I love my iphone, and my iphone touch. They do their jobs very well ( well, apart from answer calls ). The availability of the app store, the amazing UI, the great browsing experience. If only it was bigger....
..and now it is. A bigger , faster, ipod touch..? what on earth is not to like? Surely it fits the niche of a sofa/coffee/table device much better than a netbook or an iphone/ipod ever could..
Sure..it doesn't have a whizzy new gesture based interface, it doesn't have a camera, and it doesn't make phone calls..but then why should it do any of those things?
for me..if its an excellent browsing experience, can display PDFs and ebooks well, and play the odd movie or two..i'm sold.
I also think the availability of the app store makes it a killer device. Im sure there will be some amazing apps in due course.
Downsides? no multi tasking ( to be confirmed )...and while I understand Apple's reasoning for that..no IM in the background would seem like a bit of a downer in 2010.
A 4:3 aspect ratio? This initially seemed bizarre, as surely most movies are 16:9? but an article on macworld makes a good case for a 4:3 ratio. It isn't primarily a movie playing device...its a web browsing/book reading device, and a 4:3 ratio makes more sense.
So, The big question is how many are you going to buy?
:)
]]>Initial impressions are somewhat mixed.
With high bit rate stuff ( 256K, 320 or losssless ) it sounds excellent. wonderfully open sound stage, tight bass and good sense of timing. The Novo is a good with percussion and vocals, as are my Grado SR60s..so it all seems to work well.
However, with anything less than that ( I still have 192 and below hanging around from when I started digitising music for low capacity Mp3 players ) then it sounds terrible...worse than the native output of the mac. It really sounds like the music is underwater...I'm guessing the gaps in the sound are just too much and the upsampling really messes up.
More investigation required...
My current settings are 41Khz 24bit out from the macbook pro over Toslink. ( USB option only supports 16 bit audio )
I haven't tried it with my Marantz 6003 as a CD transport yet..I'll guess that will be a better test of the quality of the DAC itself.
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This seems to be the product of the fact the default unit of currency in salary seems to 'the nurse'. How often have you heard journalists or commentators say 'that would pay for 10 nurses' or that's '3 times what a nurse earns!' if a nurse is expected to live on a nurses salary, shouldn't the prime minister?
Well, no. No he shouldn't. Our MPs should be well rewarded for the job they do. This is for a number of reasons.
1. Our best people should be attracted to the job
2. I don't want the representatives of our democracy worried about paying the mortgage
3. If they are well rewarded perhaps they wouldn't feel the need to fiddle their expenses/allowances
4. In all honesty ther really arent that many of them.
If we paid each mp 200,000 a year that would cost the tax payer 145 million, which is nothing in the scheme of things...
Actually hold on a minute....that's 5300 nurses!
I can only say 'wow'. After an initial running in period, the Grados now have a new lease of life. Stereo separation is amazing...with a very tightly controlled ( can I use the word 'taught' here ?) bass. Vocals are particularly impressive, as is percussion.
There is basically no distortion even at max volume, which is nice.
Standout tracks so far.
Apparently the amp takes 300 hours to properly 'run in'..so here is hoping it gets better!
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After a little investigation, I reset the SMC controller using the instructions at Apple KB HT1411. Now the machine is happy again...with average temps in the high 40s/early 50s.
Much better.
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One of the big rumours was that Snow Leopard would require a leopard install. This was not in fact the case.
I inserted the new HDD, which was incredibly easy to replace by laptop standards. And booted using the 'C' option. Snow leopard then installed with no issues in about 45 minutes no prompting for leopard DVD etc, giving me a nice clean macbook pro.
I also purchased a external USB SATA dock, which meant I could just pop my old disk in that and copy the files I wanted to my new disk..which was nice.
So, Snow leopard? Very little appreciable differences to be honest. It certainly feels snappier, seems to run cooler and has some nice enhancements.
What was odd, that it automatically paired with my apple wireless keyboard and MS 5000 bluetooth mouse..im not quite sure how that happened.
New Stuff
Applications installed so far with no issues are:
Mistakes made when upgrading? I simply copied by music etc from the old disk, instead of my itunes library...which meant my iphone and ipod complained that they had been synched with another library and I had to wipe and restore!
Anyway, so far...so good.
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Firstly I see this as a media consumer device, not a media producer device. What do I mean by that? well, I can see it being used to read books, watch movies, listen to music, browse the web, perhaps even play the odd game. However, I can't see it replacing a macbook ( or macbook pro ) or PC as a means for creating these things. The odd email or blog post maybe....
Ok, its a given it would be an awesome web tablet ( think bigger iphone )
So what are the features I would like to see?
Apple have some of the best PDF rendering out there, so PDF makes sense as the default book format. PDF would allow for full-colour, decent formatting, and the ability to read technical books and magazines in the format the publisher intended. That would be cool. But what would be really cool would be a low power 'reader' mode, whereby the other features of the tablet would be less available to improve battery life. Ideally this would be an instant switch from reader to multimedia device mode.
HDMI out to play HD content on an HDTV. more of a pipe dream really..but imagine a dock for the tablet that allows it to be a replacement for the apple TV...but you can take it with you...finish that movie on the train, on holiday, at the inlaws etc. If the Zune HD can do it...
Ability to act as a media extender and itunes speaker target ( possibly combined with the HDMI dock ) much like the airport express.
Probably a given, but the ability to browse my documents/media on mobileme, or on my airport extreme connected disk would be great.
Unlike the iphone...things thing needs flash support, obviously.
Well, lets see what the product announcement, does or doesn't bring..
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How were the aging irish rockers? pretty good actually! Bono's voice is a little weaker than of old, but they worked with that well. There were the usual political gestures, but you expect that e.g. Sunday Bloody Sunday was re imagined to make a comment on Iran. Excellent light show, and acoustics once the place filled up, and thankfully they got most of the new stuff out of the way at the start!
Demographics were interesting....not a 'young' crowd by any stretch of the imagination, but 88,000 people singing 'With or Without You' or the opening to 'Where the streets have no name' was prettty awesome.
I'm not sure the whole 360 stage thing really worked, and could have done with a revolving central section...but I guess the Health and Safety guys would put pay to that.
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I finally decided to make the switch to Mac, after struggling with Ubuntu for a year, trying Vista, going back to XP...
So, what did I do.
I purchased a shiny new 15" unibody macbook pro, 4GB of ram with a 2.53ghz CPU.
So now, 9 months in...was it a good decision.
Absolutley. I can't believe what a good machine it is, The build quality on the machine is excellent, and despite being the daily workhorse it still looks as good as new.
But the real question is, was the switch to Mac OS X a good one. Oh yes. Its very stable, responsive, has a wide variety of quality apps...and looks gorgeous.
It does take some getting used to however. I thought i'd list some hints and apps Ive come to rely on.
Now if there are any programmers out there, then you will now that the # key is a pretty useful one. So the first time you are up against the clock and need to edit that shell scrpt...its alt-3
If you are used to Windows then you will undoubtedly be expecting a delete key...apple for some reason thing a backspace key is enough, but you can do a forward delete by using fn-backspace
Its awful. Worst 49.99 I have ever spent. Really, what were they thinking?
Its just a beautiful piece of design, and is useful when gaming or loading data into an oracle database in a VM. Why? because the aluminium case can get quite hot!
I flirted with having apps in the dock, using finder...but now i have 'seen the light'
iWork is lovely, ( think MS Word 2.0 for those will long memories ) but the compatibility just isn't there...and when you are up against a deadline and the customer/tutor wants a word doc, or you need to modify a document that someone has sent you for quick turnaround...you will appreciate the difference.
Adium is a mac osx version of the pidgin instant messaging tool. It works very well and is less er...crappy than the MS one.
The open source media player...its just as good on the mac as it is on linux and windows.
Allows Quicktime player ( and more usefully front row ) to play the more common codecs out there
Rips out embedded content ( images etc ) from MS Office docs and PDFs..Useful indeed. NOTE: Does not work with embedded Visio.
Nice text editor. Does what it says on the tin.
Wonderful little application. Puts a coffee cup in the menu bar. Click it, the coffee cup fills up. Now, that would be cool enough on its own, but it also stops the mac display dimming/sleeping. Which is great if you are reading, watching youtube videos or giving that all important presentation to the board.
Adds network bandwidth monitors, temperature stats, CPU usage, fan speed, Memory usage ( amongst others ) to the menu bars. Really useful.
If you don't use Evernote then you should. Save Web Pages, snippets from emails, word docs, to one or more notebooks. Access notes on web, iphone, other computers..and now you can share books with selected friends or colleagues. wonderful application. ( not just Mac..but I found it after I got a Mac! )
handy little app to transcode videos. Easy to understand options. predefined targets for common devices ( including ipods and iphones )
Kind of a must have for people who need to work with Windows Software. Fast, elegant integration with Mac OS X...although the interface seems a little dumbed down compared to VMWare Workstation on a PC or Linux.
In summary, was it the right thing to do? Oh Yes... Would I go back to using Linux/Windows as my main machine.. Not even If you paid me.
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Spotlight style search is excellent ( left swipe and search...use this more than any other feature )
A few annoyances so far:
Collection of Apps so far :
Photogene: brilliant little portable photo editor, all the basics and simple to use. ( could do with a spot healing brush though )
RTM: Remember the Milk. Task management. needs updating for 3.0.
WiFiFoFum: Wifi radar, useful for relative signal strength and seeing why your wireless is terrible.
Twitterific: Twitter client.
Skype: free voice calls on wifi!
Doom Ressurection: on rails..what were they thinking?
Wolfenstein Lite: ah..railguns and nazis.
iBlogger: neat little blogger client. needs support for private blogs which sit behing basic authed web sites..but apart from that..brilliant.
Sky+: Sky TV management app. oddly not as nice looking as the N95 version.
facebook: facebook client with a better UI than the web site!
Evernote: ubiquitos note taking app. Business card text recognition seems to work as well , which is nice.
no overheating issues yet...
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