March 17, 2009
Tried MacBook Pro, going back to Windows/Dell
the allure of the sleek macbook pro was haunting. All our Devs at Kashless have them. They are the “cool” hardware. I want to be with the cool cats. I even got a Kindle recently. So sunday I decided to take the office extra MacBook Pro and live with it for two days. Took it on a trip to Arizona. I hated it. And am going back to windows. While most of the issues I had are solvable over time, I don’t see the upside payoff for the brain damage. Brain damage included:
1. no office. I of course could pay AGAIN. but the Open Office didn’t work well for me and I had already paid for OFfice on windows.
2. I actually like Outlook. on the Mac the Mail app is separate from the iCal. You can’t sync with google calendar without making your calendar public (or paying for another service). The contacts didn’t sync directly with google, only Yahoo, exchange and Mobile ME (yet another fee).
3. Google talk didn’t work correctly.
4. I hate the one click mouse. too many years of two clicks. And my external Microsoft wireless mouse required extra drivers.
5. Verizon software for wireless data modem didn’t work well.
6. Not having the same folder structure was a pain. Having to figure out things I am used to doing like “Send via mail” from explorer you can’t do in Finder. You have to drag the item to the desktop then drag it back into another application. Not worse, just different and a pain to learn with no discernable upside.
I am done with mac laptops.
Posted by Martin at 9:43 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 5, 2006
About time
On the day that Apple Corps vs. Apple Computer is in the courts (Apple the computer guys will loose), The Apple computer guys finally do something good for the world. Run Windows. Welcome to the real world Steve. I hope you display this in your apple retail stores.
Posted by Martin at 7:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 8, 2005
More windows users switch
More people are Switching from windows to MAC it seems. But not without their problems. I have mentioned a few, but the Switch blog chronicle's many in the lives to two people making the switch. Interesting reading.
Posted by Martin at 1:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 7, 2005
What the future of Apple ads could be
I have started a new category some of you may have noticed called Windows guy does Mac. Being ex-Msft and a life long Windows user, recently sucked over to the Apple Borg, it has been quite an interesting experience. An interesting tidbit along this path came across my in-box this week. A producer/director friend in LA, Art Brown (artebrown@earthlink.net) has done some spec ads. In this one, he imagines one future ad from Mac. Edgy and funny, this is totally in the spirit that Apple has been putting out. I believe this is the only place you can see it on the web. Feel free to e-mail Art about this spot or any of his others (he does films as well). Enjoy.Apple _Once You Go Mac_.mov
Posted by Martin at 2:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 6, 2005
Another reason to dislike iTunes
Will the torture never stop? I was using iTunes to rip the Screaming Trees album last night and remembering how much I liked the album, I decided to listen to the songs as it ripped. Oh, what a fool. There was a warble in the background. Sounded like maybe memory contention was keeping iTunes from pushing all the bits to the sound card fast enough. The songs played, but the base was choppy and it sounded like the singer was singing into a coffee can. Thinking it might be the version of the song, I skipped to another from the library. Same problem. Wondering if it was just iTunes, I fired up the browser and surfed over to Energy Radio. There was the warble again! Even when the music is not delivered by iTunes. Stopping the import function in iTunes makes the warble go away. Hey, Apple, I know on your own platform you are used to being in control of the whole stack and can force your users to do one thing at a time, but over here in the REAL world on Windows, people share. occasionally we like to have our computers do more than one thing at a time. If you can't play nice, you should go home. I am on the hunt for a more friendly ripper now....
Posted by Martin at 9:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 4, 2005
Uncle : Mini Apple!
Well when I fall off the wagon and belly back up to the bar, I tend to do it in a big way, so last week I bought a SECOND apple (actually it is the third in the house with my old iMac). I followed Johnlu's lead and bought a fully stoked Mac Mini as a home theatre PC. 80gig drive, DVD drive, 1GB memory, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, Wifi, DVI cable to the Samsung flat panel.
Ordered on Apple.com. Their site is so smart that they sent it to my mother (an Apple die-hard where my last purchase went) without even asking me. One e-mail and three days waiting later and two packages arrived at my door this afternoon. Again Apple excels at the OOBE. Beautiful packaging, a thoughtful handle to pull the Mini out of the box, simple easy recognition of the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, no software to install, just a charm. Immediately it did want to update some of that software though... First thing I noticed was that there was no DVI cable and I needed a Male to Male headphone jack to connect the MAC to the Samsung flat panel. Thinking to continue my Steve Jobs charity, I fired up the Touareg and headed over to the Apple store. Lots of fancy cables. No DVI cables. I asked the supercilious troll in a white doctors smock for a DVI cable. He said that they come with the Apple monitors and they don't need to sell them. I asked "what if you want to connect it to a non-apple monitor?". He looked stupefied and completely confused muttering "we don't have any demand for them..." Too bad Steve, I am off the Magnolia Hi-Fi for the cable. At the high-end flat panel store the cables are $175!!! Wow, ouch! I find a 3 foot one in the exchanges bin for $75, grab a Sony double male headphone cable and head out. Plug Plug and press a couple buttons and there on the screen is the telltale grey mac start-up screen. Walks me through the keyboard and mouse set-up, finds the Wireless network no problem, asks for password (connects to Cisco wow), and registers me. Then starts downloading 24mb of software updates. Hey, I thought this thing was just made for me last week? Their build disks must be old.
Again a problem getting iTunes to find and be happy with a library in the sky, but after getting it to work for Alex, the process is quicker this time. Everything streams fine. Wait, over on my laptop I am getting a "IP Address conflict" problem. Checked the Watchgaurd to see if it had handed out all its IP addresses. The IP address of the MAC wasn't even there. So I figured out that the Cisco Aeronet 340 was handing out IP addresses to. Reboot both devices got the IP addresses all peachy keen. Mac is accessing the Internet and so is laptop.
Played some music over the lan on the TV. That is cool, but I really want to route the sound into my home theatre rather than the crappy TV speakers. Then tried playing a DVD over the LAN connected with Wifi. Jerky and choppy. Not enough bandwidth. Scrounged up a cable and plugged the mini into my hub at 100mb. Played just fine. The picture had some overscan lines on it, but that was my edit, not the Mac. Had to do a horizontal adjust on the SAmsung to get the picture centered. But now plays Video over the Lan like a champ. Look out guests, the whole home movie archive is now available!
All in all, I gotta say I like the Mac Mini. As much as I didn't want to. It is
Posted by Martin at 10:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Uncle : Apple!
I have posted before my disgust with the Apple iPod juggernaut. Two weeks ago, I crumbled under the unrelenting pressure. I bought Alex (my wife) an iPod Mini. A nice cute, pink one. With an iscription on the back for our anniversary. Her two year old (and four times as large) Rio Riot just stopped turning on one day (switch broke). Alex only had about 2gig of music on the thing anyway and never used the radio feature (although I did). She wanted something much smaller that she could run with. And wanted it dead simple. Despite my personal misgivings, the iPod was the natural choice for my non-technical wife.
When the package arrived, the OOBE was very good. Super pleasing packaging. Easy software install. Immediate hardware recognition. But first problems came when I tried to get iTunes to recognize the vast song library up on my RAID server. iTunes is obviously only designed for local use. With the default settings, iTunes tried to import (copy) all the music from the RAID to the local (20gig) hard drive and soon ran out of space. IT took some hunting for the right settings to tell iTunes to just leave the music where it was. Then once it started, I had to stop it (it had taken over an hour) and then re-start it. The re-start left me with many duplicate song entries and no clear way to remove them. Then came picking the songs to move to the 6gig ipod from the 100gig archive. IT is nonobvious how to do this and Apple Help is no help. After a browse of the bulletin boards and a couple calls to other iPod users, I figured out to create a "playlist" and then drag/drop the music you want there and tell iTunes to keep the iPod synced with that playlist. Ok, fine, now I want to open two windows side by side (like you can in any Windows application) and drag/drop between them. No can do with iTunes. You have only one active window at a time and can't run two instances of the program. STUPID! So you have to view the library window and drag/drop the files from there onto the iTunes playlist. But you can't check the progress of that playlist or see the files in it as you go.
Well two days later (and me doing all the work), Alex has an ipod with her favorite music and is using it for work-out. But I noticed the thing tucked into her shorts this morning instead of in the holster (too much stuff for her). I got the Griffin iTrip, but haven't wandered down that road with the car yet. Alex says all she wants it for is to work-out and doesn't want that music in the car. One thing a friend does with his i-pod is record him reading books to his children at night. Sounds fun. But Oh, No, the iPod Mini's firmware doesn't support recording so no mics are made. You have to buy a different iPod for that. Like I said before, Apple you are BLOWING a great platform opportunity by creating forced incompatibility between your product lines.
Posted by Martin at 9:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack