tech ronin

Upgraded MacBook Pro and iMac 24 to 4 gb RAM

In the last couple of weeks I upgraded my MacBook Pro and iMac from 2 to 4 gigs of RAM. It cost me about $100 at Other World Computing for the 2- 2 gig sticks of RAM, so that was about $200. I checked just now and you can get out the door with UPS ground shipping for under $98 for 4 gigs of RAM for the MBP or iMac Core 2 duo machines.

I tried on my own to install the RAM and after encountering the slightest bit of difficulty in each case (a screw was too tight for me and I worried about stripping it), decided to just ask my local Marin Mac Shop to install the RAM. Their charge? $27/machine. Any questions?

If you operate towards the power user end of the spectrum and have relatively powerful hardware to match, RAM is so cheap right now that you would be foolish not to upgrade up to 4 gigs of RAM if you can. That gives you headroom for things like 25 tabs open at once in Safari plus maybe 10-20 open applications. Works for me!

Now I feel like I'm not handicapping my fast Macs. It's crazy to spend around $2500 for the Mac and then cripple it even a little with not enough memory.

I have to admit that both these machines were fast to begin with and I really didn't have any complaints at all about my new 2.8 ghz iMac. But, who knows what it is capable of if it is limited by RAM a lot of the time?

Recession is Apple Talent-grab Opportunity

You know that $18 billion in cash Apple has lying around gathering dust? What say Apple starts staffing up for the coming era of iPhone / iPod touch platform domination? You can buy both companies and talent on the cheap in a recession. Steve is Scotch as I recall.

Combine a crappy economy, an awesome new iPhone SDK, a frictionless wireless App store and a $100 million iFund and what do you get? The best and brightest global entrepreneurial software talent are going to swarm this. Look what jailbreaking wrought and multiply by 10 for a start.

Update Mar 9: Upon further reflection, it strikes me that Apple may well scoop up the a few of the most promising iPhone SDK developer companies themselves. I'm convinced Apple needs to staff up.

I noticed that last year their R&D spending was less than 4% which is pretty low for such an innovative company as Apple. But then maybe some of their recent spending hasn't been expensed yet due to the 2-year window within which they can recognize expenses for the iPhone.

Attentive Mac fans have noticed the fairly high number of missed deadlines. Most recently Leopard was late and a bit buggy when finally released and now the SDK is just in Beta rather than done by February. Apple needs talent - the best available. I almost think they've been too busy building stuff to go out and find some more good people. But that only works so long.

I liked seeing Steve including two of his most able executives in important parts of the Roadmap presentation. They were looking good, actually. Steve casts a long shadow, but he needs plenty of help at the size Apple has grown to be.

Upgrading my MacBook Pro with Leopard Erase & Install

I am upgrading my main axe, my MacBook Pro, to Leopard right now. I tried upgrading a couple months ago but got stopped because the DVD drive on my MBP is fussy and wouldn't read the Leopard Install disk. That slowed me down long enough to realize I had better wait a while before I upgrade my primary computer.

I first upgraded my backup notebook my MacBook on October 27. Then on December 2, when I bought my 24" iMac, I used the included Leopard disk to upgrade it.

Things have worked fairly well on those machines and I really enjoy Leopard but I was still having some conflicts running IMAP email with some machines on Leopard and some on Tiger. I had planned to upgrade my MBP at Christmas but didn't do it. Still kind of hesitant.

Yesterday, New Years, I was thinking, let's do it. And bought online the Take Control of Upgrading to Leopard ebook. I really recommend this to anyone who hasn't upgraded to Leopard but wants to. I also bought Take Control of Customizing Leopard. The 2 ebooks together were $15. Seemed a small price to pay if it saves me some hassle or problems in the installation.

After going through the Upgrading ebook, I decided to use Erase and Install. That meant I needed 2 full bootable clones of my MBP before I could upgrade. I ran SuperDuper twice and created two clones on two hard drives. That felt good.

Today and followed the upgraders guide further and deactivated startup items, made a smartupdate to update one of my clones and was set to go. I also did a verify on my MBP drive which came up good in Tiger.

I then put the Leopard DVD in my iMac and shutdown my MBP. Then I connected the MBP to my iMac via a firewire cable and shutdown the MBP. Then I powered up the MBP with the T key held down to put it into firewire diskmode. Then back to my iMac and ran the Leopard installer. The MBP drive showed up.

I then went into the Disk Utilities available from the startup disk and verified the MBP drive. It almost finished but then bombed out. I then tried again and after a 2nd time the repairs all took and I had a clean bill of health from Leopard's Disk Utilities. That was also a reassuring thing. Not sure this was necessary at all since I planned to do an Erase and Install, but better safe than sorry I thought.

I went ahead then and used the Options button to select Erase & Install and continued and selected Customize and deleted extra translations (saving 1.9 gigs) but kept foreign fonts since Joes said the extra characters those fonts have might come in handy. I also chose to install the X-11 tools because those sometimes come in handy when you try to do command line kinds of things.

I'm about 15 minutes into the upgrade and it's telling me I have 26 minutes to go.

I won't be done then because I will have to do a Leopard-assisted transfer from my most recent clone of the MBP to get my applications, settings and data back on my fresh install of Leopard. I like the Erase and Install because you get a from scratch install and still don't have to install all our applications from scratch or even copy your data. I'm expecting that it will take 2-4 hours to transfer everything.

Luckily, my little Blackbook is available because both my iMac and MBP are tied up doing all this stuff. I'll let you know any further developments.

Update 7:22 pm. All done with the installation. Had to unplug my MBP in order to get it out of firewire drive mode. Also shut down my iMac to get it out of the mode of welcoming me to Leopard after it restarted itself when my Leopard install was done. But, all was well when I plugged in my external drive with the MBP clone on it and restarted my MBP. As soon as the MBP started up, I got the festive Leopard welcome and was offerred the option to transfer settings and such from another computer. I chose other volume and right now the transfer is going and says 1 hour and 36 minutes remaining.

Update 11:52 pm. The transfer went perfectly as far as I can tell and finished in about 2 hours. After that, I still needed to use the OS X updater to fetch 10.5.1 plus assorted updates since then. That took about 30 minutes.

After that I focused on getting FileMaker Pro 9 advanced working. I deactivated right before the upgrade to Leopard. After the install and updates, starting FileMaker threw an error. I expected that because when I upgraded to Leopard on my iMac, the same thing happened. That time I called FileMaker tech support and they helped me fix it. This time I had already found an post on the net by Googling that gave me some special instructions that allowed the Activation to occur on Leopard. Once that worked, I was in business.

Loving Leopard. Loving it on my machine I work on 50% of the time. I've been working a lot on the iMac since I got it just cause it is so fast and cool with Leopard. Now that my MacBook Pro has a new lease on life with Leopard, I may be using it more. We'll see. That gigantic 24" screen is pretty tempting. I just often like to work on the couch.

Watching Video Podcasts on iMac 24

I just watched my first episode of Girls Gone Geek. About 5 minutes of quite high quality video. I'm impressed. I'll be watching more episodes. Yes, it is partly because it is done by women. If things were not so lopsided in the geek world, I wouldn't need to seek these shows out. But there it is.

I've found with my iMac 24, that I spend a fair amount of time sitting back about 4 feet and either reading and surfing with big type on the screen or watching video podcasts. Maybe the remote you get with it is actually useful to people not in college dorm rooms.

Now that I have the iMac's 500 gig hard drive to boot from, I'm getting into more video podcasts. I could have done this before using an external drive mind you, but something about this 24" screen plus the 500 gig drive has pushed me over the edge on video podcasts.

I bought an AppleTV back in January when they were first announced but cancelled my order once I found out that it wouldn't really work with my Standard Def 50" TV. In October, I managed to pawn off my humongous SDTV to my sister and acquired a 40" HDTV right-sized for my smaller new Tiburon place. Now I could benefit from watching video podcasts on my TV via an AppleTV. Except it seems obvious that Apple will release AppleTV 2.0 in by spring. I'm waiting for that. In the meantime, this 24" iMac is working for me just fine.

My Leopard IMAP is breaking my Email

I don't have all the facts yet, but since setting up Mail on my new iMac in Leopard, I haven't been able to receive email. That's since Monday! Just figured out that shutting down mail on my iMac makes email work again. I can then check the mail with a web browser on my iMac or I can check in Mail in Tiger on my MacBook Pro. Just a little heads up.

Leopard on iMac 24 2.8 - Bliss

Got an iMac 24 2.8 on Sunday. My G5 tower 2 ghz dual was 3 years old. I loved that it still does Classic. But it was starting to show its age and I believe in replacing my Macs before they become completely obsolete. And I like to get new Macs at the end of the year for tax reasons.

I didn't want to pay for a new Mac Pro plus a 23" or 30" screen. Wasn't a good deal from my perspective and a high end iMac seems good enough. I considered the lower-end 24" iMac but I want something that will still seem fast for a while. Not something that is just fast enough now and will start seeming a little slow a year from now.

You pay an extra $250 for the 2.8 ghz processor compared to the 2.4 ghz version. That's a reasonable anti-obsolescence investment. Since the processor is going to give out before the screen does, I want the faster processor so that this gorgeous hunk of metal and glass will have a long life span before hitting the dump or recycling bin.

The other $250 I paid ($2299 total) included a 500 gb instead of 320 gb hard drive and 2 gb RAM instead of just 1 gb. Again, I liked the higher end configuration because it won't be easy to upgrade the hard drive later. At some point I do expect to upgrade to 4 gigs of RAM but 2 will do for a while.

I also sprung for a wireless keyboard and mouse. Because I was buying at the Apple store, I had to pay full price for the wireless gear. I forgot about that when deciding to buy locally rather than online. Oops. That cost me an extra $120. But, I do regard the extra gear as backups should the batteries go bad one day I'm in a crunch.

The 24" screen has been something I've wanted for years ever since I saw my first 23" cinema display years ago. It is huge!

I have been using a 20" cinema display (about 4 years old) and a 17" cinema display (about 6 years old). I thought maybe I could use the 24" iMac and deploy or sell the older displays elsewhere. Not quite!

I missed having a second secondary screen to put things on that I want open but want out of the way. Spaces didn't feel like it would do quite what I need. I have a habit of having that screen there. For example, today my email wasn't working. I wanted to keep the email inbox in sight but needed it out of the way so I could use the screen for other things.

I already had an adapter that let me use one of my old Apple displays with the G5's newer DVI port. All I had to add was a mini-DVI to DVI adapter and plug that into my Apple Adapter and plug the Cinema display into the adapter. Apple sells the mini-DVI adapters for $20 and the Apple-DVI adapter for $100. Luckily, I just needed the $20 item. Went over to the Corte Madera Apple store (which was rocking hard at about 5:30 pm) and picked up the mini-DVI adapter. Plugged things in and I'm set.

Now I have my 20" monitor as the secondary screen. It is about 3" lower because it doesn't have the iMac's chin, but it works. I doubt if I'll bother trying to elevate it.

Now, about this new iMac! It is a thing of beauty! It is a great, great machine. The screen is brighter than bright, so I keep it set to the minimum brightness for normal use. I can turn it up for use with photos and video. You are going to need extra ambient light if you want to work at night with this screen without blowing your eyes out.

The wired and wireless keyboards are exquisite. The touch is to die for. The look is awesome. So far, I'm using the baby-sized wireless keyboard with complete satisfaction. I'm not a numeric keypad fan, so I delight in losing the extra weight and size of the wired keyboard. Every other keyboard seems clunky compared to this.

I was not too surprised to find that Tiger was installed on the iMac. A Leopard DVD was in the box but that's it. I had to install Leopard at home. A whole extra chunk of time when I couldn't use the new machine. Bummer!

One advantage, though, is that I got to see how much better I liked the new iMac with Leopard on it. Leopard on my MacBook was one thing, but Leopard on this screamer with giant screen is fantastic! The 3D dock looks like it was made for this screen. It looks great and their's plenty of vertical space so I don't need to begrudge losing vertical room to a dock at the bottom of my screen. On the MacBook, I had to put the dock on the left to get some room.

Leopard is gorgeous. It runs blazing fast on this machine. Everything pops. Safari is wonderful. I'm hooked on Leopard now. I'll try hard to hold out till Christmas with my MacBook Pro on Tiger just in case I run into trouble. Steve was telling the truth in June when he said Leopard would be worth waiting for.

This is my first iMac. Who knew I would love the integration and simplicity? I am beginning to see things Steve's way on this. It's so easy. So elegant. Sometimes options are more trouble than they are worth. That's the religion you get with the iPhone.... I'm being corrupted but perhaps for my own good.

Leopard still only for my experimental use

I got started with Leopard on my backup computer, my MacBook, on the Saturday after Leopard launched. Had some problems there. I was tempted still to upgrade my main axe, my MacBook Pro, to Leopard but held off. Lucky thing.

I'm convinced that I would have lost more than I gained by switching my main machine at that time. I'm still happily productive on Tiger on my main axe. And, I haven't had a lot of time to do much with Leopard yet on my MacBook. But I have a few initial impressions and experiences to share.

I tried using the dock at the bottom of my screen because I wanted to see the cool new dock. This week I switched back to the dock on the side. I like it there. I like it on the bottom from an aesthetic point of view but a widescreen like the MacBook's really works better with the dock on the side. I like it on the left. The left side dock loses its 3D look, but still looks different enough to be a nice touch.

If you have a 24" iMac or even a 20" or 17" MacBook Pro or maybe a 15" MacBook Pro, you may have room for the dock on the bottom. But forget it on a MacBook. No way!

I like the way Leopard looks overall. I like the consistency and the great number of small refinements throughout. And, I am still being surprised by big improvements here and there. For example, the Network panel rocks (see above). It looks enticing and actually gives you the most important information you need on one panel.

I heard Mac guru, Dr. Bob Levitus, talking about Leopard on the Mac OS Ken podcast recently. He wasn't really recommending it. He loves it but thinks there are enough issues like the blue screen of death to make it a prudent idea to wait a while. Wait until you can upgrade with confidence. Wait until there's enough time for good advice to be published and for lesser but prized applications to be upgraded and fully Leopard-compatible.

I'm lucky to have a secondary machine handy that I could upgrade to Leopard and use for web browsing, feed reading and some email. I can tinker with it and explore and not get stuck with extra problems when I'm under deadline and have to get something out the door.

So what's the plan with Leopard? I'm going to keep this up for a while. I have my fun, new Leopard machine to play with and I have my MacBook Pro for work and anything else I want on my main machine. I want to wait until my favorite backup program, SuperDuper, works flawlessly with Leopard.

I have every intention of upgrading to Leopard on my MacBook Pro by Christmas. Maybe Thanksgiving weekend even. I'll be tracking the Leopard news. Once I'm convinced the chances of problems has diminished to unlikely, I'll go for it.

By the way, even when I go to Leopard on my MacBook Pro, I'll still have my G5 tower on Tiger. That machine isn't Intel based and still runs Classic. I still have one Classic application I like to run from time to time - Civilization II - a classic game if ever there was one.

I hear Intel Macs are the ones that get speedy on Leopard. Older machines don't fare as well. My 3-year-old G5 runs great and I don't want it slowing down on Leopard. It'll probably be fine, actually, since the Mac towers have decent and upgradeable video cards.

Then there are the highly anticipated screen sharing and remote control features in Leopard to consider. Once the kinks are worked out (hear Ted Landau's rundown of initial limitations on the Nov 8 episode of the Tech Night Owl Live Podcast), this snazzy sharing stuff is going to be compelling.

If I fall in love with Leopard over the next few weeks, I may decide I want an all Leopard household at some point. The advantage to NOT doing that is that I'll be able to run Leopard-incompatible applications on my non-Leopard machine(s) as needed rather than being stuck without that option.

Up and Running in OSX Leopard

I dropped by my local Apple store in Corte Madera last night around 9:25 pm. It was busy but there were lots of Apple staff around so I could get help fairly quickly. I used my iPhone $100 credit and bought the Family size of OS X Leopard. Got my free T-shirt which is still in the bag.

I'm moving this weekend with movers coming early Monday morning. No time for much fun. But, I did think I could stop working around 9:15 pm long enough to get Leopard on Leopard night.

I left pretty quickly and headed over to the new place in Tiburon. There were no special treats other than the T-shirts at check out. Not exactly a party. My new apartment has my new Sony XBR4 40“ HDTV, so I coordinated my trip with a brief visit to the new TV to watch Numbers in HD. Looking good!

While the show was on, I tried to install Leopard on my MacBook (my #2 machine). I just tried the upgrade. First time through it failed. Second time through it was failing and said the only way it would work is if I erased my drive. I forgot about archive and install and erased the drive. Too bad. The install failed which left me with an unusable computer on day 1.

Today, in between packing boxes, I used SuperDuper to copy a backup of my MacBook Pro to the MacBook. That took about an hour. Then I was able to boot the MacBook again. I read the installation instructions a bit more this time and decided to do an archive and install.

Worked like a charm and I am writing this post in Leopard using ecto as we speak. Leopard is definitely snazzy. The consistent look and differences are really nice. I'm already plotting to upgrade my MacBook Pro as soon as possible.

But, after my first bumpy install experience, I think I'll give it at least until Tuesday after the move. Meanwhile, I can use this machine to check my IMAP email in Mail and surf the net. I did upgrade my copy of NetNewsWire when it notified me there was an update and it is running just fine without a problem.

I can't wait to play with Go to My Mac and screen sharing in the near future! I'll make several more posts no doubt as I discover the niceties of this new OS for myself over the next few days.

iPhoto 08 and Numbers Rock

I scored the new iLife 08 and iWork 08 today. That's a great impulse buy and I'm sure Apple knows it. What a deal for $158. With the upgrade of Pages and addition of Numbers, I'm hoping to forego an upgrade to the next version of Office for Mac.

I actually have never upgraded to Office 04. So, why bother with Office 08? it better be good is all I can say if Microsoft wants to have a prayer of getting people like me to upgrade.

Meanwhile, I'm trashing Excel. OK. I'll keep it around but I hope to use it rarely if ever. Of course, there may be places where I like Excel better than Numbers, but right now I'm liking Numbers. Ease of use is excellent. The program isn't very big which is a major plus. And it feels way different (Apple does not disappoint).

The differences in Numbers are several but I can't do a point by point comparison because, like I said, I'm still using Excel X from 2001 or 2002. I'm just about positive, though, that this paradigm change in Numbers is not in Excel.

See the photo above. The two spreadsheets there are tables. From what I can see here, Apple has done a really nice job. You want to work with Numbers. I haven't had that feeling about a spreadsheet program in a long, long time.

Numbers has sheets. Excel has worksheets. Similar there. But numbers has tables and you can have multiple tables per sheet. A table is like a mini spreadsheet object that can have as many rows and columns as you want and can be dragged around to the exact spot you want it on the sheet.

You can insert rows and columns right on the sheet. Calculations that I tried are easier to use. Charts are droolworthy. There's a certain scrumptiousness to the look and feel of the application itself.

Numbers is accessible, easy and fun. The way I figure it, that's what most of us want in a spreadsheet. If you push spreadsheets every day for hours on end, maybe that's not what you want. But the majority of us use spreadsheets less frequently and less intensively. That's the sweet spot Apple exploits with Numbers.

I hope to write more on this the next time I get into a spreadsheet project. Actually, knowing me, I will think up a spreadsheet project just so I can play with Numbers some more. You can download their 30-day trial free or just pop the $79 to get Numbers plus improved versions of Pages and Keynote.

The first program I tried today was iPhoto. I take a lot of photos and wanted to see what else I could do. Mostly, I've just played around with the new Events feature. I loved having all my photos grouped by import batch. Some of the batches are a mish mash of things for that day. But, often enough, the batch deserves its own grouping and now I don't have to do it the hard way.

Good thing. The Events view in the multiple photo view shows a single photo for each event. This seems much more manageable. You can easily see mini views of each photo just by moving your cursor over the single photo. You can split and merge events to modify the groupings. I plan to create a big iPhone July 07 event which will be all the iPhone photos I've collected online in the first month.

This is fun people! Photos are great to play around with and this is a substantial upgrade to iPhoto so the fun gets even better. You also get easy integration with .Mac photo galleries and other cool features there where you can email photos taken on your iPhone and let your friends email photos to gallery photo Events. That's going to be great for aggregating photos taken at parties and other get togethers. And for interest groups I would think. There are new flag and hide functions that should come in handy.

I am not planning to buy a new Mac in the next couple months, so I couldn't wait. If you do buy a new Mac, you'll almost surely get iLife for free. I couldn't wait, but that's just me.

Picked up a few more shares of APPL

Woo hoo! Got 65 more shares of AAPL at $130.09. Remember that I'm nobody and totally inexperienced with stocks. All my other holdings are mutual funds. But, I wanted to have a round number of shares. Now I have 200. Much easier math. I have an iPhone and I think Steve Jobs is at least as competent as any other corporate exec out there and APPL is worth more than $130. So there!

And that doesn't mean it won't drop below 130. I just think overall it is headed towards 200. And I'm looking forward to iMacs next week, Leopard, upgrades to iPhone, widespread adoption by the non-early-adopters, international sales, and the ultraportable.