceable part, there are instructions in the manual for removing the bottom of the case and upgrading the hard disk and RAM.  When you’ve got Apple staff in store telling you that you can upgrade the drive yourself too then something is wrong.  Fair enough if you don’t support third party drives, you don’t have to – but don’t release firmware upgrades that stop them from working.

This is almost the sort of behaviour that got Microsoft into trouble and with all the negative press that the app store is getting for rejecting applications at the moment, Apple need to buck up their ideas because they’re going to start hemorrhaging customers.

Or maybe it’s an iBlog, which co-incidentaly is the name of the new theme I’m using, and a very nice theme it is too.

So – we were in the Apple store yesterday at Meadowhall.  I needed to get my iPhone looked at – the screen was coming loose on the left hand side and I’d decided that the phone needed to last me at least another 12 months.  I’m skipping the 3Gs completely and waiting for the next hardware refresh.

For an extra megapixel and a built in compass I’m not overly bothered – especially at the price O2 are wanting to charge, breaking the contract AND paying for the handset indeed! My contract isn’t up until around the 11th Jan, I think Sue’s is going to be sometime around the end of Jan.  By then we’ll only be 6-7 months away from the next iPhone and I think we’ll just both wait for that.  Seems to make sense to me.

So, since we were at the Apple store, I’d decided that Sue might as well have a personal shopping appointment so she could have a proper look at a mac.  She spent nearly 2 hours with one of the guys there and she ended up getting a 15″ base level macbook pro.  If the macbook had been available in aluminium and 15″ she’d have probably gotten that.  I reckoned that 13″ was probably a little too small given how much time she spends looking at the screen.  I’ve spent most of yesterday evening and most of today setting it up for her (which is handy because she’s been at work all day today) and I think it’s pretty much ready for her to use when she gets home.

It took me around 3-4 days to move across from my laptop to my macbook, obviously I’ve learnt something since then but whilst we were at the store yesterday it amazed me just how little I did know.  With the last month being so hectic, not being in at the weekend and spending a lot of time working on other projects I’ve been using the mbp but not actually learning anything about it.  It was quite interesting to pick up a few more hints and tips yesterday, I need to watch some more videos and do some more reading.  Reading – that reminds me, Sue can read those mac magazines I bought last month including that iLife book – that was pretty good from what I remember.

In the car on the way home she admitted to me that she’d only gone along with the personal shopping thing to shut me up, it was only once she started looking at it properly and was shown just how easy iDVD, iPhoto and iWork were that she got really interested.  She felt that she’d actually be able to do all these things that the guy at the apple store was showing her – she’s never burnt a cd or dvd in her life even though she’s always had the ability to do so.  There’s something about the mac that just oozes ease of use.  I have to agree with the bloke we were talking to yesterday though – not everything is as easy and there are some pretty meaty sections to get into.

I love using the terminal, it reminds me that unix is under there somewhere and its fun.

I took out applecare for my iphone from the apple store yesterday and got home and checked ebay and I could have gotten it for less than half price.  Nevermind eh?

I need to order Sue this pink laptop bag she’s spotted but its nearly £40 with delivery!

Really looking forward to this Wednesday, it’s our 3rd wedding anniversary.  Other than taking her out for a meal in the evening, I haven’t made any plans – thoughts and suggestions welcome!

There, I said it.  It’s done.

And it’s so good!

1920×1200 screen resolution, so crisp, so clean and sharp.  iPhoto with it’s geotagging capabilities along with the face recognition that hunts through your other photos and tags them for you.  Absolutely fantastic.

I came across my first challenge this evening.  I had to install/make use of a tight VNC viewer to connect to the PC we have hooked up to the telly (use it for controlling bits and pieces and playing video, etc).  I got to the stage where I could start it using the command line using

java vncviewer /parameters

Which was all well and good but it’s a bit of a pain in the arse, you don’t want to have to open up a terminal and type out the command each time.

So I opened up vi and created myself a little script called vnc.sh

I couldn’t execute this initially without invoking sh so had to chmod it to allow execute.

This allowed me to execute it by running ./vnc.sh from the command line.

Moving forwards but still not where I wanted to be – unable to create a working alias from an sh file I did a little more hunting and found that if I renamed the .sh to a .command I should be able to run it from the finder and create an alias.

Job done.  Who’d have thought my basic (but improving all the time) linux skills would have come in handy so soon?

Other than that, I’ve got the iPhone running the beta of v3.0 now, I’ve also got the SDK installed.  I’ll be spending a bit of time this weekend getting to know the code and starting to play around – a lot of people are telling me that it’s not the easiest thing to learn and it’s certainly not the best platform/language to start out on.  I’ll see how it goes – I’m doing it purely for fun and hopefully I’ll be able to get going with it soon.

Bought four different magazines from WHSmiths today.  One of them is a Mac Format guide to iLife – at £7.99 it wasn’t cheap but it looks pretty good as a how-to guide for the different features of iLife that came with the mac.  I also bought Mac Format, Mac User and Mac World.

I’ll be reading through them over the coming days (and over the weekend) and if theres one that stands out I might subscribe to it.  We’ll see how it goes.

So far, I’m very, very impressed.  Not missing Windows at all and I’m wondering why it took me so long to think about making the switch.