Crosswalks to Nowhere

It was bound to happen someday. You can only resist the call for so long, and then *bang* you find yourself giving in to The Calling.

Long ago, there was a Mac IIcx making strange little noises in the cubicle next to mine. I managed to escape its call, instead following down the more well-worn path. My first computer was a Packard-Bell 386SX running at 16 MHz with a whopping 2MB of memory and 10 MB hard drive. It ran the brand-new MSDOS 5.0 operating system and cost almost $800. That was then.

This past weekend, I placed an order for a 12" Apple iBook. It has a 1.2 GHz processor, and 80 GB hard drive, and 768 MB of memory.

My conversion was delayed by several years, but will soon be complete. I will be a Disciple of Steve.

Seriously, the decision to go Mac was not one I arrived at easily. After all, thirteen years of doing all my personal stuff on DOS/Windows is nothing to take lightly. The catalyst for the switch was the fact that my Windows-based notebook is starting to show its age, and I became tired of always having to tweak and/or rebuild my XP machines and/or worry about the latest spyware and viruses infecting my environment. I was also tired of the fact that every fourth time I plugged my iPod or PalmPilot into my XP machine, the computer crashed. I did a lot of test driving (thanks to Chris and Lisa for letting me get my hands on their machines) and decided to take the plunge into the Apple world.

(I will confess here that I spent many years as a UNIX systems administrator, and in the late 80s/early 90s I worked closely with NeXT systems, so I am not walking into this blindly.)

Since I've been in the Windows world for so long, I figured my blog would be a good place to talk about any issues I may run into as a recent convert. I don't intend on getting all techy-- I am approaching the Mac world as a true user, not an engineer. So watch this space for more adventures in the new operating environment.

The machine should show up in a few days. More to follow!

My new iBook arrived on Friday morning. (I was hassled by certain individuals about my "stalking" its shipment through FedEx's tracking site.)

The computer is a 12" iBook G4 with an 80 GB hard drive. I added 512 MB of memory so the total onboard now is 768 MB. It's also got the Airport Extreme card, so I can surf wirelessly. I bought a Kensington Optical Mouse, too.

I spent part of Friday getting familiar with the machine, which consisted mostly of installing the memory and getting the computer to talk on my network.

A snowstorm blew in that evening, so we were pretty much locked in on Saturday. I managed to get a lot done then, including transferring my Quicken files, all my MP3s, and loading up apps like Office: mac, Palm Desktop, and the Real and Windows Media players.

So far, things are moving pretty smoothly. Being a longtime Windows user, the new environment does take some getting used to, but I'm adjusting pretty easily.

I am having a difficult time getting network printing to work. The Mac can see the Samsung printer that's attached to my XP box, but it doesn't actually want to print to it. For now, I'm just going to plug the cable directly into the computer.

More to follow as I get deeper into this...

Confession time. :-)

Overall, my PC-to-Mac conversion is going well. I successfully hopped on Panera's free wireless network yesterday, albeit with a minor snag. The Safari browser does not like to be hijacked, which is a good thing in general, but because of this it won't allow you to agree to Panera's T&C document and thus not allow you to surf the internet. I had to use Firefox instead; it was minor, but still an annoyance.

Yesterday I enabled iSync's conduit to synchronize my Palm and Apple's iCal and Address Book programs. What I should have done first was look at iCal and Address Book, because they're lousy compared to the Palm Desktop. When I tried to disable iSync, it wouldn't allow my calendar and contact list to go back to the way it worked before. I had to completely remove iSync and the Palm Desktop program and reinstall in order to get things back to the way they were before. Now it's okay again.

I successfully installed iLife '05 last week and began to mess with iPhoto. I've been using a shareware slideshow/sorter program called ThumbsPlus for as long as I can remember, and this is more elaborate. A cool thing about iPhoto is that it allows you to create albums, so things like "Becky's Concert" or "Emma's Soccer" are easy to find now. I haven't done a lot with its editing features beyond fixing some red eyes.

Not too many other snags so far. I'll have more to report in the near future, I'm sure. Meanwhile, I'm defragging the hard drive on my ThinkPad, the disposition of which has yet to be determined.

In general, my conversion to the Mac has gone smoothly. Applications have worked well, and the problems I've had are ones I'd expect with a new platform. I've made it around most of the them pretty easily.

A few weeks after I got my iBook, I noticed the lower left corner of the computer's case seemed loose, so I visited the Genius Bar (Apple's in-store service depot) at Apple's Michigan Avenue store in Chicago and had it fixed. Well, kinda. The problem came back in a few days, and again after I tightened it myself.

About a month later, I noticed there were white spots on the display. I figured they were smudges, but after cleaning the screen and watching them get worse over a few weeks I realized the LCD was the problem. I brought it back to the Genius Bar and one of the guys told me they'd service it for me (both the LCD and the case), but it would have to be sent in to their repair depot. He entered all my information on a service ticket and I took the laptop home for the weekend to back everything up.

On Monday I made an appointment so I could drop off the iBook. My scheduled time was 11:15, and I arrived at 11:10. I waited 20 minutes, which was no big deal since there was a iPhoto demo going on at the same time. During this time, it went from 4 customers talking to Apple staff down to no customers and two Apple staff members goofing around behind the desk. And there I sat, waiting to be called.

What finally got to me was that two people came off the street to talk to the Geniuses, clearly without an appointment, and they were served right away. While the second customer was being helped, I went to the desk and explained that I just needed someone to write up my iBook so I could drop it off and get back to the office. The Genius who had helped the two walk-ins said "I'm just the iPod guy." A salesman overheard this and pulled the Genius Bar manager out of a back room; he wrote up my order and I was on my way back to the office.

Today I called Apple's 800 support line to make sure they had my iBook somewhere safe. They showed no record of it's being received. Apple's website showed my service order status as being "closed." I called the Apple Store and spoke to a couple different people. They had no information on my computer but assured me it would go out at 6:00 this evening.

Now there's something that instills confidence.

I explained that the reason I brought it into the store was because I figured they would be able to get it moving through the service process quickly. Now we've lost an entire day (and maybe even the computer) because someone in the Genius area didn't pick it up to process it. He had nothing to say to this beyond offering to investigate why it took until now to get to it. I told him all I wanted was his personal assurance that the machine was going out tonight and the new service repair ticket number. An hour later he called with that information.

I'll update this blog when I get more info.

For the first time since I bought the iBook, I found myself saying "this would not have happened had I bought an IBM or a Dell." Let's see if Apple's progress on this changes my attitude.

According to Apple's Support web site, it shows a status of "Unit Shipped to Depot" for my iBook. The detail shows they've received the unit at the depot as of early this morning.

At the end of the day yesterday, the status of my iBook was "Hold - Need More Info." I decided to call Apple Customer Support to see what further info they needed so I could prod this along.

The customer service rep looked up the service record and showed that the technician wrote "No problem found" and they were preparing to send the unit back to the store for my pickup. I just about lost it on this poor guy. He told me he could enter my comments on the service ticket and they would make it back to the people looking at my computer, so I explained that there were huge white blotches over the bottom half of the iBook's display, with several smaller ones elsewhere. If the technician would bring up an all-white window (e.g. Finder, Text Edit) there is no way he could possibly miss them. I also explained that the Genius at the store took about 20 seconds to look at it and agreed it was a problem that required service.

I could give the Apple service depot people the benefit of the doubt and assume that the Genius didn't explain the problem properly on the service order, but to be completely blunt someone would have to be blind not to see this problem. What makes this worse is that this seems to be a known problem with iBook and PowerBook screens.

The customer service rep assured me that "one way or another we will make sure you are a satisfied customer, even if it means giving you a new machine." This was nice to hear, but I have a feeling it may be one of those things that customer service people say to get off the phone. (Call me cynical, but we all know this happens.)

He also gave me the number of Apple's Customer Relations department and an escalation ID, so if there's no movement on this today I'll be giving them a call.

More to follow as events unfold.

I decided to relax for a few days and let Apple's repair depot (an outfit called Flextronics International, located in Memphis) do what they had to do to finish up my iBook.

The status on Apple's web site showed that the repair was finished and the unit was shipped back to the store on Friday. The web site's status page didn't change for the next several days, so I called Apple Care support. They told me it shipped but there was no tracking number available. The person I spoke with left a message for the repair service company asking for a tracking number, and I was told it would take up to 48 hours for a response to come.

I called the store, and sure enough the computer was there. The person I spoke with told me they replaced the LCD screen, which made me a very happy dude. I went to the store to pick it up and sure enough the screen looks great: no more white blotches.

(The problem with the case's being loose doesn't seem to have been addressed, but that wasn't the critical problem anyway.)

I have to wonder if this would have been fixed to my satisfaction had I not made a lot of noise about it last week. And the fact that it came back repaired and in good condition still doesn't excuse all the tumult at the beginning of this saga. I'll have to make a decision between now and January '06 as to whether I want to get Apple's extended AppleCare service on this unit. If this is an example of how Apple handles repairs, I may look for alternatives.

This is one of the tip-ins when I was considering buying an iBook: Solarian II.

This was an awesome game on the Mac II back in the early 1990s, and it's just as addictive in its current incarnation as it was back then. It's a variation on Space Invaders or Galaga, only with some really cool sound effects (which I'll record and post in the future).

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Following my iBook's repair, I received an email from Apple asking for comments on my experience. Let's just say I was very firm with them. I figured my comments would go into some database somewhere, to be treated as a number on a customer sat metric chart, and that would be the end of it.

I was wrong. About three weeks ago, the manager of the Michigan Avenue Apple Store called me to tell me that Apple wanted to make the situation right, and the company did exactly that.

My faith in Apple's Customer Service has been restored. Thanks to everyone at the company for making an unpleasant experience a much better one.

Note: Mac geekiness to follow...

This month's MacAddict has a nice tip for turning the dashboard on and off in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). This is useful if you find things running slowly due to memory issues, like I did on my iBook. I'm putting it here because I know I'll misplace the magazine at some point.

Turning off Dashboard
----
Open a terminal window and enter this:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

and then enter:

killall Dock

Turning on Dashboard
----
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

and then enter:

killall Dock

Enjoy.

Here are Lisa's and my iBooks showing off some tricking out.

It appears the old-style rainbow Apple stickers fit perfectly over the glowing apple on the lid of the latest generation iBooks.

Neat.

Here is the video from today's Apple event where Steve Jobs introduced the new iMac, the new iPods, and the new iTunes video features.

Some things never change-- this reminds me a lot of the videos we used to see back in '89 when Steve was running NeXT.

The new products look pretty cool, I must admit. And as for their impact on our world, I defer to Lisa.

I've been looking for a decent backup program for the Mac for a while. Every recommendation I've received has been either expensive and overblown with unnecessary features (e.g., .Mac) or mind-numbingly complicated (e.g., some French program I downloaded). For the near term, I've been copying my user files to my iPod and then transferring that data to the second (300 GB) drive on my desktop XP machine.

All that changed when I learned about a package called SuperDuper. This is a great little program which serves the single purpose of backing up your data without a huge hassle.

I have an external firewire drive, and when I run SuperDuper it duplicates (get it?) the contents of my iBook's drive to the firewire drive. I can even boot from the firewire drive once the backups are complete.

My iBook's hard drive has about 30 GB used on it, and it took about 35 minutes to back the entire thing up. By registering the package, you get the ability to perform incremental backups, so that only the changes to your hard drive are reflected in your backup image. That saves a big chunk of time in the backup process.

I've always been a proponent of purchasing really good shareware when I come across it. SuperDuper cost $19.95 and is worth every cent.

Apple Computer released a beta product called Boot Camp today. This is a component of their upcoming operating system OSX 10.5 ("Leopard") which allows the user of an Intel-based Mac to run Windows.

This is a brilliant move on Apple's part for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Microsoft's next version of Windows ("Vista") won't be available until next year. Now, people who are looking to buy a computer this holiday season are presented with an option: they can buy a Dell or HP like everyone else, or they can buy a stylish Mac to go with their cool iPod. They'll also have the bonus option of working with a superior operating system, OSX.

I became a UNIX-head in 1986 (SunOS 3.2 was my first exposure to it), but I learned within a few years that Windows was the way of the business desktop world (does anyone else remember WingZ or FrameMaker?). Since then, I viewed Windows as a necessary evil: I have some apps that run only on Windows, so my main computer at home-- the "Big Computer" as the kids call it-- is an XP machine.

Buying a dual-core Intel-based Mini last month brought OSX to the Big Computer's screen. (Through the magic of a KVM switch.) And as of today, I have the option of running the Big Computer's programs on my Mini.

Apple was smart enough to wait until there was a lot of buzz generated from members of the hacker community who managed to cobble together a solution to this a couple weeks ago. Today they were able to pull the Boot Camp rabbit, all ready to play, our of their hat.

Perhaps trying not to completely prove John C Dvorak's theory that Apple will switch to a Windows-based platform, Apple says that through Boot Camp they will provide the means to dual-boot your Mac to OSX or Windows, but they won't actually support Windows. Fair enough.

And now that Apple has given its hardware the capability of running Windows, it's in Microsoft's (and their business partners'-- hello, Dell) best interest to make sure it runs well, lest they lose customer after customer with calls to Apple Tech Support that finish with the recommendation "Well, boot into OSX and let's see if the problem goes away."

Of course, there are limitations: your Mac environment may not be able to write files to your XP space unless you set it up correctly, and your XP space won't be able to access your Mac files at all. I think it's only a matter of time before this problem gets resolved, though. And on a related path, it seems there's an announcement expected later this week from a company which is planning on releasing a new virtualization product for OSX, allowing you to run Windows within OSX. Microsoft's Virtual PC does this today, albeit only on PowerPC Macs and not rather well.

While I may be too hopeful that this will start to chip away at Windows' stranglehold on the desktop, I'm always glad to see competition. I've known way too many corporate IT managers who have burned out with constantly patching and repatching an operating system that was never meant to scale in the first place. Maybe this is the beginning of a trend.

I downloaded Parallels Workstation 2.1 Beta 2 and loaded it on my Intel Mac Mini. This is a brand-new product that lets you run Windows (and several other operating systems) in a window on your OSX desktop. (Click the photo to see a larger version of the screen shot.)

Having used Microsoft's Virtual PC before, I always look at products like this with a cynical eye: Virtual PC ran okay on my iBook, but the performance was generally lacking. Parallels is supposedly designed to take advantage of the virtualization capabilities within the Mac's Intel CPU, so I was hopeful when I loaded it.

Installation was fairly simple. Parallels grabbed about 4 GB of disk and 256 MB of memory by default. Both of these parameters are easily changeable through the configuration screens. I loaded Windows XP Professional, and it seems to run fairly well.

I did not load any applications yet; I wanted to see how it handled simple things such as Internet surfing, and it did just fine.

For some reason, I could not get it to recognize the Macs on my network (including the host Parallels was sitting on), and the Macs didn't see the XP instance. The XP instance could see the Macs in Windows Explorer, but when I tried to connect to them the application hung.

Another fairly serious challenge I ran into is the fact that Parallels crashes my Mac every couple of hours.

Another issue is that there does not seem to be any sound drivers within the Parallels environment. This presents a problem if I want to view or listen to Windows-only media.

Of course, this is beta software and I should expect some trouble, so I can't whine too much about it. Regarding that point, I see that a new version of the software is up on Parallel's site (I am running version 2.1.1658.24 and the version up as I type this is 2.1.1658.30) so maybe they addressed some of the weirdness is there.

All of this is abhorrent to Lisa, of course, who believes that the only thing that should run on an Apple is OSX. She just shakes her head when she sees a screen like the one above. :-)

I took the leap yesterday and installed Boot Camp on my Intel Core Duo Mac Mini.

Installation was very straightforward: I had to upgrade the firmware on the Mini to the latest version, and then I ran the Boot Camp installer. It walked me through partitioning the hard drive and creating a CD with device drivers on it, and then it went through the Windows XP installation process. An hour after I started the process, I had an XP environment running on Apple hardware. The video, audio, network, bluetooth, and wireless were all configured perfectly.

One annoyance I've found is that the clock in the XP environment is always wrong when I boot up. This may not seem like a big deal, but it's disconcerting to see "3:00" in the corner when it's 10:00. It's also a pain to have to reset it each time I use it.

Basic web surfing and accessing other computers on my network all work fine.

My next step is to install some intense applications (I'm thinking of loading Adobe Audition, which we use to record the Cheap Date Podcast)-- I want to try to slam the computer's CPU and see how those Dual Cores deal with it.

So what does all this prove? Well, that you can run Windows XP on an Apple computer.

From the bigger picture, I'm not sure what it means. I'm beginning to see what some in the Mac community are saying, that this could be a big misstep for Apple. My guess is that this is a novelty that's going to wear off. I just hope Apple has some sort of strategy for bridging the worlds-- I'm thinking that stable virtualization would be the best selling point.

Meanwhile, my coworkers and my beloved are pressuring me to de-contaminate my Mini as quickly as possible. We'll see. :-)

After a few days of messing with Boot Camp on my Mac Mini, I decided it was time to remove it.

No, I'm not giving in to the peer pressure of friends, coworkers, and loved ones (well, one specific fangirl loved one)... I decided the experiment was over.

A big contributing factor was the Mini's performance with Adobe Audition. I used it to mix the latest Cheap Date podcast, and I was very unimpressed with its performance. The main issue was that scrolling across the project was slow and choppy, probably due to the video card/drivers built into the Mini. It looked like I was running it on Windows98. (As a reminder, my Mac Mini is a Core Duo with 2 GB of memory.) To be fair, when it came time to crunch the project down to its final MP3 file, the Mini finished up in about half the time my regular PC (with an Athlon 1700+ processor and 768 MB of memory) usually does it.

Other things that really bothered me were the fact that the clock always reset itself to 5 hours ahead (corresponding with GMT) every time I booted into XP, and the fact that it couldn't see the OSX side of my Mini. This latter point is probably a blessing, because otherwise I would be worried that my OSX partition would be subject to viruses brought in while running XP.

Then there's the fact that I had to shut all the way down and bring the machine all the way back up every time I wanted to switch environments. It's not a very efficient model in which to operate.

Finally, there's the question of why I bought a Mac in the first place: why run Windows on this machine when it's designed to run something better?

The decision has been made. Boot Camp will be removed from my Mini over the weekend.

A couple weeks ago, I bought a new MacBook. It's the 13-inch Core Duo 2.0 GHz machine, and I upgraded the hard drive to 80 GB. The unit came with 512 MB built-in, which I upgraded myself (more on that in a second).

The image above is a screenshot of my current desktop. Note the cool aspect ratio.

Now, you may recall I bought an Intel Mac Mini earlier this year; well, that computer is now in the hands of a coworker who bought it from me, and from what I understand he's having a whale of a time with it. He's got it connected to a spankin' new BenQ 20-inch flat panel monitor and he's very happy with its performance. The funds received from the Mini helped underwrite the cost of the MacBook.

When I sold the Mini, the 2 GB memory upgrade I purchased from OWC did not go with it. I swapped in the 512 MB from the MacBook to the Mini and the 'Book got the 2 GB. And yes, the buyer was aware of the switch. :-)

Before I go any further, let me say that I became something of an expert in the process of opening up the Mini. I followed the video instructions on OWC's web site, and if you have the right tools (one skinny metal putty knife and one plastic putty knife) you can do the job and leave your Mini's case unscathed. If anyone wants to hire me to open their Mini, my rates are reasonable.

Now, on to my first impressions of the MacBook:

The MacBook's glossy screen is probably the one thing that's caused the most noise among the user community. Prior to now, all Apple notebook PCs had screens with a matte finish; with the introduction of the MacBook, Apple has followed a similar path to HP and other PC manufacturers and now provides a glossy-finish LCD screen. I'm going to cut to the chase here: the screen is wonderful. It's bright, the colors are more intense than on my iBook, and speaking as someone who works in an office with overhead fluorescent lights and rides a train every day, the reflective qualities of the screen do not get in the way of my using the MacBook.

Another of Apple's changes was to make upgrading the MacBook's memory and hard drive about 1000% easier. On the iBook, the memory was under the keyboard (and on most older models, also under the AirPort card), which was not too difficult to access. Changing the hard drive, though, required major surgery involving the removal of about 90 screws. On the MacBook, you remove the battery and three screws to remove an access panel. Once the panel is open, two levers help you remove the memory, and pulling on the hard drive's plastic tab removes it from the machine. Upgrades could not be simpler.

Another change is the keyboard. The keys are now flat, square, individual buttons mounted through the case, as opposed to a single, removable keyboard unit on the iBook. Some people have said it's the same keyboard layout as the iBook, but it's not: there is a separate "Eject" key at the far right, next to the F12 key. On the iBook, "Eject" and "F12" were the same key. This makes accessing Dashboard easier on the MacBook, where you just hit F12; on the iBook you had to hit the Function key and hit F12. Some people have said they like the new keyboard better, but I'm still getting used to it.

When I first fired up the MacBook, it asked me the standard questions including "are you moving your information from another Mac?" At first, I said "no" and created a user with the login name I always use. Then I tried to run Migration Assistant (the program that copies your files and applications to your new Mac) and it complained that there was already a user with the name I wanted, so it created a new user and copied my info there. After it was done, I tried to put things the way I wanted, but I realized it would have been too much hassle to change everything, so I re-imaged the machine and ran Migration Assistant right from the first login screen.

Most of my apps worked fine the first time out, and for most programs I wasn't required to re-register when I fired them up for the first time. Microsoft Office, iWork '05, and Photoshop Elements 4.0, among others, all transferred fine. Some other apps, like WireTapPro and Audacity, don't have Universal binary versions so they did not work.

I had reinstall my printer drivers. I have a Samsung laser printer connected to a DLink Ethernet Print Server, and while the queue and the drivers seemed to have been moved over, I was unable to print. I wound up reloading the drivers from CD.

Other than that, my iBook world was merged nicely with my MacBook world.

I bought a license for Parallels, and that's loaded on my 'Book as well. I haven't done much, but I was able to get file sharing working between the Mac and XP environments. First impression: it runs very nicely.

Another observation from the user community is the MacBook's tendency to run hot. One area-- the part that would be on your left leg if you sat the computer in your lap-- does get warm. I don't find it disturbingly warm, but it does run hotter than my iBook or my ThinkPad did.

When I ordered the Macbook, I wanted to get an extra power supply with it. The challenge was that the online Apple Store's lead time on the 60-watt MacBook power supply was 6-8 weeks, yet they had the 85-watt MacBookPro adapter in stock. I ordered the 85-watt version and it works perfectly-- it's got the same MagSafe connector, and although the power cube itself is a little bigger, it works just fine. And most important of all, it's the same price.

I was unsure of how I would deal with the larger size of the MacBook since my iBook is a 12" model. I'm pleased to say that it only takes up a bit more room in my briefcase, so the difference is negligable.

I purchased a sleeve online from Waterfield Designs, and it's great. Their customer service is top-notch: I think I had three or four emails from a real, live person at WD telling me the status of my order. I have a Booq Vyper for my iBook, and while I'm impressed with its durability, the WD case is just so much nicer.

So those are my initial thoughts about the MacBook. More to follow!

Here's another MacBook hard drive replacement story for the Apple fans out there:

My MacBook came from the factory with an 80 GB drive (Fujitsu MHV2080BHPL, on the left in the photo above), and I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to a larger drive because of our podcasting work and the fact that I've become a Parallels junkie :-).

I decided to go the simple route and get the same model drive in a larger capacity: newegg.com has the Fujitsu MHV2120BH 120 GB drive (on the right in the photo) in stock, so I ordered that one. It arrived quickly, as newegg orders usually do (unsolicited plug :-).

The steps I took were as follows:

1) I backed up my existing hard drive to an external firewire enclosure using SuperDuper. (I've been using this application for a long time, and I'm a huge fan-- it's what I use for regular backups.) My drive had about 55 GB used on it, and the backup took under an hour.

2) I shut down and rebooted, holding the "Option" key to see my boot device choices: I chose the external drive and booted from that, just to make sure everything on the backup worked okay. It did. I shut down the MacBook and disconnected the external drive.

3) I laid out a clean cloth, turned the MacBook over and removed the battery. Then I used a small (jeweler's) Phillips-head screwdriver to loosen the three screws on the memory/hard drive bracket in the battery compartment. Then I removed the bracket.

4) The hard drive is in the left end of the case inside the battery compartment. I untucked the plastic tab and gently pulled: the hard drive slipped right out.

5) The hard drive is mounted on a thin metal caddy: you will need a #9 Torx screwdriver to remove the drive from the caddy. I removed the four screws from the caddy and removed it from the old hard drive. Then I put the caddy on the new drive.

6) I slid the new drive into its slot and tucked the plastic tab underneath the drive as the old one originally was.

7) I replaced the memory/hard drive bracket and battery, and put the unit upright again.

8) I connected the firewire drive and powered up the MacBook holding the Option key. I selected the external drive (as I did in Step 2) and booted up.

9) Once running, the MacBook gave an error message that I connected an "invalid device." A dialog box asked if I wanted to initialize the disk, and when I clicked "yes" it brought up Disk Utility.

10) In Disk Utility, I selected the new drive and chose "Erase." After a minute the drive was ready and MacOS mounted it: I could see it on my desktop and in the Finder.

11) I fired up SuperDuper again, this time making the external drive the source and the new internal drive the target. The restore took about an hour.

12) Once completed, I shut down the MacBook, disconnected the firewire drive, and pushed the Power button. The MacBook booted perfectly with the new drive. Success!

13) Once I was up and running, I ran a "Repair Permissions" just to make sure everything was copacetic. It's all good.

There are instructions on Apple's site in this PDF document. The one thing they don't tell you (as I've found in other instructions online) is the bit about the drive caddy and the Torx screws, which I imagine would have been extremely frustrating had I attempted this at 11:00 at night and found myself without the appropriate tool.

I'd like to acknowledge Andy Biggs at The Global Photographer weblog for his excellent description on how he performed this operation.

Hope someone finds this helpful!

The other night, one of my daughter's friends asked me why I have an Apple sticker on my car.

I gave my usual response, which is "because I use Apple computers and they're cool," but for some reason I felt the need to temper that response because of the way Mac people are perceived these days.

I consider myself a "Mac Person," but more important than that, I've always believed in the philosophy of "the right technology for the job." There are things that mainframes can do that UNIX servers don't do very well, there are things that Linux servers do nicely that a Windows 2003 machine can't. For what I do, a Mac fits the bill better than a PC running XP or Vista.

The Mac is not flawless, by any means. I've had my share of problems with Macs-- but for the most part it's a solid platform that works.

And sometimes, the reactions you get from people who hear you're a Mac person are amazing.

Many people I meet are technology-agnostic, which means a computer is a computer and there's usually no compelling reason for them to care what operating system is running under the hood. When I mention to these people that I use a Mac, they're usually genuinely curious, and in some cases (let's take my real estate agent as an example) ask if the Mac would solve some of the problems they have on their PCs, or at least, how different the computing environments are from each other. It's my hope that most computer users will eventually fall into this camp.

Until then, we'll continue to have the factions of Windows-hating Mac Users and Apple-hating Windows Users.

Not too long ago, I was on a local discussion forum and someone made a comment about the expense and incompatibility of Vista on his computer. When I raised a concern about Windows Vista's new licensing structure, he immediately said "Well, that's what you'd expect to hear from a Mac User."

Unfortunately, this is typical in some corners of the computing world, and it seems no matter how even-handed you are about computer platforms, someone will label you. And it's not limited to that side of the argument (if we must pick sides).

There's also a segment of Mac users who view other Mac users as part of a huge brotherhood who must do everything they can to convert the masses to using the Mac. Often, these people are even worse than the combative PC users because they approach their world as evangelists, oblivious to other opinions or viewpoints. For these souls, Apple can do no wrong. This is the main reason I stopped visiting certain Mac forums on the internet-- reading most of those postings made me woozy. (Posted next to a Hello Kitty avatar: "Omigod, I just looooooove my little Macky the MacBook! It's so cuuuuuuuuute!" Gack.)

What I like about the Mac is the fact that, most of the time, if I want to do something it will simply work. By controlling most aspects of hardware and software, Apple has created a near-seamless model. Plug in your iPod, it works. Plug in a gigabit Ethernet connection, you're live. Viruses? None to speak of, really. These are the parts of the "Get a Mac" TV ads that speak the truth.

What I don't like is the fact that when something goes wrong with a Mac, it's usually something really stupid. For example, I am about to have the keyboard on my MacBook replaced for the fourth time-- not because of abuse, but because of Apple's self-admitted problems with the manufacture of the part. Apple is cheerfully replacing the keyboard free of charge, but what if I didn't live no more than 10 minutes from an Apple Store?

Another example: last week, Apple released an update to their iTunes software that I dutifully loaded on my Mac. The result: about 40 songs that I purchased from the iTunes Music Store wouldn't copy to my iPod any more. (Not all the songs I purchased from iTunes, just these 40 completely random tracks.) The solution? I had to rebuild my entire iTunes library, a 20-minute process.

So I'm faced with a choice-- have a computing environment that works with the occasional stupid glitch, or run what 90% of the computing world uses (Windows) and deal with drivers, antivirus software, and a little more tweaking than I'd like.

I'll choose the former, but I won't be evangelical about it. And the truth is that PCs will be with us forever, and even though I use a Mac, I still run Windows XP (under Parallels) on my MacBook because there's no software for the Mac that's as good as Adobe Audition for mixing our podcasts.

The proper tool for the proper job: that's what it's about. And that sticker on my car? It's not so much a badge as it's a cool-looking sticker.

Emma and I were up in Deer Park this morning for the 10:00 am opening of the Apple Store.

We got there at about 9:35, and there were about 150 people in line already. By the time the doors opened, there were probably about 350 people queued up. (Emma took this photo.)

The store is a standard, smaller-format store-- about the size of the Old Orchard Apple Store.

The two notable things about this morning's event were the free t-shirts and the fact that I got to mess with an iPod Touch. The Touch is pretty cool (it's an iPhone without the phone) but it was a little slow to respond. And I couldn't get on the iTunes Store from the phone at all, probably because every WiFi device in the house was jamming the store's network.

On the way home, another interesting thing happened: we were heading south on Rand Road and passed underneath Route 53 when I saw this:

That's Sears Tower in the center of the photo, some 40 miles away. This sort of thing only happens on the clearest of clear days.

From there, it was off to Trader Joe's and then back home.

I bought this small laser printer at Sam's Club a number of years ago (for almost nothing) and it was a real workhorse until it finally died in January of 2007.

I recently heard from a brand-new Mac user who has this printer and he told me Samsung no longer has the drivers for this printer online.

If you have this printer and you want the drivers for the Mac, click here and the .dmg file will download to your Mac.

Just doing my part to help.

Update: A reader just informed me that he had success using these drivers with MacOS 10.5.1 (Leopard). Great news!

Apple's new operating system, MacOS X 10.5 Leopard, was released this past October. Since my MacBook is my primary machine, I decided to step very carefully into the Leopard world. I didn't want to find out after upgrading that one (or more) of my critical applications didn't work.

The Mac blogs, forums, and podcasts I checked were jumping with stories of successful (and unsuccessful) upgrade experiences. I heard enough that I was convinced I should wait before I whacked my internal drive with the new OS.

That wait was not very long. I now own a copy of Leopard.

Rather than install it right away, I chose instead to load the OS on a partition on a bootable external firewire drive. This was the safest way to see how Leopard-- and my applications-- would run on my MacBook without destroying my current environment.

This will be the first in a series of blog postings describing my experiences with Leopard on my MacBook. I'm hoping some of you find this useful, and perhaps you'll enjoy the drama associated with bringing up a new computing environment.

Okay, "drama" is an exaggeration. :-) Enjoy.

My first wave of tests with Leopard is complete, and so far things have proven pretty successful, with one unhappy exception.

The following apps work fine, according to my initial set of tests. I did not do any heavy-duty operations with each program, but the basics seem to work. All versions tested were the latest, downloaded from the vendor's site, unless otherwise noted:

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
Amadeus II
AppleWorks 6.2.9
Camino
Cisco VPN Client 4.9.01.0080
Cocktail
Disk Inventory X
Firefox
MT-Newswatcher
Parallels Desktop
Samsung ML-2510 Printer Drivers
Quicken 2006
Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection 1.0.3
ViewIt
VLC

All that said, a couple items of note:

SuperDuper, one of my show-stopper apps, could not produce a bootable copy of my hard drive. This alone drives my decision to wait to upgrade. I may buy an additional external drive to use Leopard's TimeMachine feature, but I also like the idea of having a bootable copy of my internal drive. Once there's a Leopard-compatible version of SuperDuper, I will upgrade.

CoconutBattery, a little utility that tells you the charge cycle count and overall health of your notebook battery, reports an incorrect cycle count under Leopard. It reported that my battery was charged and discharged 4 times, which is inaccurate.

Lisa decided to dive right in and go for the in-place upgrade from Tiger to Leopard on her iBook G4. The upgrade went fine, and she has no problems to report right now. No guts, no glory. :-) TThe only thing is that I'll need to come up with an interim backup strategy for her computer while I await SuperDuper's upgrade.

Stay tuned. More to come.

Shirt Pocket software just announced the availability of SuperDuper! 2.5, which is Leopard-compatible.

This is the biggest of my show-stopper apps-- I wouldn't upgrade to Leopard without this excellent backup utility, and now that it's here, the party can begin. :-)

I'll have a full report in a few days.

I finished upgrading my MacBook to Leopard last weekend. In all, it was a fairly easy process: I backed the machine up to my external Firewire drive using SuperDuper, formatted the machine's hard drive, and installed the OS from the Leopard disk. Once the installation was complete, I used Apple's built-in Migration Assistant to bring all my files and applications over from the Firewire drive, a great new feature in Leopard (it used to only allow you to migrate from another Mac).

A side note about Migration Assistant: it would be really nice if Apple gave the option to pick and choose which apps you want to copy over from the old environment to the new. Unfortunately, it's an all-or-nothing proposition, which means I'm sure I brought some leftover garbage from the old machine image.

I am happy to report that so far every app I tried works fine under Leopard. I was worried about Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0, but so far, so good.

I bought another external firewire drive to act as a Time Machine backup space, so both Lisa's and my machines are now backed up through that method every time I plug in that drive. I figure I'll use this feature as often as possible, and do an every-other-week image backup with SuperDuper.

My biggest complaint with Leopard is that Spotlight, the Mac OS X built-in search engine, did not index my e-mail, nor did it index many of my regular files. I had to manually rebuild these indexes, which I learned how to do by reading this blog page. Now I can pretty much find anything on my machine.

Now for something really, really cool:

Mac OS X 10.5 has an option called "Screen Sharing" built in-- this is also known as plain old "VNC" (Virtual Network Computing). This means that you can remote-control your Leopard-based Mac from another machine on your network.

I've read about ways to do this from another Mac, but last week I discovered this excellent tutorial which brings your Mac desktop to your PC. Now, I love my MacBook and use it for pretty much everything, but when it comes to keyboard-and-mouse-heavy activites (like reconciling my checkbook in Quicken) I miss using a full-size keyboard and mouse. By using TightVNC on my Windows XP PC (which has the aforementioned full-sized keyboard and mouse) I was able to run through my drill with less strain on my eyes and wrist. I know some of my Mac brethren are screaming "blasphemy!" right now, but it works, and I like having the option. The photo above is a snap of my PC's screen.

I'll keep you posted of any more adventures with Leopard. So far, I'll give it a thumbs-up.

This week's update is all about the techie stuff, both having to do with Macs, and both having to do with hard drives.

Tale #1: The Beeping MacBook

I awoke the other morning to a MacBook that was beeping intermittently. The system seemed to be operating just fine, but every so often I'd get an odd beep from under the keyboard. I searched for the symptom on Google and came up with a few hits, including this YouTube video. The most common diagnosis to this problem seemed to revolve around a bad hard drive.

When you purchase AppleCare (Apple's extended warranty), they give you a copy of TechTools Deluxe, which is a suite of diagnostic and test tools. I ran the tests and the machine came up clean: no disk or memory errors.

I decided to re-seat the memory and hard drive just for good measure, especially since it's very easy to do on a MacBook. After I did this, the beeping stopped. Being the superstitious type, I ran a full SuperDuper backup on the computer.

Five days later, the machine crashed and wouldn't reboot. Then the hard drive started to screech. I plugged in my external firewire drive containing my previous backup, and booted from there. The computer came up right away.

One trip to Fry's and $79 later, I found myself installing a brand-new 250 GB Fujitsu drive in the MacBook. After restoring from the backup and assessing whatever I lost in those 5 days, I feel lucky that my intuition paid off.

The former drive, a 160 GB Hitachi TravelStar, is on its way back for replacement under warranty.

The moral of this tale: if your MacBook starts making this particular noise, be prepared.

Tale #2: I'm Goin' In

Rebecca's iBook had a 40 GB hard drive. I'm sure that seemed like an awful lot of disk space when the computer was built in 2004, but with music, videos, movies, and photos, that 40 GB is nothin'.

I picked up a 120 GB hard drive from Fry's (a couple weeks before the events of Tale #1) with the plan of doing the replacement while I was on vacation, so I'd have lots of time to spend working on the project.

Unlike a MacBook, where the hard drive and memory can be replaced by removing the battery, three screws, and a single bracket, the hard drive on an iBook is buried deep within the recesses of the computer and requires multiple disassembly steps and the removal of over 60 screws. Thanks to the wonderful step-by-step instructions at iFixit.com and a pair of non-colorblind eyes (provided by my lovely assistant, Emma), I finished the job in about three hours.

When I got the computer back together, I noticed the wireless (AirPort) signal was really lousy. It worked, but where it previously had very good reception it was now barely connecting.

After a quick search for "bad wireless reception on iBook" (what did we do before Google?) I discovered that the antenna connection on the Airport Extreme Card, which is simply a wire that plugs into the top of the card, needs to be pushed down very very hard in order to make good contact. When I did this, the connector snapped into place loudly, and when I booted up the great wireless reception came back.

I figured I would provide another service to my fellow Mac users in the event they were looking for info on either of these fronts.

The next update won't be quite so geeky, I promise. :-)

There's an ad running on TV for a service called "Finally Fast" which claims to clean and speed up your PC.

Sure, there's money to be made selling this sort of this thing, but I have to question the integrity of a company who pitches a product that doesn't even run on the computers shown in its advertisements.

Check out these photos snapped from the commercial: the computer in the shot above is clearly an iMac, and the iBook below seems to have miraculously died from a Windows Blue Screen of Death.

And here's the kicker:

How seriously can you take a company who misleads the people who view their commercials?

Or maybe they just think Macs look cool.

I no longer have an Apple sticker on my car window.

I have not become an Apple Hater: my current computer is a MacBook Pro, the latest in a long line of Apple notebooks I've owned over the years. I carry an iPod Touch with me, and there are lots of things with Apple logos scattered around my house. From a product standpoint, I would say that I am a reasonably happy Apple customer.

My issue is with Apple the Company.

It used to be that Apple was a voice of reason amid the noise of computer (and later, consumer electronics) companies. Their products were more elegantly designed, simpler to use, and backed by an organization that appeared to care about its customers. I can't possibly sum up all the time I spent chasing down drivers and recovering from viruses on my various Windows boxes, and when I got my first iBook, I started focusing more on what I was doing on the computer as opposed to making sure the computer worked the way it was supposed to.

I've had a few problems with my Apple products, going back to my first 15 GB iPod, but Apple was generally very responsive. (You can read all my Mac-related blog postings at this link.) Of course, any computer brand can have issues, and I am not implying that Apple is more problem-prone than Dell or Lenovo. What set Apple apart was the ease and availability of support and their general willingness to acknowledge and resolve problems.

I put the sticker on my car years ago to make the statement that I liked the company and its products.

Over the past couple years, Apple the Company has begun to show a different side of itself. The attitude of "We'll make this easy for you" has turned into "Here's how you're gonna do this." And when things don't work the way you expect, Apple's willingness to search for the right answer seems to be turning into the classic "Doc, it hurts when I do this" / "Well, don't do that" approach.

I'm not alone in noticing this. Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi recently wrote:

"Perhaps the bigger, longer-term concern for Apple investors is the emerging pattern of hubris that the company has displayed, which has increasingly pitted competitors (and regulators) against the company, and risks alienating customers over time... Examples of its behavior have included its limited disclosure practices (Steve Jobs' health; plans for deploying its cash balance), its attack on Adobe's Flash, its investigation into its lost iPhone prototype (which culminated in a reporter's home being searched while he was away and computers being removed), its restrictions on app development, and its ostensibly dismissive characterizations of the iPhone's antenna issues (i.e., phone needs to be held a different way; a software issue that affects the number of bars displayed). The worry is that collectively, these issues may, over time, begin to impact consumers' perceptions of Apple, undermining its enormous prevailing commercial success."

My perception was impacted before the iPhone 4 antenna problems came to light, and the company's handling of that issue only served to show that it cares less about the end user experience than making sure You, The Customer understands that when things don't work the way you expect it's because You, The Customer must be doing something wrong.

(Side note regarding the iPhone 4 antenna issue: all Apple had to do was state that they recognized the problem and that they would take the necessary steps to ensure their customers were happy. Arguing in the press and telling people "you're holding it wrong" just made them look like amateurs, and giving away rubber bumpers weeks after the fact looked rather feeble.)

(One more parenthetical thought: one journalist said that a Livestrong bracelet works nicely as a bumper on an iPhone 4: maybe Apple and Lance Armstrong could team up for some much-needed mutual positive spin.)

In the IT world it's been said that despite their technically superior product lines, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) couldn't market itself out of a paper bag, and Sun Microsystems acted as if it had less adult supervision than the Boy Scouts of America (paraphrasing an old joke). Both of those companies no longer exist, but their sins are still legendary among their customers. Because of this, companies like HP and IBM, who know how to appeal to the guys in the corner offices by addressing service issues, have done well in the corporate world. Apple runs the same risk as DEC and Sun in the consumer space: their license to print money because of the cute logo stuck on the back of each product is going to expire once enough mainstream customers decide they've had enough.

This brings me to Apple's customers: since the days of the Apple II, there have always been Apple fanboys. Lately, though, a new breed of Apple customer has emerged-- the ones I call "neo-fanboys." These are the people who will defend Apple and its products in spite of any evidence put in front of them, all the while denying the epithet "fanboy." They will order a new i-Thing on Day One, regardless of whether they see a need for the product in their lives (see "iPad"). They won't necessarily sleep in front of the Apple Store-- they'll order online the next day while laughing derisively at the people who did. They will accept and downplay any problem, preferring to live with it or be willing to head to the Genius Bar a couple times a month for a fix (see "MacBook Random Shutdown," "MacBook Discolored/Cracked Keyboard," "iPhone OS 3.0 Wifi Problem," "MacBook Pro 'Mooing' Fan"). And when the iPhone 4 Antenna issue arose, they were the ones who were loudest in downplaying the problems, completely oblivious to the fact that the technical issue-- however isolated or easy to fix-- was secondary to the way Apple was handling the business issue.

Macworld's Chris Breen described these neo-fanboys' attitude in a recent podcast:

This "Apple above all" attitude ultimately isn't helpful... [It's unfortunate there are] the fanatics, the ones who make normal people think that Mac users are profligate lunatics who like nothing better than lining up in the middle of the night to buy a hunk of plastic with the Apple logo on it... there's a point when this kind of devotion devolves into delusion. Apple is a company that makes cool products. It's not your friend, it's not your partner, it's a company. And companies sometimes make mistakes and behave in ways that benefit the company more than the consumer. Admitting that your favorite company is capable of making mistakes is a good thing all around. It makes you a more pleasant person to be around and it helps to ensure that the object of your devotion.. toes the line rather than depending on getting a 'pass' from its fanbase.

The sticker came off my car because: (a) I believe Apple has lost its way in understanding what it means to service customers; and (b) I don't want to be associated with neo-fanboys.

It's my opinion that as Apple becomes more successful, their increasing (apparent) unwillingness to treat its growing mainstream customer base with the respect it deserves, combined with this breed of customers spewing "Apple, right or wrong," will ultimately have a negative effect on its existence as a company. And honestly, I don't want to see that.

Yes, Apple should grow up: not in the way they tried to do when they attempted to fit the standard mid-80s corporate model, but in a way that leverages their clear leadership in innovation and delivery while treating their customers as the precious assets they are. They need to rely less on the blind devotion of their fans and focus on delivering for their customers. The Apple Stores and Genius Bars place the customers right in the company's hands, and are excellent platforms on which to build this approach. They should stop expecting the guy with the two iPods, iMac, and MacBook to walk in and be the Perfect Little Apple Customer and start working on the person who just got their first Mac or iPad, showing them what they can do with it and what Apple is going to do to continue improving their experience.

Apple needs to understand that it's "Customers, right or wrong."