Around February of 2005 I bought a G4 iBook. I loved it, and still do except for the screen resolution. It has always worked very well. I could easily take it to class and use it all day on a single battery charge. It is quiet and never overheats. As far as I’m concerned it has worked flawlessly, and I’d like to point out, it still does. The battery still keeps a great charge. The screen has zero dead pixels. It has held up perfectly. As I stated before it’s main downfall for “modern” times is the low screen resolution of 1024×768. It has a 1.33ghz G4 Processor, 1.25gb of RAM and runs the Leopard operating system. It isn’t fast compared to new laptops, but it is great for general internet usage, even still today.

In May of 2008 I purchased a 24″ iMac. At that point I became a full time Mac user at home. I loved it. And for $1800 I hoped it would last a long time. Fast forward to 2010 and now I know I was totally mistaken. The iMac, along with every other piece of Apple hardware over the last couple of years, has various flaws that Apple refuses to do anything about and they just don’t last as long as they should.

For one, they overheat. Apple seems to think that the more silent a computer is the better… No, that’s not the case. If I let the fans on my iMac run at stock speed, not only does the whole computer get ridiculously hot, but even the LCD screen burns in. In order to make my screen viewable after a few hours I finally figured out that I needed to remove the glass covering on my screen (it’s simply held in place with a few magnets) and use a program to control my fan speeds. Without the glass my iMac looks fairly bad, but if it helps the issue it is the only option I have. There have been various topics on the Apple forums regarding this issue and absolutely no solutions have been posted. Why? Because there are none. It’s a major design flaw. Nothing can be done to fix it other than what I have done, if you even consider that a fix. On a side note, other things have failed on my iMac also, including the Super Drive and the line-in jack.

Another problem is their operating system support. Snow Leopard is great, don’t get me wrong. But I am unable to upgrade past 10.6.2 on my iMac. Well, that’s not entirely true. I can if I want to have a completely unstable and unusable computer.

Starting with 10.6.3 and even in the current build 10.6.4, there is a major issue that causes the entire computer to lock up. The screen either gets lines all over it, or goes completely black, and the computer is unresponsive to all input. The only possible thing to do is to press the power button on the back of the iMac until you can restart it. This issue started all the way back in April of this year. It is now mid August. Once again, there is no response from Apple about the issue and they have no idea what to do. They released a so called “fix” for something but it had no effect on my computer. I am not the only one with this problem either. There are plenty of threads on the Apple forums regarding the same issue. I was forced to reinstall Snow Leopard and only upgrade back up to 10.6.2 to have a working computer.

Because I initially liked my iMac so much, I bought a first gen iPod Touch for a whopping $379. I absolutely loved it. It basically convinced me to cancel my Verizon contract and switch to AT&T to buy an iPhone 3g.

My phone has always worked fairly well. As a matter of fact, I still use the iPhone 3g. I have it jailbroken of course. But once again, Apple released their next great thing iOS 4. iOS 4 is totally useless on the iPhone 3g. My phone is already nearly 2 years old so the battery doesn’t hold a charge nearly as well as it did early on. iOS 4 absolutely destroys it, not to mention the fact that the useful features such as “background” apps aren’t officially supported on it. Needless to say, I am using the 3.1.3 OS, and I will never upgrade any higher. They don’t even support a wallpaper on the iPhone 3g. Amazingly, I have no issues with full themes while it is jailbroken.

I’m sure you can imagine where I am heading now with this, the iPhone 4 “antennagate” issue… I would love to buy a new phone. AT&T was even nice enough to allow me to do so early if I wanted to upgrade. Why would anyone even consider doing this? Yeah I know, plenty of people say they don’t have an issue. I guess Apple just decided to fire Mark Papermaster for no reason, right?

This entire umm, “made up problem” has made me totally rethink my entire stance on Apple as a whole.  I am about 95% certain that I will not buy another Apple computer. I am also about 75% sure that I will not purchase another iPhone, and the only reason I even say 75% is the fact that I have spent a good bit of money on applications for my current iPhone 3g. I don’t really want all of that money to go to waste and honestly it is the only reason why I would even consider staying with the iPhone.

I am starting to ramble now so I will finish off by discussing my main issue with Apple products, their price. As time goes by and technology is getting better and better, and the “computer user” is becoming more mainstream, prices have dropped drastically. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to care about this trend. Apple computers flat out are overpriced, more so than ever I think.

I recently purchased an HP Pavilion dv7t Select Edition laptop. I can admit it, I love Windows 7 and it is basically what will end my time as a primary Mac user. Here is a comparison between the HP laptop I ordered for $1150 and the 17″ MBP that costs $2350 (upgraded the HDD to 7200rpm to match the HP):

HP: Intel Core i5 2.40GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 2.66 GHz
MBP: 2.53GHz Intel Core i5
HP: 6GB DDR3 System Memory
MBP: 4GB DDR3 System Memory
HP: 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
MBP: 500GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
HP: 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 switchable graphics [HDMI, VGA]
MBP: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor with 512MB of GDDR3 memory and Intel HD Graphics with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory
HP: 17.3″ diagonal HD+ High-Definition HP LED BrightView Infinity Widescreen Display (1600 x 900)
MBP: MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Resolution Glossy Widescreen Display
HP: Blu-Ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD+/-R/RW Double Layer
MBP: SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
HP: One 6 Cell (standard) and One 9 Cell (over-sized) Lithium Ion Battery
MBP: Built-in 95-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery

It is totally unbelievable that you can buy 2 of the HP laptops instead of a single Macbook Pro. When you can buy literally 2 other computers for the price of one Mac then there is something drastically wrong. I could see if it was a far superior product then maybe it would be worth it. But the bottom line is Apple products are not superior at all to other manufacturers.

I could go on and on with this post, but I am going to end it here. To summarize, I used to love Apple products. Over the last couple of years many factors have swayed me away from their products. The most recent iPhone 4 disaster coupled with their inability to price their products competitively along with the drastic drop in overall quality are the main factors in my decision to no longer support the company as I once did.

So yeah, I finally made another blog post.

As the title says, “Time Stands Still”…

Photograph Taken by iPhone 3GS

I thought I’d add a Macro Monday for the week since I have not posted much lately.   I was playing with the camera on my phone to view the different focus settings, and I think this turned out well for a cellphone camera.  I resized this image, however if you click on the above photo it will open full res.

To sign up for the beta, MobileMe subscribers will need log into www.me.com/mail and click the “Request an invitation” link in the lower left corner. You will then receive an e-mail notification once they’ve been added to the beta.

From what I had read, the mail rules feature will allow MobileMe users at last to filter mail into separate mailboxes in advance of downloading them to your devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Macs and PCs.

Once I get my beta account setup I’ll be sure to review this service and provide some feedback to everyone.

More Information: MobileMe News

I’ve made it no secret on how much I love my Mac, and I do think the build and quality of OS X is fantastic.  If this qualifies me as being a Apple Fanboy, then so be it.

But lately, with the launch of the iPad, and announcement of the iPhone 4.0 OS, it seems like Apple is starting to leave behind the part of the business that started the company, “the Mac.”  On top of this, the company’s behavior seemed to have changed as it now is in two legal issues that I am aware of, the huge debate with Flash and fighting with Adobe, and its recent controversy on how applications must be written and approved in the new development agreement.  As ironic as it sounds, it no longer feels that Apple is the “cool / hip” Apple as they once had been, but more like Microsoft.

I can understand to a point Apple’s stand on their new application clause.  To guarantee that all of the applications are written the same, and to ensure their performance of the apps run at their peak, I think having all future apps written in object C makes sense.

In regards to the Flash debate, this needs to end.  Think about 4-5 years ago, you could not even get the rich content on your mobile phone that you can now.  There have been times where I’ve hit a site on my iPhone that has Flash content that I cannot play, and it was annoying but not the end of the world. Most people don’t tend to notice, but Flash is a CPU and Memory hog.  The next time you play something Flash intense on your PC or Mac check out your CPU monitor.  On top of all of this, Flash ads / and applications had been written for keyboard and mouse interaction, thus requires a rewrite to take advantage of the touch interface.  With that being said, why not use HTML5 as the standard?

Next month is Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and I’m hoping that some attention will be given back to the Mac and to OS X.  I understand if Apple has shifted focus on to the iPhone, iPad, and iPods however it seems like Apple is starting to forget their roots.  I hope that the company’s behavior is just a “phase”, and they will turn return to the Apple we all knew and loved.

I should have checked online before installing the update, because soon after I started having problems I did a simple search and found that I was not the only one. Basically, there is something wrong with the 10.6.3 update that causes the computer to become completely unresponsive. The screen goes completely blank then fills with vertical lines. When this happens, the computer as I said before, is completely unresponsive to mouse and keyboard input. The only thing to do is turn off the computer with the power button.

I found this topic on the Apple Forum which shows that this is happening to many others also. As of writing this blog post, the forum topic has been open for 2 weeks with no response from Apple.

This is a MAJOR problem. The 10.6.3 update makes the iMac totally unusable. Like always, I didn’t want to sit around and wait for a solution. I was going to get my computer working again, hopefully in fairly quick way. That is when a day long fight with my computer started…

First off, I knew I couldn’t just roll back to 10.6.2. So I was trying to think of a simple way to “make” the computer let me. I thought to myself, what if I just change the version number in the .plist file? That seemed like a great idea…

I changed the OS X version back to 10.6.1 so then I could reinstall the 10.6.2 update and hope for the best. Well, hoping wasn’t good enough in this instance. I installed 10.6.2 with no problem, until my iMac had to restart. Upon restart it instantly got a kernel panic. A never ending reboot loop…

At this point, I sat for a few minutes and thought logically about what to do. Upon each restart, button commands on the keyboard weren’t even working to be able to boot from the Snow Leopard disk. I decided to turn it off for good and unplug the power, hoping to clear out the ram. Once I did that, the computer would then allow me to hold down the “option” key to bring up the boot menu. I was then able to boot from the Snow Leopard disk.

Once  the Snow Leopard installation began, I let it run through the whole install. It never gave any options as to what type of install I wanted. I just selected the drive that I already had Snow Leopard on and away it went. About 45 minutes later it was done. My iMac was back down to 10.6. All of my data was still there, and it seemed to be working alright.

At that point I realized my Bluetooth Apple Wireless Keyboard was being recognized as generic, so none of the special keys were working such as volume and screen brightness. I didn’t think that was a huge problem so I decided to install the 10.6.1 update.

Upon installing the 10.6.1 update, my iMac no longer recognized that it had bluetooth at all. Yes, bluetooth was completely gone from my system. At this point I thought I would install 10.6.2 and once again hope for the best, but I wasn’t able to type my password to start the install. So then I figured I would just restart the computer and hope that bluetooth decided to show up again. To my surprise, it was back.

I now installed the 10.6.2 update. On the initial restart, all functions seemed to be back to normal. Bluetooth was working, and my keyboard was now recognized as an Apple Wireless Keyboard. I did a Time Machine backup right away and ran no other updates. My computer surprisingly seems to be running faster after doing the reinstall and updates.

I will not be updating my version of OS X any time soon. I can’t believe Apple would put out an OS update that would make one of their own products completely unstable. With such limited hardware configurations, I can’t believe the update wasn’t tested enough before the release to ensure something like this wouldn’t happen.

Every day I am more and more disapointed with Apple products. They really are in it just for the money now. Gone are the days of better hardware and a nicer user experience. I really don’t know if I will purchase another Apple computer again, or even another iPhone. Especially after the latest 4.0 Firmware announcement, which states that the most requested feature of the update won’t even work on my 3g version of the phone. (Which I would like to point out is now jailbroken from the second they made the announcement.)

With regards to coverage of AT&T at least in my area (Pittsburgh), I have had no issues what so ever in regards to making both telephone calls and using the data network.  In my personal opinion, I believe that the 3G coverage is about equally matched up to Verizon Wireless, however using the web and data applications run much smoother, in addition to the response time appears to be better.  This could be due to the nature of how the phone’s applications are written, or due to the OS that the device is running on.

Using two accounts on this phone both MobileMe and Microsoft Exchange works beautifully.  In my experience with BlackBerry, having more than one account tended to merge both email accounts, calendars, and contacts together.  The iPhone handles multiple accounts very well keeping everything separated.  I am absolutely in love with MobileMe, and how it integrates with my phone and MacBook (more on the MacBook in a future post).  The synchronization is by far faster than Exchange, and Apple I applaud you for getting email, contacts, and calendar synchronization nailed on the head.  I actually find myself more now using the calendar and iCal to keep my personal life organized, because I know the two will work together with no problems.

I think the battery on the phone is good, considering I have been playing with this phone every free moment I get.  I go about a full day on my battery when I am playing with this,  and on days like Saturdays when I’m at home the battery lasts until Monday morning. As of this post I charged my phone last night, and have had 3 hours and 40 minutes of use today, and my battery is still at 65%.

At the end of the day, everyone will have their own thoughts about this device. In my opinion  moving from a business standard platform (BlackBerry), to the iPhone was a great move.  I found no down sides to having a iPhone over a BlackBerry, and with the addition to the various applications that adds additional productivity to my personal life, I’d already be lost without this phone.

So that being said, I thought a comparison between this device and my old BlackBerry Storm is in order.

I’ve only had my iPhone for 5 days, so I will follow up this article in a week or so with part deux.

Coverage:

I have always had a Verizon cellphone (Smartphone or not) for years, so the thought of switching carriers did cause a bit of concern.  I heard multiple people say the AT&T coverage in my area (Pittsburgh) was not that great in comparison to Verizon’s.  Generally a few dropped calls would be  okay, and even understandable, however since this is primarily used for business I need to have a reliable network.  I don’t believe in the TV commercials for AT&T or Verizon, as they are playing the marketing game, and really only the individual using the phone can correctly assess the coverage.  As of now (5 days) using the phone, I have yet to see any situation that makes me believe Verizon is a better network.

To test the AT&T commercial, I created a phone conference with two other phones.  Once  I had the phone conference going I began surfing the web and perhaps because of the network and the beauty of Apple everything just worked.  I could not make a phone call and browse the web on my BlackBerry.  I do not know how often I’d use this, but its fantastic knowing that I can.

Email/Calendar/Contacts (Exchange):

The first account I configured on this device was my Microsoft Exchange account from work.  Prior to the iPhone I was using multiple BlackBerry devices (VZW WE 8830, and the BlackBerry Storm), so I was used to getting my email very fast.  So far I have not noticed a delay in the delivery of my email.  Typically my phone has notified me of a new message either 1 – 2 seconds after my computer received the message, no major delays.  The calendar and contact synchronization has also been fast.  I have not seen a major delay yet in comparison to the BlackBerry platform.

Email/Contacts/Calendar (MobileMe):

I have now moved from using Gmail to MobileMe.  I have been using Gmail since the early days, when the initial invites had been in small numbers.  I knew what to expect from Gmail so once more, I was leery of the switch.  I tried using MobileMe a few months back on the 60-day trial, and noticed that the web interface was slow, and my contacts would randomly delete themselves, so I cancelled my trail.  My thought was even though the web interface was beautiful, I need reliability.

Since getting the iPhone I figured, lets give it another chance to fully take advantage of the push technology.  I am not sure if Apple has changed their servers, or made an update but now my web interface is extremely fast.  Had the experience been this fast during my trial I probably would not have cancelled it.  The push for email is extremely fast, and I believe it works faster than my exchange account.  The updating of contacts and calendar is actually faster than Exchange.  I can move items in my web interface or on the phone, and almost in real time I see the update.  Exchange takes a little bit longer (10-20 seconds).   This is actually much faster than the BlackBerry platform again. I am actually loving the performance of MobileMe over Exchange and even the BlackBerry platform.

Ease of Use:

I have to admit using this phone is truly a dream.  Typing on the iPhone’s keyboard is a better experience than that of the Storm.  In a previous post, I mentioned how one had to touch, then physically click on the screen to input a character.  This is not the case with the iPhone. I am actually finding it faster to type email and SMS messages via the iPhone.  I have yet to try the landscape keyboard because I am so impressed with the portrait keyboard.  On the storm I was constantly producing spelling errors, due to the “SurePress” keyboard.  The phone would “think” I wanted to type one word when really I meant another.  This led to some embarrassing emails to executives as the overall grammar of the email made no sense.

Battery:

I’ve been charging my battery daily, but I believe the reason it is getting low is due to my constantly playing with the device.  Once the novelty slows down from having the iPhone I will be able to truly give both devices a fair comparison.  I do not want to give a opinion on the iPhone’s battery quite yet.

Summary:

I have been downloading applications like crazy this week, and the App Store has a far better selection than what I could find for my BlackBerry.  There are many applications I have found so far that will allow me to be more productive and aware of my servers at work while I am out of the office.  This is one of the reasons our company is actually removing all BlackBerries from our environment and moving to the iPhone.  I plan on following up to this post in a week or two once I have really tested the phone in more detail.  As I said both phones have been on the market for quite some time, however I thought it would be nice to share my thoughts on moving from a popular platform (BlackBerry) to the iPhone.

Apple Computer, Inc. has updated the iPhone developer SDK to allow VoIP over cellular networks.

What this means is, as of yesterday, Apple allows VOIP applications such as Skype, and iCall to use the 3g network rather than limiting them to WIFI as they have up until this point. Currently only one app, iCall, has this functionality built in.

Keep checking for updates to your favorite VOIP apps over the next week or so, as I am sure they will quickly try to update. For now, I am going to give iCall a try. I will post my initial impressions of it within the next few days.

I can’t believe I never came across this before, but thanks to Twitter I saw a link posted regarding Google Sync.

Below are the simple steps involved to set up Google Sync on your iPhone or Touch. By doing so, it will set up your Gmail account to work basically like Mobile Me (an Apple service) and push your mail directly to your Mail App in real time. It will also sync your Contacts and Calendars if you choose to do so.

Requirements and Upload

1. Google Sync is only supported on iPhone OS versions 3.0 and above. You can check your current version by going to Settings > General > About > Version. To upgrade, follow the instructions at http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/. Please upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0 before setting up Google Sync.

2. Perform a sync with iTunes to ensure that Contacts and Calendars from your iPhone are backed up to your computer.

3. If your business, school, or organization uses Google Apps, your administrator will first need to enable Google Sync before you can take advantage of this feature.

Getting Started

1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Tap Add Account….
4. Select Microsoft Exchange.

Enter Account Info

5. In the Email field, enter your full Google Account email address. If you use an @googlemail.com address, you may see an “Unable to verify certificate” warning when you proceed to the next step.
6. Leave the Domain field blank.
7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username.
8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
9. Tap Next at the top of your screen.
9a. Choose Accept if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears.
10. When the new Server field appears, enter m.google.com.
11. Press Next at the top of your screen again.
12. Select the Google services you want to sync.
13. Unless you want to delete all the existing Contacts and Calendars on your phone, select the Keep on my iPhone option when prompted. This will also allow you to keep syncing with your computer via iTunes.

If you want to sync only the My Contacts group, you must choose to Delete Existing Contacts during the Google Sync install when prompted. If you choose to keep existing contacts, it will sync the contents of the “All Contacts” group instead.

You’ve set up Google Sync for your iPhone. Synchronization will begin automatically if you have Push enabled on your phone. You can also open the Mail, Calendar or Contacts app and wait a few seconds to start a sync.

More detailed information for this process can be found here:  Google Sync: Setting Up Your iPhone or iPod Touch