My wife was in need of a new phone, her last phone she put in the washing machine by mistake which killed it dead, the only problem was the contract does not run out till march 2012. She uses the iPad all the time (the one I won from GFI) and she is not really technical minded at all. The phone she was using was my HTC Hero which runs Android 2.1 and she could not for the life of her get used to that, it was in fact too complicated. There was a few options, one of these would have been a blackberry device for example, plenty of them on offer for £10 a month and it has a keyboard. Why did we go with the iPhone 4S over any other phone? Read on to find out.
Posts in category Apple
Why I choose the iPhone 4S for the Wife
Private Eye for OSX
A great free tool from Radio Silence called Private eye allows you to see in real time everything they is talking on the network. You can filter by incoming, outgoing or by application. You can grab this fine piece of software (Mac only) from the site
Is it Fixed yet?
An update on the broken iMac, I took it to an Authorised Apple repair centre about 30 minutes drive away on Wednesday 14th Sep, dropping it off right after work. I expected them to start working in this on the Thursday and with some luck have it ready for collection by Saturday, I say this given that they had hardly any items out on the shop floor and never looked that busy. They took until Friday in fact to work out what was wrong and they come to the conclusion it was a power supply. I called them right back explaining that if you hold the power button in while plugging in the power cable, all the fans come on – this to me says it is not the power supply. They assured me thought that this is what Apple said it could be – what was I to know right?
The Day Apple Died
Refresher – I bought a refurbished iMac 27″ 2010 model from the apple store on the 3rd June 2011 and apart from one of the USB ports playing up, the machine to my knowledge ran just fine. On Sunday the 11th Sep, I was using the machine and it worked just fine, I powered it down as normal, switching off the Mouse to save on battery. Monday morning I pressed the power button and nothing happened. I started to go through a sequence of tests, I got my meter out to check the fuse, tried a different power cable and checked on-line to see what test I can do. I choose to call Apple Support and at this stage expected for them to sort out this issue by means of a person coming out or whatever, how wrong I was.
Mac vs. PC – the age old debate
The age old argument that has been going around since the dawn of time, which is best – the apple or the PC and in this sense we mean either a computer running Windows or it could be Linux of course. For the Tech savvy end user, building your own machine can be cheaper, much more powerful and more upgradable than the Mac range of computers. On the other hand we have a beautiful all-in-one that is the iMac and nothing can beat the one plug professional looking box which also happens to have the 27″ screen of course. I wanted to use this post not to go through the age old arguments but to ask the question of “why should I spend all that money and buy an iMac”
Strange issues with USB Drive on OSX Lion
I had a spare USB Drive made by iOmega and is a 500GIG Dive and if I remember correctly it is a IDE type drive inside not SATA. The goal was to have this drive plugged into the imac and use it as a time machine backup drive. I started time machine running but after a few minutes the drive went from the desktop and time machine complained it had no drive to back up to. The only way to get the drive back was to power it off and on. This left me puzzled, so I turned to the PC next to my iMac to do some serious testing.
Where is my Free OSX Lion you promised me apple?
Of all the companies that are out there, the one that I thought could get it right with a major operating system rollout would be apple. They stated that if you bought a computer from apple from the 25th June onwards, you are entitled to OSX Lion when it came out free of charge. The problem is, the servers that handle verifying if your are entitled to acode or not is having trouble matching serial numbers against inventory. When I headed to the page I entered my infomation in there only for it to tell me:
Sorry, we can’t find the serial number you provided. Please recheck your serial number and enter it again.
First impressions of the new 27 inch iMac
I thought I would write a new post with my thoughts on the new iMac that I bought, this may help some people who are not sure if spending that much money on a computer is worth it or not. I need to add of course that I have owned the 24 inch iMac and know enough about this sort of thing already. Given the time since using Apple computer in a proper sense (I have a Hackintosh running 10.5.8), it would be nice to see what has changed, how much I had forgot and how working on such a large display would either Aid me in my work or hinder me due to the size. Let us begin then on this journey back to the mac. READ MORE »
Finally Bought the iMac 27 Inch
I have been pondering on buying one of these super large Apple iMac machines for a little while now, before I was waiting until they refreshed the range and once they did refresh the range, I was unsure as to which one to buy. I went out yesterday to look around the shops, to see what they had on offer (the prices do not change for apple products) and have a general play around. I spotted some reduced price models but they were not only last year models but shop used (ex-display) and the saving to be honest were not that great. In my mind I was unsure to buy the Core i5 2.7 Model, the faster (only slightly) Core i5 3.1 model but had a better graphics card or wait until a decent refurb hit the store.
Do I need a new machine such as the 27″ iMac?
Apple got out the Door the new range of iMac’s – this rather like the older range with the same 27″ Screen, all-in-one design, still no Blu-Ray drive and so forth. The Difference is inside, the CPU is faster (Sandy Bridge model), it now has 2 thunderbolt ports (which I cannot see myself using any-time soon) and the 6 Series ATI Graphics card. The Downside to any “All-in-One” type system is that you cannot really upgrade the thing and if it breaks, your whole system goes down. My thoughts on the iMac in general is that it is a very nice system that is free from clutter but of course as it is all built into the same case, leaving the system switched on overnight is a pain compared to a PC which has an on/off switch for the monitor. The question here then is not if the imac is fit for purpose but rather “Do I really need to buy more hardware”?
