iPhone therefor I am.

I recently gave into technolust and bought an iPhone 3G. After a rather drawn out purchasing process ( Surely, if someone comes in and walks straight to the counter and asks for an exact phone on an exact contract, you can stop the sales pitch right there and just expedite the process), I left feeling the warm glow of high-tech consumerism and headed home to activate my futuristic communicator. All was well as the apps were stored, my media was podded, calls were made, photos were touched and maps were pinned – except there was a little niggle feeling that all wasn’t right.

Turning the iPhone from portrait to landscape whilst running an orientation aware app would sometimes result in the app rotating, but more often than not, it wouldn’t do a thing, Whilst a good vigorous shake would usually result in the screen locked upside down until it was rebooted, I don’t think this was the effect that Apple had been aiming for. I fired up the excellent App Store and searched for an accelerometer tool, finally settling on iHandy Level. Once installed, iHandy Level revealed that the iPhone seemed to think that being held level was the same as being tilted 45 degrees, although equally as often may just flip 180 degrees. After a soft reset, a hard reboot and eventually a restore, it was clear this iPhone had some issues with its accelerometers.

A quick trip back to the O2 store and an after-sales experience light years ahead of the actual purchase experience, the phone was twisted this way and that for a minute or two, before a brand spanking new iPhone was handed over and I was free to enjoy my iPhone and the forthcoming 24 months of contractual bliss which is certain to ensue…

One

One new battery winging its way to me fresh from the clutches of the house that Jobs built.

The experience of calling Applecare was far from the pulling teeth experience to which I have become accoustomed to when calling technical support in the past. The call went straight through with no time spent on hold admiring the frayed ends of sanity. First off we went through the usual NVRAM reset and then the PMU reset – luckily when running dcnet it only takes a minute or two for the Mac to switch off abruptly so the top checklist items were checked off in rapid succession. Next up was the elevation to second line support where the hero of the day confirmed the abrupt halt was indeed the thing that should not be and suggested that a replacement battery would be the cure.

So poor twisted me is left with my planned obscene diatribe kept in storage for a future support call to a less efficient organisation.

Cannot kill the battery

In 1986, the metal band Metallica asserted on their seminal album “Master of puppets”, that a battery could not be killed. Sadly for me, in 2006 Apple Computer threw an exception and Metallica were left holding the remains of their money grubbing power supply assertion in their well groomed hands. My MacBook Pro has developed a bad case of “Fat-Crap-Battery Syndrome”. This disease first presents itself as a bad case of the Mac switching off unexpectedly whilst on battery supply. Slashdot et al have covered the story in some detail in the past, so I was well aware this affliction could possible hurt my lovely little machine and I was immediately looking for the symptoms:

i) Shutting off on battery power, even though the battery monitor reported a full charge seconds before. Check.
ii) Battery beginnning to swell like some crap, overpaid talk show hostess. Check.
iii) User wishing Mr Jobs’s colon cancer had given him a bit more gip. Cruel but Check – the guy is a perfectionist after all.

So it looks like time to call Applecare and scream at some poor dick until I can scream at some Merc driving manager dick. Sometimes I wonder if my experiences with other companies’ support has damaged my expectations of product support…regardless, I will spend the rest of the time until Applecare UK opens honing a fantastic stream of obscenities and expletives into a workable sentence to throw at the first person who makes me follow their corporate “Wear the customer down until they fuck off” checklist of other-possible-but-clearly-unlikely scenarios checklist.

Problems with Mushkin RAM and the MacBook Pro

If you are think of upgrading the memory in your MacBook Pro to avoid the rather large Apple price tag, then I would steer clear of the Mushkin 1GB PC2-5300 SODIMM (Part 991504) as they appear to have an incompatibility with the MacBook Pro.

Immediately after installing the Mushkin SODIMM, the MacBook Pro began spontaneously restarting within a minute or so of starting up. I took the memory out and tested the laptop with just it’s standard 1GB and all was fine with no spontaneous restarts. So I reinstalled the memory hoping that it was just a bad seating, but the problem came back.

The odd thing is that if it doesn’t restart with two minutes or so, then it stays on without issue however this usually requires one or two reboots. Once it’s working OK, then I can put it to sleep and it’ll wake up fine, I can run it hard and it’ll run all night – but if I reboot then the problem reappears. I’ve run the Apple Hardware Tests in basic and extended mode repeatedly and it never reports an issue at all. There is nothing in the console logs when it does reboot, it just seems to power cycle.

I recently got a 1GB Crucial PC2-5300 SODIMM and that doesn’t have the problem at all. I ended up trying all the combinations of slots and memory types (the standard Apple SODIMM, the Mushkin SODIMM and the Crucial SODIMM) and if the Mushkin is installed in any slot, either on it’s own or with one of the other SODIMMs, then the problem reappears. The only explanation would seem to be an incompatibility between the Mushkin and the MacBook Pro…so I would suggest avoiding Mushkin for your MBP upgrades and go with Crucial.

Think Different

Well the experience of being a MacBook Pro owner has really brought back the excitement that computers used to have for me – now after using it for a few days I can confirm that it really is different.

It’s a luxury item to be sure – but when you open it up you know you are no longer in the world of the low margin PC box shifters. OS X is beautiful and elegant on it’s own, but with the addition of a few utilities like Desktop Manager and Quicksilver it simply shows you a world of productivity and ease that I never imagined…Apple can put me down as a switcher once I get used to the odd keyboard. If only Microsoft would build Visual Studio for the Mac and Valve would build Steam & CS:S I would be in seventh heaven.

Penny Arcade

I went looking to see if my faviourite web comic had updated and what do I see, Gabe and Tycho talking about the Mac and there was the quote any geek waiting waiting for his new computer wants to see:

It’s just really fucking good and that’s all.

And to top it all off, they had put up a new strip and that was also Mac related.

An Apple tommorrow keeps the boredom away.

The MacBook has landed at the office after its rather sluggish progression across the globe (<19MPH seems a little slow in this day an age...man have I been bored waiting!):

Now all the stands in the way of a geeky Mac love in, is for the ever vigilant Nicky to pop the thing into a couriers hands. So tommorrow I shall begin the process of having my high expectations dashed on the rocks of Revision A niggles and coding in the most square bracket heavy language I have seen…

Speaking of coding, after finishing Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (which I’ll now re-read with Mac in hand), I began reading Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming For Mac OS X 2nd Edition which I have enjoyed so far. Hillegass’s book gives a good background on the OS X conventions from its NextStep origins and gives plenty of topics a brief but working introduction. I like working examples simply because it makes it easier to go and find the appropriate documentation if you’ve got class names, and it’s easier to experiment when you’ve got some working boiler plate code.

As an added bonus, the author’s picture on the back cover gave me a chuckle as now I know what the illegitamate child of Brokeback Mountain and The Three Musketeers would look like:

Macsterdam

Arrive Terminal AMSTERDAM, NH, NL 27 Feb 2006 14:29

Oooh it’s getting closer…I just hope it doesn’t arrive too stoned to boot or give me an STD as soon as I put it on my lap!

Shipbook Pro

According to the Apple Store order status page, my MacBook Pro shipped yesterday with an estimated delivery date of March 3rd. That’s around 11 days earlier than Apple previously estimated but with 11 days delivery time, so I guess it must be in some cargo container sailing from Shanghai to Europe…i’ll be watching the shipping news just incase it sinks en route!

Waitbook Pro Ultimate Edition

What a difference a few hours make! I just rechecked the order status and shipping has now moved to the 15th of March with delivery estimated at the 27th of March. Now I understand that it’s a new product and the dates given were just estimates, but it seems very arbitrary to say shipment in four weeks and delivery in 6 weeks…it suggests the whole thing is just guess work.

I’ve got to admit that I am now reconsidering the order for a number of reasons:

• Apple have stated their intention to transition the entire product line to x86 by the end of 2006.
• March 27th is too close to Apple’s 30th anniversary and the expected celebratory product launches.
• Merom will be out just a couple of months with it’s 64-bitness and more mature VT.
• Every month that goes by makes that ATI x1600 look less and less appealing.

So maybe it would be better to wait for the Merom based MacBook and the improved mobile graphics, rather than stick with it and get the MBP on the 27th of March only for Mr Jobs to unveil the 64-bit Merom based x1×00 powered MacBook Pro II on 1st April.

Update: Maybe that should be “Penultimate Edition” because the date has flipped back to the 3rd of March and 15th for delivery!? Maybe they are running on x86 Mac X Servers and Yonah has a repeat of the Pentium Div bug…