nullstream weblog - January 2006

My First Apple Product

Rant

January 28, 2006 10:42 PM PST

For Christmas I got my wife an Ipod Nano 4g. Anyone who knows me understands the significance of this. I am not exactly an Apple fan, and this purchase was difficult for me. But I got through it and managed to get one in time for Christmas. My first impressions where pretty positive, despite the fact that it got pretty scratched up in the 5 minutes it took me to get it from the packaging and into a protective sheath. (Seriously what is up with that)? My wife took right to it and loves it. I should say she ‘loved’ it. It died today, 1 month and 3 days since first use. She was using it on and off all day. She turned it off for 15 minutes and then it wouldn’t come back on. It doesn't respond to reset or charging, It’s dead Jim.

Ask me some time what I think of Apple.

Comments (7)

Paul, January 29, 2006 06:32 PM:

That sucks, but at least it'll still be under warrantee (90 days, right?).

I've been running my 40GB iPod daily for 1.5 years now (dropped twice, covered in coffee once) and it's still going fine. It's actually annoying, since I want a reason to get the video version.

J, January 29, 2006 06:45 PM:

Yeah, that is too bad. I finally saw a Nano just yesterday and those things are ridiculously small. I can see why sales of the gumstick shuffle went down. Really, it's only 90 days warranty? I would expect at least a year. I'm interested to see if they get you a replacement quickly. Stop by the Apple store and see if they'll do it on sight.

Paul, January 29, 2006 07:17 PM:

Looks like 180 days.

Wheelson, January 29, 2006 10:36 PM:

Apple, iRiver, Sony, it's all the same stuff when you get down to the actual nuts and bolts. All these things are very small, very expensive and rather disposable. My guideline is, if it fits in my pocket and it has an LCD on it, if it lasts a year I'll be amazed.

In 1998 when I got my first PDA I bought a titanium case for it so I could protect it. I put the little plastic film on the screen and all that too. Now the PDA is a fossil. I probably only used it for a couple of years. Looking back it was silly to spend the money and effort trying to protect something and make it last for 5+ years when it became a fossil due to becoming obsolete in about a year.

I started thinking about portable electronic gadgets that have had the longest lifespan, both operational and applicable. I honestly can't think of any that are more than a few years old other than my watch.

FredB, January 30, 2006 12:43 PM:

There's an undocumented method for resetting iPods. You sit on it and pulse your butt cheeks. The tricky part is getting the frequency right; apparently faster than most people are comfortable with.

FredB, January 30, 2006 12:47 PM:

I'm either going to be banned from posting here or going to hell, whichever occurs first.

John, January 31, 2006 07:24 AM:

Ipod Resurrection:

After submitting the service request to Apple I put the Ipod in a drawer. The next step was to wait for the return packaging to arrive in the mail. For some reason I took it out last night and tried to boot it up again (for the 100th time). This time however the little apple logo popped up for a few seconds, gave me a low battery indication and then faded off. I ran it over to the computer and docked it, and it came right up and connected to Itunes like normal. After a full charge cycle it appears to be working fine.

Theory:
After some logical deduction, I believe the following happened: I think that the Ipod locked up hard, but was still on. It had a blank screen with no back light or sound, so it looked completely off / dead. It was so locked up that it wouldn’t respond to the normal reset sequence (it may have responded to Fred’s secret method however). The battery was fully charged at the time of lockup. It took a day for the battery to drain completely and thus ‘reset’ the Ipod.

Full Auto

Gaming

January 20, 2006 11:10 AM PST

Sega Labs width=
Captain Sniffy proxies this link to Sega Labs for some funny advertising about Full Auto. This is the 360 game I'm currently looking forward to most. It looks like a good mix of Midtown Madness and Halo. Who can argue with car game who's main objective it to blow stuff up? The game releases on 2/14.

Official Site Team Xbox Coverage

Update: Added image

Comments (8)

Paul, January 20, 2006 12:45 PM:

With luck, they might even release the Xbox 360 by 2/14!

John, January 20, 2006 12:55 PM:

Quote from Jurassic Park: "Eventually your going to have dinosaurs in your dinosaur park – right?"

J, January 20, 2006 03:34 PM:

The 360 just isn't that compelling to me. Even the prices on deal sites are like $670 for a "bundle". Total BS. Whether the supply is artificially constrained or not, I just don't see why it's this expensive for a game box with minimal games. Most of the new stuff I'm hearing about it XBox arcade (AKA flash gaming). Is it just fanboys buying it? Maybe the price will come down after everyone at MS finally is able to get one!

John, January 20, 2006 03:42 PM:

Sigh, I seem to recall that you were not excited about Xbox 1.0 either, or Halo for that matter (something about it being a half-life rip off).

You will be converted to the dark side in due time.

I agree with the MS comment. They would have made things much simpler if they would have just given all MS employee's a free 360 before Christmas :)

J, January 20, 2006 04:41 PM:

It's not that 360 or xbox 1 is bad - they just don't justify the high price tag and apparent fanyboydom. This, like HDTV is something I'll move to when it's commodity, or at least average consumer. And don't forget Paul had a big hand in moving me to Xbox.

BTW - I like this ad for the game. Pretty creative.

Paul, January 20, 2006 05:24 PM:

I did a "forced downgrade" on J's gaming experience... muahahahaha!

John, January 27, 2006 01:09 AM:

Ok I played the demo for this game (single player), very crazy action. It is hard to describe all the destruction. I think is going to be great fun. I hope they have game types similar to Midtown.

John, February 27, 2006 12:30 PM:

Well slashdot has a quick review and they decided it was worth a rental but not a purchase. I picked it up the night before I left for vacation and only played it for 45 minutes so I'm undecided. It does not have any Midtown madness style game play however, so that is a let down. It is basically just track racing with guns. I'll try to do a mini-review as I get more time with it.

Intel Macs

Cool Tech

January 10, 2006 02:17 PM PST

Some people think the Pentium II is the fastest processor in the world. Not quite. The chip inside every Power Macintosh® G3 is up to twice as fast*. Think different.

Remember the days when the Apple fanboys made fun of the pokey Intel procs? I actually had the above as my background screen on my spanking new Beige G3 (the last Mac I ever bought)! Apple today announced the first set of Intel based macs. You can read about the news elsewhere, but this post is for commentary and comments!

The performance of the dual core intel procs looks fantastic, and from the reviews I've read on Windows dual core laptops, the battery life is also better. So dual core is a win-win (this is why we like computers). What better exmple of this than the new iMacs being offered at the same price but with a 2-4x performance increase, faster graphics card, built in camera and the latest and greatest Apple software.

The laptop was what I was really interested in seeing, and so far am pretty exited about it. Other companies can't be bothered to include a DVI port on their laptops (despite the fact that they must already have the chipset to power the built-in LCD). Apple lays the spank down with dual-link DVI on the new MacBook Pro. This machine looks all around nice, and not unexpected pricing starting at $1999. For the amount of hardware, software, new screen and form factor this seems like a really solid laptop purchase.

The big question for me is whether Windows will run on these laptops. I'm not talking about reformatting it immediately and running only Windows. A good portion of the value of the machine is obviously the OS and applications. However, I can't commit to spending that much if I am locked 100% into Mac. It's too big an investment. I have to have a fallback position to ease the transition over.

No word on a new iPod Shuffle. These had been discounted and cleared out of the channels, so I suppose we'll see an update sometime soon. The low end iBook like was also being heavily discounted, so who knows what the story is with that. They can't really mess with the new MacBook, so maybe it will just wither away or use a single core or something.

Comments (17)

John, January 10, 2006 03:02 PM:

Yeah over all a solid announcement. People always expect more. There were some good speculations this time around too, such as screen Shuffle, Media Center killer Intel Mac Mini. The more far out one I read was Apple entering the gaming market. -Yeah right.

The MacBook (stupid name me thinks), looks pretty solid. Mac users are going to love that since it really cranks up the performance over the G4. I think that mag plug thing is pretty cool since pretty much everyone has tripped over their laptop power cord. I agree with J, that what I'm most interested in seeing is if this thing will dual boot to Windows. If so then I predict it will be a very hot item indeed.

Paul, January 10, 2006 03:50 PM:

I think they are just trying to get the name "Mac" into all their products. The iBook will become "MacBook", and the PowerBook is now "MacBook Pro".

Sort of like trying to spread the name "Pod": podcasting, etc.

Paul, January 10, 2006 06:22 PM:

It's also funny that the day Apple announces Intel Macs, their stock price closes at $80.86... that's nice work!

George, January 10, 2006 10:33 PM:

The iMac update was a bit of a suprise, seems like it was just updated a few months ago.

About the Shuffle, it's still available on the Apple website. The 1gb version went out of stock before xmas and I think that fueled the speculation the shuffle would be updated.

Ian (friend of J), January 12, 2006 12:59 AM:

David Pogue of the NY Times wrote "Intriguingly, they'll all be technically capable of restarting in Microsoft Windows - not using an off-the-shelf copy, but perhaps with the assistance of a software kit written by some enterprising programmer."

Paul, January 12, 2006 11:16 AM:

Hmmmm... I wonder...

John, January 13, 2006 10:05 AM:

Nah, they always say stuff like that when they think a keynote fell short. It's like the stuff you say to your kids when they are bad... "I was going to take you to McDonalds today, but not now." In this case Job's says, "I was going to announce something totally cool today, but I won't because Intel's been bad."

John, January 17, 2006 02:31 PM:

Every day now I follow several links that alternate between proclaiming that the intelMac will boot Windows and that it won't.

Here is another one.

J, January 17, 2006 02:36 PM:

I also heard that the x64 version of windows will use the new EFI bios, but that the Core Duo chips don't support x64??? If so, that would really suck just from a computation perspective. Anyway, unless there's some crazy trusted computing stuff running in the EFI bios, I don't see why this won't be solved eventually, at least for Vista.

John, January 20, 2006 03:44 PM:

Crash Different

Angry, angry young man.

J, January 20, 2006 04:46 PM:

Now I know what kind of stuff the M$ boys are passing around the lunchroom! Pretty funny though. I definitely have more trouble with a mac now than a PC. The first thing that always gets me is that you have to resize a windows just by the bottom right corner. Apparently I'm always grabbing the edges of windows to resize them.

J, March 21, 2006 08:38 PM:

So they've got the macbook running XP. Apparently it's pretty stable but there are some differences with the video card interface so the graphics aren't hardware accelerated. Things like WiFi do work however.

With "virtualization" and dual cores being all the rage, I'm surprised that people aren't looking at running the OSs simultaneously. There's been talk of a virtual pc type environment, which might be pretty cool.

J, April 24, 2006 09:54 AM:

17" MacBookPro out now. Do people really like huge laptops?

Paul, April 24, 2006 03:08 PM:

I don't. The 15" MacBook is as large a laptop as I'd buy. On the other hand, if you aren't a gamer, the 17" would be a nice home machine if you didn't intend to go mobile with it, since there are virtually no cables or fan noise and would take up much less space on a table.

J, April 24, 2006 03:28 PM:

I'm interested in when I'll just have an iPod size computer that I can plug into any monitor/kbd/mouse/network and get going. But till then, I'm much more interested in a 12" laptop with DVI for big screen than a 17".

John, April 24, 2006 05:54 PM:

I think that the 17" laptops are nice if you want one computer but have occasional need to move it to another room or take it somewhere. Since the battery life is so horrible though you really have just a 'portable'. Maybe they could just drop the battery all together to save money? I think I would prefer a Laptop to an IMac type machine in a small room (excluding price) since it takes up less volume and can be folded flat.

John, April 29, 2006 12:41 PM:

Get a MacBook Pro in your choice of of 24 colors! This company will sell you a new pre painted one, or you can send your's in for a bling upgrade. The metallic black (carbon) looks pretty sweet. They all sell the Dell model I'm getting.

Is This Thing On?

Opinion

January 3, 2006 10:45 PM PST

Due to a lack of anyone posting anything for almost a month (where is the Xbox 360 review, Sniffy?), here are some of my gratuitous "Top n of 2005" lists, where n is not a large number 'cause that would take too much time.

Continue reading "Is This Thing On?"...

Comments (6)

Sniffy, January 4, 2006 04:46 PM:

XBox 360 review is forthcoming. BTW, I caught Sigur Ros at the Paramount last time they came to town (Octoberish?). Trippy.

Wheelson, January 9, 2006 09:22 PM:

Paul makes one mean list.

J, January 10, 2006 02:22 PM:

Thanks for the post - a lot of material listed that I haven't seen/heard, so I take them as new suggestions.

I've only heard that coldplay cd a couple times. Haven't heard the rest of the artists.

Didn't read any of the Harry Potter books. Can't stand the movies (they're all plot event after plot event with no strong story or character development), but don't hold that against the books. Maybe they help make the movies more interesting. BTW, Quidditch™ is a ridiculous premise for a game.

I agree about Serenity and probably could add a couple movies on a list of my own.

Battlestar is hands down my favorite active show now. There are a few others I'll add to my own belated year end post.

John, January 10, 2006 02:44 PM:

Serenity and Narnia both rocked. Narnia was much better than I expected, my kids even liked it, and they hate everything except Harry Potter.

I read the latest Harry Potter book and thought it was pretty good. I'm not accepting the ending however.

Battlestar is my ONLY active show now. The show continues to surprise me.

Paul, January 10, 2006 02:53 PM:

If you don't believe the ending of Harry Potter book 6, read this (scroll to the near the bottom where it says "And now it's time to talk about...").

John, January 10, 2006 03:14 PM:

Ok that post is spot on. I agree with everything OSC says on this subject. I noticed the same things in the plot when I read it. I'll be dissapointed of book 7 doesn't turn out this way. BTW speaking of OSC this year I finshed off the whole Bean series and am now reading The Worthing Saga. Recommended stuff.