Matt Charlton

Today see’s the US release of the new Apple iPad tablet device.

I’ve seen a couple of articles which draw comparisons to the way the point and shoot camera has been relegated to the point of a niche device – serious photographers use DSLR cameras whilst everyone else uses their 5mp+ camera built into their mobile phone.  You’ve always got your phone with you and for most people, this is good enough.  Unless you have an iPhone/3G and the camera just isn’t good enough to replace a point and shoot other than grabbing snapshots.  The same could happen with laptops and tablet devices; people who need to use a computer for high power tasks use a desktop machine.  Other people use a laptop.  They’re not ideal and are often slower with less processing power than their big brothers but there isn’t a lot much else out there.

The iPad could change everything – when you analyse just what you use your laptop for on a day-to-day basis you’re probably looking at some twitter/facebook/social networking interaction, a fair bit of web browsing and e-mail.  With flash being left out of the Apple garden of love this wouldn’t be any good for all of you Farmville addicts out there (until they port that to HTML5 ) but I guess for a lot of people it would be more than sufficient.

There’s still no word from Apple on when this will hit the streets in the UK, nor is there any information regarding pricing.  As always with the $ > £ ratio, I imagine there won’t be much difference so we could be looking at around £800 for the 64GB wifi + 3G model.  That’s an awful lot of money but with no expandable memory options, I’d have to go with the best one available.  The 16GB iPhone 3G was the best model when I bought it and I struggle with space – I’ve got a few mp3s on there but I’ve also bought 2/3 Blu-Rays over the past 12 months that came with digital copies to transfer over.  Problem is, they weigh in at between 1GB-2GB each and I can’t have more than 1/2 on the phone at the same time.

The 32GB model would probably suffice, but doubling the storage for the sake of $100 (depends on the $ > £ again) seems like a non-issue.

I’ve read reports from Apple that say they want the iPad to be the sort of device you can throw in a suitcase, throw on the seat of your car, pick up and check your mail, browse the web.  It does look like a lot of fun for displaying your photos and watching videos, I can see it being the sort of device you could keep on your coffee table and pick up to use as and when you want to.  It’s also very portable and you’d have no problems taking it over to a friend’s house.

The biggest thing that puts me off is iPhone OS – As much as I love my iPhone, I prefer the customisation available to me in Mac OS X – I like the openness of the system.  Everything with the iPhone is closed.  Apps have to be vetted and approved and can be pulled at any time.  If the iPad ran OS X I’d already have a pre-order in (if the UK Apple store were accepting them) but I’m still unsure about what running the iPhone OS will mean for the iPad.

The e-mail and calendar stuff looks awesome, some of the games look quite good, especially board games.  I’d have it for that.

I’m still undecided as to whether or not I’ll get one – chances are that I will; I waited until the 2nd generation of iPhone to purchase and am glad that I did – there were no apps for the original release and with limited Edge coverage ‘oop north’ browsing the Internet would have been painful.

When I think about when and where I might use an iPad – probably in the house in front of the TV (wifi would be fine) but also when I’m in the car as a passenger – for this use, 3G would be ideal, I’d still have access to the net on a larger screen and with no tethering option to the iPhone, the 3G model might be the only option.

I’ll try and visit the Apple store before I head to the states, or whilst I’m there if needs be.  I think seeing one of these things in the flesh and using one will be all the wow-factor you’d need to push you over the edge and purchase one.

Yeah it’s an iPod touch with a bigger screen, but I can think of at least 10 ways I’d use that to my advantage.

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.

I’m having to write this blog post from my iPhone because both MacBook pros are in varying states of restore or os installation. Incidently I’m using wordpress for iPhone in landscape mode and it’s lovely.

Feels natural to be typing with both thumbs like this.

Okay a bit of history.

I bought a 17″ mbp in may. It came with a 320gb hard disk which was fine at the time but with snow Leopard and windows 7 fast approaching I wanted a little more space.

I bought a Western Digital 500gb blue scorpio. Installed, worked like a charm.

We got sue a mbp in June but hers came with only a 250gb hard disk. When I upgraded her to snow leopard I noticed that there was less than 50gb free so decided to buy another drive. Bought the same one from amazon.

Installed it and snow leopard refused to install. It’d just hang at various states of the file copy stage. I googled a message from the error log and found a post which relates to a failing hard disk. Fine, I thought faulty drive. I’ll send it back to amazon.

They sent me a replacement out and it did the same thing. My initial thoughts were that there was a dodgy batch of hard disks. I wanted to be sure though so I did some more troubleshooting.

I’ve got an external drive kit. I tried hooking it up to my mbp and it wouldn’t see it. My pc would see it but refused to initialize it.

I still wasn’t convinced.

I put the drive into my mbp. SL installed fine. Same error messsage after partitioning the drive but it worked no problems

I took the drive out and put it back into sues to see if it would boot. Nope. I guess it puts something machine specific in the mbr.

Tried to erase and reinstall. Failed. Although in a different place on a diferent file.

I tried my external DVD drive. Failed again similar place.

I decided to try leopard. Maybe that would give me some more info as to what was going on with it having a slightly different installation procedure.

It failed just before file copy started. Stating an issue with ile copy and that the hard disk was possibly faulty.

Last resort. I took my known working 500gb and attempted an install. Nope. Hard disk possiby faulty. WTF?!

I phoned AppleCare. Yay for scripted Indian call centres. Went through what I’d done. Told him i thought it was possibly a motherboard or bus error He said I was best taking it to a retail store. No genius bar appointments till early next week.

One thing he did ask me to try was to wipe the original 250gb and try a fresh install on that. Try and make it hang.

Leopard installed just fine. So did snow leopard. Bugger.

So that’s where I am now. I can’t see the hdds being faulty but I’ve got no way to prove what it is. I can only replicate it when introducing new hardware to the system and although I can prove said hardware works fine in another machine, I don’t know what apple will say to that.

Anyone got any ideas?

**Update**

http://www.mattcharlton.co.uk/moan/biting-into-a-rotten-apple/

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!

Apple, one of the biggest music download retailers (if not THE biggest) today announced that it was making the majority of the tracks on iTunes DRM-Free. 

Basically this means there will be no limit on how many times you can burn a song to CD (as there is currently) and you can put it on whatever device you like, as many times as you like. 

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/06/itunes-going-primarily-drm-free/

iTunes was one of the last online music retailers still using DRM.  Places like Play.com have offered DRM free tracks for a long time. 

This announcement brings up some interesting questions.  In relation to PC games, one of the heaviest casualties of DRM protection (see Spore, any EA game or recent game from any publisher for that matter). 

All that PC-software based DRM does is to cause problems for the people that legally buy the software.  As far as I know there has yet to be a PC game that hasn’t been cracked.  Cracked copies of games circumvent the DRM put in place by the publisher.  I remember reading a news article that named a game that was brand new out and it was already available for download, DRM free. 

People that purchase these games often find problems with the online activations that are required or the applications that are discreetly installed to their computer that are required in order for the game to run. 

Most of the piracy these days comes from people downloading software, not from people copying games for their mates.  I’m sure a lot more people would buy games if they were DRM free. 

When I bought Spore, I installed it on my laptop and noticed I could only install it on 5 machines.  What the fuck?

I mean seriously.  I’ve been out and bought a game, I’ve paid £30 for it and they’re telling me I can only install it 5 times?

It’s also interesting to note that forums are often full of people that can’t install games that they’ve bought and paid for (they could also be lying and just be filthy pirates), it just seems to me that the DRM causes the pirates no bother whatsoever but is just a giant pain in the arse for legitimate customers.

If I decide to buy one copy of the game and install it on my laptop, Sue’s laptop and my desktop, that’s three copies gone straight off.  I resetup one or two of them and I’m close to my limit.  You can of course, deauthorise a computer to free up a copy.  Why should I have to?

I remember reading about a feature that the PS3 would have that offered similar if not a little more draconian measures.  Basically it would have killed off the pre-owned market.  A game would only be playable on the first console it is placed in.  No lending games to your friends, no selling games you don’t want anymore, no buying games on the cheap when they’ve been out a while and nobody wants them. 

Thankfully, that didn’t come to pass this generation.  With apple turning their back on DRM, it looks like we might never see it. 

All we need now is for PC games manufacturers to follow their lead, sack the DRM, let people install the games they paid for and off we go.

DRM sucks balls, get rid of it.