Macgasm

Apple Genius Bar Logo

After almost five months of pretty heavy usage, my iPhone decided to give up. Although the phone still worked properly the screen was barely visible and contained all kinds of streaking vertical lines. Since I was outside of the country when this happened I called my cellular company (Rogers) and setup an appointment to bring it in and get a floater. Fortunately a friend on Twitter advised me that it would be better to make an appointment at the genius bar since I was still within the warranty period.

Making an appointment with the genius bar (http://www.apple.ca/retail/geniusbar/) was quite painless. You simply pick the store you would like the appointment at and then input your personal information. The web site will then come back with a list of open times you can select from.

When I got the store I had to register so they would know I was there. The appointment was set for 7:00PM and I did not get to see my genius until 7:20PM. He actually apologized for running late and noted they were short staffed that night. In the next few minutes I was reminded of how Apple shines and was thrilled with the level of service provided. The genius informed me he had never seen this happen before and actually apologized again for the inconvenience. He then went to the back of the store and got me a replacement. There were no further questions, no hassles — just one signature and a new iPhone.

When I got home I plugged the new phone into the computer and was able to restore the phone just as it was prior. This made me realize again how much I love Apple and that if there is such a thing as an Apple tax it is worth every penny. Had this been a Blackberry/other smartphone I believe it would have been days before I was up and running again. Even then I likely be installing software and tweaking settings for several more days.

Have you been to the genius bar? If so what was your experience?

With all this WWDC talk about Snow Leopard and the new iPhone OS and iPhone 3GS, one service has gone unnoticed. Now I know a lot of people could care less about MobileMe, but I am a MobileMe user and love it. I have never had an issue with it. I think Apple has gone and even made the MobileMe service even more useful than ever now if you own an iPhone.

The first new feature is “Find my iPhone”. This can come in handy for several things. First if you have misplaced or left your iPhone somewhere, you will now have the ability to locate it. This is done through the MobileMe website. You will get a view of your iPhone’s location on a map and be able to see where it is. You will also be able to send a message or sound to your phone with this service. So if someone has found your iPhone, they can see the message that you send with contact information for you. If you happen to misplace your iPhone in your own home, you can send a sound alert and track it by sound in your home. This works with your sound on or off! If you are like me at all, you have misplaced your iPhone in your house while it is on vibrate a few times.

Next is “Remote Wipe”. This really falls under Locating your iPhone, but I feel it deserved its own spotlight. So you have lost your iPhone and you have important things on it or have no hope of getting it back. Now through MobileMe you have the ability to completely wipe your iPhone with out having it in front of you. So if you use your iPhone for work and have some client info on it or phone numbers of famous people, you can now wipe it and keep all that info safe.

And finally we have Mobile iDisk. Mobile iDisk will be an iPhone app from apple that allows you to see your iDisk from your iPhone. This is very handy if you keep a lot of important notes on your iDisk. You can view several file types on your iPhone in this app as well. If you have friends or colleagues that use MobileMe and they have a public folder in use, you can view that with their permission from your iPhone as well. This is something I have been wanting from apple for a long time.

A side note to the iDisk app. Last week I reviewed Airsharing pro that enables this. I still stand behind AirSharing Pro. However I feel that Avatron my have opened apples eyes to see that people want this functionality.

A lot of people around the internet are curious about how their 3G iPhones are matching up to the new 3GS model.  There’s been a lot of mixed reviews about the new model.  Some people are stoked, and a whole slew of other people are not.  One thing is for certain, geeks sure do have a sense of humor about the S in 3GS!

@iTod: iPhone 3GS. the s is for ‘suckas’ who bought iPhone 3G

@dangrover: iPhone 3GS — the S is for Sccchhilller

I’m still on the fence about the value in upgrading from my second generation iPhone to the 3GS. One thing I can say that is kind of irksome about this upgrade is the fact that voice dial is not being given to 3G users. I don’t know anything about the technology involved with the application, but it seems to me that a built in mic is all we need. For a device that has been heralded as more powerful than a PSP and some other previous generation video game systems, it seems like we’re being left out for no reason at all.

Most of the other 3GS applications are logically being left out because of their reliance on some new technologies (ie. Compass). I can’t wrap my head around the voice dialer though. If i’m missing something let me know in the comments. If it’s being left out for no other reason then enticing users to upgrade I’ll be pretty pissed.

You can get the rest of the chart and comparison from Apple here!

Apple have now posted one of their ‘guided tour‘ videos about the new iPhone 3GS.
You can watch online in 3 sizes, or download for later.

While you’re there, check out the new TV advert.

After the WWDC 2009 keynote I wanted to go and buy an iPhone 3GS. The first thing to note is that you can order a new iPhone directly from Apple. However, if you’ve purchased an iPhone 3G on release date, and you’re in the United States with AT&T, you’re likely going to have to wait until July 12th before you can get an iPhone 3GS at the upgrade price of $199 for the 16GB Version, and $299 for the 32GB Version.

If you purchased an original iPhone and didn’t upgrade to the iPhone 3GS you should be able to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS and pay the upgrade prices.

I went to go the Apple website and tried to order one and this is what I saw below.

Looks like I’ll be waiting until July 12th before purchasing an iPhone 3GS.

Mac OS X has 75 million as of 2009. There were only 25 Million in 2007.

Hardware

• New 15″ MBP, unibody design.
• 7 Hour battery life (supposedly).
• 5 years of use before seeing diminished battery life.
• Recycling options available at the Apple store, if it does need to be replaced.
• Over 1000 charge cycles, up from the 300 previously.
• SD Card Slot. No Express Card Slot anymore.
• Up To 8GB of 1066MHz DDR3 RAM.
• 60% color gamut increase.
• New starting price of $1699.
• 3.06 Dual Core CPU, 500 GB 7200 RPM or 256 SSD
• Highest End is 2.8GHZ, 500GB HDD, 9400M + 9600GT at $2299.
• 17″ also updated, shipping today. Retains Express card slot.

Macbook 13″

• 13″ updated, new display, SD Card slot and battery battery life.
• FW800 and SD Card Slot. Now Also called ‘Macbook Pro’.
• $1199 to $1499 in standard configurations.
• 13″ Macbook pro shipping today.

Macbook Air

• New Macbook Air, price drop to $1499 up to 2.13GHz CPU.
• All of them meet EP gold and energy star v5 standards, greenest lineup yet.

OS X : Snow Leopard

• Best OS Written for vast majority of consumers. Sharp contrast to vista. Windows 7 introduces even more complexity, Same issues, registry, DLLs, defragmentation.
• Lots of new technologies in Snow Leopard, lots of refinement, exchange support. 90% of the OS was refined.
• Finder was re-written in cocoa, with tons of extra features.
• New Dock, with Expose built in. 45% faster installation of the OS, recover 6GB of space of disk space after upgrading from leopard.
• Preview now 2X faster, better text selection in PDF, better chinese text input, uses trackpad to draw characters.

Safari

• Mail up to 2.3x faster, safari 4 features top sites, final version released today on all platforms.
• Leopard, tiger, and Windows.
• Passes Acid3 test with 100%.
• Safari is 7.8X faster at Javascript, included with snow leopard. Crash resistance. Browser plugins crash, but not the browser nor the OS.
  Cover-flow view of browser history.

Full spotlight search of browser history, full text.

Quicktime X

• Quicktime hardware accelerated, new streaming method that works with any web server.
• Brand new interface, content is the focus.
• Trim and share video using a visual timeline select the part of the video you want. Directly shared with Youtube, Mobile me, or iTunes.

Stacks

• Stack handle lots of content better, scrolling drilling into folders.
• Magnify thumbnails on the fly, can step through multi-page documents and plays videos through Finder.

Expose

• Click and hold on a dock icon and expose shows all of the windows. Can work within a window without closing Expose.
• Can drag a file on any icon, and expose will allow you to choose which
• particular window you want to drag it to.
• Snow Leopard shipping in September, $29 for the upgrade.
• 64-bit, if it runs in 32-bit mode, it has a limit of 4GB. All major system apps run in 64-bit.
• 16 million gigabytes of Memory is the limit.
• Grand Central Station gives full granular control.

OpenCL

• Allows processing support by using the GPU instead of the CPU. Video cards can be much faster than traditional CPUs. With the capacity of 1 teraflop power.

Exchange Support

• Mail, iCal and Address Book all support Microsoft Exchange.
• Auto-discovery of Exchange servers, all email/folders/to-do lists are automatically populated, spotlight immediately searches all data. Quick looks let you preview Office documents through mail, even if Office isn’t installed.
• Event invitations can be accepted / denied right through mail, Ical and address books automatically have all data once mail is setup.
• Contacts can be created by dragging and dropping contacts.
• Supports resources allocation, people’s schedules, room availability.
• Requires MS Exchange 2007 or later.
• Boxed Version is $129.
• Upgrade is $29, $49 for Family pack. Near-final developer preview available today.

iPhone

• 50,000 applications in the App store.
• Free SDK has been downloaded more than a million times.
• 40 Million of iPhone OS Devices have been sold.
• iPhone OS 3.0, major update to the firmware, 100 new features.
• ‘Find My Phone’. Only available to Mobile me subscribers. Will show on the Map where it is. Alert sound will play regardless of silent mode.
• If your phone really is lost, remotely delete all the data. Restore from backup will allow you to get back all of your data.
• OS Update will be free for all iPhone Customers, original iPhone and iPhone 3G. $9.95 for iPod Touch customers. Will be available June 17th.
• Two thirds of all mobile browsing happens on an apple mobile device.

iPhone 3GS

• Most powerful and fastest iPhone. Same Great design.
• Much faster, loading messages is 2.1X faster, loading a game, 2.4X faster, Viewing Attachements, 3.6X faster, javascript 2.9X faster. Speeds shown against iPhone 3G, running 3.0 software.
• Game developers get better speed.
• HSDPA for 7.2Mbps.
• New camera built-in. 3.0 Megapixel autofocus camera. Auto, exposure, auto light balance. Touch to focus. Auto Macro lens too, improved light sensitivity. Photos can be taken as close as 10CM.
• Video on the iPhone. Switch on the bottom and allows Video or still photos. 30 frames a second VGA 640×480 with auto-focus.
• You can also share the videos from your iphone using a share button (email, MMS, MobileMe, and to Youtube).
• Videos are shown right alongside the photos in your library app on the phone. You can also edit the videos (trimming).
• API for Video capturing for Developers.
• Voice Control. Includes Voice Dialing anywhere in any application.Hold down the home button for a few seconds. A dialog box will appear.
• Voice control of iPod.app, “Play all songs by the Killers”.
• Control Genius, “play more songs like this”. “What’s playing now”.
• Built-in Digital Compass. Compass.app Longitude, latitude, See where you are. Integrates with Maps.app and will orient which way you are going. Built-in API for the compass.
• Accessibility is now built in as well.
• Nike+ support built in as well.
• Hardware encryption now built-in, great for businesses.
• Battery life is now better. 9 Hours of internet surfing, 10 hours of video playback, 12 hours of 2G talk time, 3 hours for 3G talk time.
• Most environmentally friendly phone. Arsenic free, mercury free LCD.
• Packaging 23% smaller.
• Available June 19th. For $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB. Black and White. 3G version will be $99 8GB version. iPhone 3G price starts Today.

Overall the Keynote was a two-hour extravaganza of new Macs, Snow Leopard, new iPhone OS 3.0, and iPhone 3GS.

[photo by: Adam Jackson on Flickr]

It’s coming, and we’ve finally got an official word on a release… month. Apple has pegged a release in September, but they were far from announcing it as a hard date. In the past, we’ve seen release dates slide a little, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the September 2009 date slip.

We’ve had a few bones tossed our way about what to expect out of snow leopard over the last two years, and today we got a little more information on what to expect out of the release.

They spent quite a bit of time focusing on operating system refinements, new technologies that are going to be included in the release, as well as some more information on Exchange support (yawn).

Major Snow Leopard Refinements

The finder has been completely rewritten, but there’s very little we’ll notice about the changes.  This revamp ties into the process of turning all the core applications into 64-bit versions to ensure that users get the latest speed possibilities out of their new devices.  It’s about time if you ask me.  Finder could have used the update in Leopard.  The process of rewriting some of these applications, and working out kinks brings with it a natural slimming of the code needed to run programs.  That being said Apple also announced that the operating system installation for Snow Leopard comes in as 6gb’s smaller than the Leopard install.  Now that some major fat cut off the bone if you ask me.  Coincidentally, a smaller install means a quicker installation process.  I’m sure a lot of tech support people are heralding the 45% cut in installation time as the best thing to happen to OS X since the move from OS 9.  I can’t blame them, the install time for Leopard was painful.

One of my other favourite features in OS X is also getting a bit of a reworking.  The dock now has some expose hooks, you click and hold the icon you want, and you get the windows you want.  There was also mention of stacks letting you navigate through folders. In hindsight these two things look like a bit of a no-brainer now.  You want to increase productivity?  Use expose to its fullest extent possible around the operating system. I’m all for it, and it’s going to make my daily computer use a lot more painless.

Powerful new technologies.

You know what must be a pain in the ass? Chinese characters on computing devices.  I wouldn’t know, I don’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese, but I can only imagine that character recognition for those languages must be a really laborious process when the computer has no idea what the hell you’re talking about.  Apple addresses the concern by building in an Application that lets you sketch your character.  Again, how was this not something that has existed yet?  Genius.

Mail and Safari are both getting love in Snow Leopard as well.  Mail loading 2.3x faster than it does now is something that most of us could benefit from.  I mean getting your mail instantly is important when you’re trying to get your Viagra mail right?  Safari 4 is officially out of beta today.  I wonder if that means MSN no longer craps the bed when you install it.  I’ll wait to hear from my siblings before I give that one an install.  You know what’s going to set apart Safari from it’s competitors?  Its ACID 3 score.  100/100 is something that web developers are going to be ecstatic about.  You know what I’m going to be ecstatic about, no more crashing browsers.  That’s right, plugins crash now, and that means my all important social media websites don’t have to all be reloaded manually. I’m sure google apps users will also breathe a collective sigh of relief.  Oh, Javascript is 50% faster.  Get ready for an explosion of modal windows and accordian menus.  You know they’re on route now!

There’s an new quicktime interface, but we all know that was coming, and GPU and hardware acceleration is also on the agenda officially now. OpenCL is now in full swing with Snow Leopard.

Exchange support.

Unless you’re in corporate IT, this is probably a giant MEH for most of you, but you should probably note that they have built Exchange support into the three key OS X communication systems: Mail, iCal, and Address Book. So the next time that smart ass IT guy tells you that your new Mac can’t integrate with their corporate system tell him he’s full of crap and that he should find a new job.  Don’t take his crap.  He’s a moron!

The Price?

29.99 USD for Snow Leopard and 49.99 USD for the Family pack.  Talk about sticking it to Microsoft.

The final build of Safari 4 was announced during the WWDC keynote today. I have been running Safari 4 beta since it was announced awhile back, and wanted to jump to the final release. So far I am pleased to find everything pretty much the same, if anything, even faster. However, there is one big change – the tab bar. One of the biggest complaints about the Safari 4 beta was the Google Chrome-style above the address-bar tab bar. The idea was to save space, but many argued that it was poorly implemented. It was in the title bar of the app and unlike Google Chrome, there was no space left to grab just to move the window. Additionally, the selected tab was larger than the other tabs around it. As far as I can tell, the final Safari 4 implementation is identical to the Safari 3 tabs. There doesn’t even appear to be an option in preferences to go to the above the address-bar style.

I personally appreciated the space it saved, my biggest problem was the fact that it could click through. There were countless times that I clicked on the window to switch focus to Safari, and accidentally closed a tab. I think Google Chrome nails this style of tabs, and wish Safari had the same system, but I expect Google’s legal department wouldn’t like that too much.

Apple has a history of not listening to users. They like to tell their customers what they want, instead of listening to their customers. But today with the change in this tab system, and the announcement of the tiny MacBook Pro (with the (re-)addition of a FireWire port no less) Apple is doing a little to please the masses.

Safari 4 should be in software update soon, but if you want it sooner, hit up this link.