Category Archives: mac

New iMac

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As the purchaser of a iMac at the start of the year, I went through the usual doubts and uncertainties about how long my purchase would remain current. Just to recap, I got a 24″ iMac, with the following upgrades: 2GB RAM, 500GB SATA hard disk, 256MB nVidea graphics card. Although the 24″ iMac had only been out for a couple of months, I was aware that the overall design was getting on a bit, and was probably due an update sometime this year.

Yesterday saw that update, and I’m breathing a sigh of relief that there’s nothing too revolutionary about it meaning my current iMac doesn’t seem so obsolete (in reality it isn’t obsolete at all, it’s still a hugely powerful machine for what I do with it!) I’m quite impressed with the way that the 24″ model’s base specs have been upgraded. The processors have a boost, topping out with a 2.8Ghz Core Duo Extreme, whilst the maximum amount of memory is up to 4GB from 3GB. The graphics are ATI across the range rather than the previous ATI low end and nVidea high end choice, and 256MB is standard. Finally, the hard disk sizes are upped, with the max now being 1TB.

The thing I’m most happy with is that the overall styling is similar, albeit with a brushed metal and glass look rather than white plastic. Most importantly as well, the screen resolution hasn’t changed, with the 24″ still being 1920×1200. I’m quite happy that my iMac has a matt screen rather than the now standard glossy screen which to my eyes is not as good for photo work.

I’m also happy that the new models don’t yet have any HD drive, and have stuck with DVD for the time being.

The one thing I’m less happy about is the fact that the cost has decreased quite significantly, with the top end iMac 24″ now coming in at £400 less than I paid for a faster processor and equivalent memory, graphics and disk to the one I specced. Still, overall it could have been worse.

One thing Apple should be slapped for is shipping the top end iMac with 2x 1GB memory chips. If you want to upgrade to 3 or 4GB in the future you are going to have to chuck one or both of those away.

Thoughts on Beryl

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I’ve had a pretty hardcore day of getting a design doc done today. I started at 6:30am and went straight through until about 7pm. All day was spent slaving over my Thinkpad, with it’s shiny new Beryl window manager running. I have to say I am extremely impressed by the experience of using it.

I start off taking advantage of an empty office to duck into one of the conference rooms to make sure that my Thinkpad and Linux would play nicely on a projector. Unsurprisingly it wouldn’t and I couldn’t get the Fn-F7 combo to work. After a bit of googling and a check of the internal forums I found a solution involving aticonfig –force-monitor=crt1,lvds

With that sorted and the projector displaying I fired up a presentation and displayed it. I then had an epiphany and realised that for the first time, virtual desktops make sense to me thanks to Beryl. Previously I’ve found having to click on an icon somewhere or remember a keyboard shortcut a little too tiresome, and ended up piling things on one desktop. However with a simple Ctrl-Alt and the push of the mouse I can watch my virtual desktops swish past in an OS X Quartz Extreme cube effect. It is so powerful to use in presentations. For instance I can have the full screen presentation on one desktop whilst a demo is set up and ready to go on another. No longer do I have to Alt-tab or escape out of the presentation to get to the demo, just swish over to another virtual desktop whilst my audience gaze in wonder at the Beryl eye-candy. I’m now even more impatient for OS X Leopard and it’s Spaces virtual desktop concept to arrive, but it doesn’t look quite so funky.

Talking of OS X, the other invaluable part of Beryl which I found myself making extensive use of during the day was the Expose-like ability to see shrunk versions of every open window, then click on the one you want to work with. The way it can show all windows across virtual desktops or just the ones in the desktop you are in is way cool, and so is the automatic (and much faster than normal) flipping over to the desktop hosting the window.

All in all, on an intense days work I’ve been nothing but impressed by RHEL, the IBM Open Client and Beryl. It is certainly a league above Windows XP for being able to get things done productively, and as much as it hurts to say it, it gives OS X a good run for the money as well. It seemed to run fine on my T42p, 2GB RAM and 128MB ATI Mobility FireGL T2 as well.

Southampton Apple Store grand opening

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Queue 1

Both Andy and myself were present at the opening of the Southampton Apple Store this morning. Having underestimated the popularity of the event and left my departure accordingly late I was glad that Andy managed to secure an impressive place in an even more impressively long queue, which almost reached down to the exit from West Quay onto the High Street.

After some frankly quite embarrassing staff whooping and hand slapping, they opened up the shutters to let in the hordes. With what seemed like a full complement of staff and of course a huge amount of punters the most immediate impression was that the store itself is, well a little small. I was expecting it to have two floors, as with most Apple stores I’ve been to. The DVD shop which was there before certainly did.

Filing in 2

I spent most of my time wandering around taking photos, some of which are now up on flickr (slideshow here) Andy meanwhile had a mission to spend, and came out with a new toy, but I’ll let him tell you about that ;-)

24″ iMac – initial random thoughts

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24

Wow! Some random thoughts before I collate a more considered post tonight:

  • It comes in a very big box.
  • It is quite disconcerting when the invoice stuck to said box is made out to some guy in France…
  • … though he seems to have gone for the 3GB…
  • … but only the 128MB graphics card.
  • Phew, it is actually mine.
  • Why is Apple packaging so, well, cool.
  • Blimey it’s big.
  • But very, very nice.
  • Lots of system updates to download.
  • Firmware update. Please don’t go wrong…
  • …Phew.
  • 1920×1200 rocks.
  • Wires from the keyboard and mouse are annoying me already.
  • Very easy to transfer stuff over from the iBook via firewire.
  • Did I say it was big?
  • Play with FrontRow. Remote is cool.
  • 1080p trailer of 300 at native res, impressive.
  • Installed Lightroom. Wow, this is what I bought it for!

Lightroom comparison

  • SecondLife and Google Earth are sweet. Might actually tempt me to spend a decent amount of time in SL now.
  • Photoshop Elements runs quick, even under Rosetta.
  • CD drive is very quiet.
  • Very, very happy.

Anticipation

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29 Jan 2007 07:00 Southampton Out For Delivery
29 Jan 2007 05:48 Southampton Import Received
27 Jan 2007 22:16 Northampton Hub Consignment Received At Transit Point
26 Jan 2007 17:09 Arnhem Hub Consignment Received At Transit Point
26 Jan 2007 17:09 Arnhem Hub Consignment Passed Through Transit Point
23 Jan 2007 11:42 Shanghai Consignment Received At Transit Point
23 Jan 2007 09:35 Shanghai Consignment Picked Up

The ins and outs of Apple shipment and order tracking

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I’ve ordered numerous items from Apple over the years, including two iPods an iBook and now the iMac. As such, and like a lot of other Apple customers, I’ve become quite au-fait with their shipment procedures. In fact, it seems Apple customers are really quite anal when it comes to tracking where their precious delivery is!

When you view any hardware product on the Apple Store, it gives an estimated “ready to ship” date. If this is “within 24 hours” that normally means the product is in stock at a distribution point and you are ordering a standard configuration. If you are customising a product then your order becomes a BTO/CTO (Build-to-order / customize-to-order) order with a typical ready to ship date of 2-3 days. This will be fulfilled from the factory in most cases (iPod engraving being an exception – that is done at the distribution point) Of course, the ready to ship date is the date it is, er, ready to ship from the distribution point or factory, not the date you can expect to receive your shiny new purchase. If you are especially keen to get hold of a standard config, you might be better off heading down to your local reseller (John Lewis are best if you happen to be in the UK)

Once you’ve ordered, your order confirmation will give the RTS date, and an estimated delivery date. You will also have an order number typically beginning with W80 or W81. This is where the fun begins. If your order is CTO hardware then it is most likely going to be built in a factory in China. From there it is possible that it may be shipped directly by courier. You’ll know if this is happening as the shipping method on your order status page will be “Fast Ship (EMEA)” This means that a courier (TNT or UPS in the UK at least) will handle the delivery from factory to your door. Once your item is shipped you’ll receive a dispatch email from Apple which will contain a ten digit delivery reference number beginning with 80.

What happens now is up to the delivery method. If it is a single item through Fast Ship deliver then you are in luck. You should be able to use the delivery reference number to do a track by reference on the courier web site (try both TNT and UPS) though you will have to wait for the courier system to pick up the details after you receive the order shipped email.

Alternatively, if you’ve ordered more than one item, then congratulations, you’ve now entered the world of the fabled distribution centre. In Europe, this is the TNT European Distribution Centre (EDC) located in The Netherlands. No doubt it is surrounded by lovely windmills and tulip fields. It is here that all your items meet up and get packaged together (or merge in transit if you like) for a single delivery to your door. Factory sourced items are shipped here by a company called Kuehne + Nagel. Going through the EDC tends to add time to your order delivery, so think twice before you add that extra piece of software to your hardware order!

So, the net result is that there are various possible ways in which goods ordered from the Apple store might get to your door, so it would be nice to have a single point at which everything could be tracked, right? Well, unfortunately the Apple Store tracking system is not the best. However, help is at hand thanks to a very nice man called Thomas, and his Appletrack site. This collates information from K+N right down to the nitty details such as when your package picked up, booked on a flight, to when it gets handed over to a courier. It also has a helpful forum which contains more information that this post ever could. It is also a fun read to see people fretting about the fate of the plane their new Mac is on as tracking shows it being in the air for 48 hours!

Not that I’ll be laughing if the iMac doesn’t turn up. Now where’s my order reference number…

Useful backup trick for iTunes

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I have somewhere in the region of 500 albums in my iTunes library, the vast majority of which are rips from physical CDs. However I tend only to buy music from the iTunes Music Store nowadays and as such make sure I back those tracks up regularly.

iTunes itself offers this facility by an option on the Back up to disc command to back up only purchased music to optical media, however I back up to a NAS device so this doesn’t work for me.

So, the rather neat and geeky method I use is to drop down into Terminal and do the following:

iBook:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music aspender$ find . -name *.m4p | cpio -pdmv /Volumes/music/backup

This pipes the list of m4p files found in my iTunes library (.m4p being the file suffix used by the DRM protected AAC files you get from iTMS) to the cpio command which archives them whilst preserving the directory structure. The inclusion of the -p option performs a copy-pass function which un-archives the files into the target directory. Alternatively you could omit this and keep a single cpio archive file around.

Easy access to the powerful Unix underpinnings of OS X is one of the reasons I love Macs.

As for the rest of the library, well I’m planning a major exercise to re-rip all my CDs into a lossless format for future proofing, then do conversion into MP3 so I’m not bothered about backing them up for the time being. More on that later though.

Apple Mac purchasing decisions

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Whilst I’ve been busy shooting over 3000 frames with my Canon 400D, I’ve been severely hampered in the post-processing of them due to the lack of a suitable computer. Not any more… Gulp.

Whilst I work in computer software, I’ve never really been much of a hardware geek. The thought of building my own PC doesn’t interest me at all, also I don’t get the whole constant upgrade thing, so prefer to have a machine which will last a long time. As such I made an old 486 DX2 50Mhz last me all through university and well beyond. Thankfully of course IBM gave me a succession of Thinkpad laptops over the years, so my need for a desktop machine of my own was minimal.

About four years ago I got the urge to get a Mac, and bought a used PowerMac G4 from eBay. I fell in love with it and have been a Mac fan ever since. However we sold it on 18 months ago to fund a 12″ iBook G4 for Lana to use on her night shifts. All this was fine as I could happily surf the web on my Thinkpad and use the iBook for iTunes and iPhoto occasionally.

All this changed when the DSLR came along and I suddenly found myself wanting to spend more and more time in front of the iBook using Adobe Lightroom and more recently Photoshop Elements. Using the Thinkpad would be possible (IBM are good like that generally) but not an ideal option given the limited disk space I have spare. Thus I started to hanker after a new machine. The only question is what it would be? The certainties were that it would be a Mac, and also that it would be new and would have to last. That combination provided a number of options:

  • Mac Mini and a display
  • iMac
  • Macbook
  • Macbook Pro

All of these would be within my budget. Unfortunately the Mac Pros are too expensive once you factor in the need for a display. Technically my priorities were a large crisp display, as much RAM as possible and large but more importantly fast disk.

The Mac Mini, although small and silent suffers from only having a Core Duo processor and 2.5″5,400 rpm disk of up to 80GB. It can take 2GB of RAM but has onboard graphics which share system memory. Twinned with a 20″ or 23″ Apple Cinema Display I feel it would run out of steam quite quickly and the disk would instantly be filled with my current iTunes library and photo archive.

The iMac is a much more interesting proposition. The sleek all-in-one form factor certainly has aesthetic appeal and the displays are excellent. The Intel Core 2 Duo processor provides enough power and RAM is up to 3GB. Disk-wise they use 3.5″ SATA drives that spin at 7,400 rpm up to 750GB in size.

The two laptops are of course a compromise between portability and performance. With one iBook already in the house I wasn’t keen on the 13.3″ widescreen display of the MacBook as it wouldn’t offer any significant difference to the 12″ iBook, which is pretty cramped when editing photos. That left the MacBook Pros of which the 15″ provided an adequate 1440 x 900 resolution. However, common to both the laptops was the relatively slow 5,400 rpm drives (or even 4,200 rpm if you want 200GB in a MacBook Pro) The portability of a laptop is compromised if you need to start adding external storage via firewire, and in any case I didn’t see portability as a key requirement. After all there are already two laptops in the household.

So, the iMac it was. The only decision was which one? It came down to the 20″ or the amazing 24″ model (you can see where this is going…) Both were within budget, so the decision was really about do we have space for the beautiful, but really rather big 24″ model? There are some technical advantages to the larger version as well. It has upgraded graphics, Firewire 800 (though of debatable use unless you are planning to implement RAID 1 or 5) and the screen itself is different in that it has two backlights leading to increased brightness (some say too bright.) After playing around with both in John Lewis (including uploading my own photo onto them using the Bluetooth on my Nokia N80) I couldn’t get past the beauty of the 24″ screen. With a massive 1920 x 1200 resolution it can handle 1080p video which whilst not so important now, may well be in a couple of years. The only thing holding me back was the thought that the 20″ one plus an extra 20″ Apple Cinema Display would work out about the same (well, a bit more.) Now of course, dual monitors are very useful for photo work, but we don’t really have the space for such a luxury.

So, tonight I placed an order with Apple for the following:

  • iMac 24″ with 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
  • 2 GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM (2 x 1GB)
  • NVIDEA GeForce 7600GT with 256MB SDRAM
  • 500GB SATA 7,400rpm Hard Disk
  • 8x double layer SuperDrive (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

As I said at the top, Gulp! The only things I didn’t max out on the options were the RAM and the Hard Disk. The RAM can go up to 3GB, but the option was too expensive and I’ll wait for the price of the 2GB sticks to drop. I could have ordered a 750GB Hard Disk, but again the cost was quite high and extra external storage can always be added. Some of the options, namely the processor upgrade (from the standard 2.16 GHz) and the graphics card (from 7300GT with 128MB) are probably not going to be necessary for the use I have in mind (I’m not a PC gamer at all) but the iMac is not a user-upgradable machine (memory aside) so I might as well max them out whilst I can. After all, this machine is going to have to last a long, long time!

So now all that is left is to anticipate the delivery sometime around the end of the month. That, and to remove ThinkSecret and MacRumors from my feed reader so I don’t hear about the inevitable iMac upgrade that will now happen! I could have waited a couple of months to get OSX Leopard as standard, but I’m impatient and anyway, that will provide more fun later on!