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.

Blackberry

I had at work a similar phone to the blackberry as it goes (same type keyboard) and let her have a go of this phone to type some messages out and straight away using the middle button to go through the menu’s was too hard to work out and so was trying to type any sort of message.

iPhone 4S

Here was my thoughts, the iPhone is the same way of working as the ipad, just smaller right, so if she already knows how to work that, then jumping to an iPhone should be second nature. I priced up both the iphone 4 and the 4S and the difference in price was not much at all, same monthly contract, cost of phone was either £20 or £50.

Now the 4S has Siri and we tested this out “Send message to Tom” at which point it got the right name from the address book. We spoke the message and then said Send – it did this without touching the keyboard. We tested typing a message and it got the words right every single time – easy right.

As an added bonus, I added all the music she likes, the Next application and many others. Now she could check her facebook any place she likes, play the music and phone people with here 500 minutes a month. I have not bothered myself to get an iPhone – maybe I am more of an Android man, larger screen and so forth.

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

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?

Monday was the day they said the Power supply would arrive from Apple, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and waiting until 3:30pm on a Tuesday to call them asking if they had it fixed yet, I got told they will fit the part and get back to me. Ten minutes later the engineer called who went on to say what he had done so far. He had swapped the power supply, the logic board and various cables and still nothing, it was not until he took out the hard drive that the system came to life. I recall saying it was the hard drive when I took it in due to the fact that it was clicking when trying to power the machine on.

Now that we established it was the hard drive, surely a simple replacement from the shop (who sell PC parts) and job is done right? Well not quite, they need to ‘order’ one from Apple, await delivery, fit and install Lion and then test – all before I can have my machine back. I am going to have a guess that my machine will be working by Saturday and I can then go and pick it up.

If this had been my only machine – the lack of the computer would have been annoying, why does an Apple authorised repair centre not have the parts in stock?

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.

What did I expect?

If I buy something and it stops working within a few months, I expect to either take it to a local shop for fix / replacement, get the company to come out and fix it or at worst for them to pick it up. The problem with Apple dealers is they are not common on the high street and only to my knowledge in major towns.

The Support Call

She got me to go through some checking, pressing 4 keys at once while powering on the machine (very hard to do while on the phone) and eventually come to the conclusion that it was in fact dead. She then started to tell me where to take this, I had the option of two shops 30 miles one way, 30 miles the other (plus bridge tolls) and 30 miles in the last direction. The problem with these trips is that I would have to finish work, quickly get changed and then drive to the store and try and get there before it closed. I would then have to repeat this once it was fixed.

AppleCare

They informed me if I had Applecare, I would be allowed to have it picked up, fixed and returned. I was going to buy Applecare at some point anyhow but just not now. When I got into work that day I bought the said product thinking that it would happen in the next 24 hours (as per the support call me told me it would) but no, it has to be delivered by courier and this is not due to hit my house till the 16th Sep – madness.

My next plan

As I cannot seem to get the  iMac fixed quickly, I will drive to the store on Wednesday and see if they can fix it by Friday.  I am annoyed that unlike say Dell who will send a person out regardless, Apple cannot provide the same level of Support unless you buy extra support from them. I still wish I had not bought this machine – long live Apple

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”

The iMac is very expensive

If you take a look at the 27″ iMac on the apple store, the price is mind blowing, if you were to take that same money that it costs to buy just the i5 model for example – you could build or buy one hell of a windows box out of that money that would have the Core i7, more storage, much better graphics card and so forth. What most people do not take into account though is the 27″ screen and if we wanted the same screen for the Windows box, we need to spend at least £650 on the Dell Model.

Now that have removed £650 from the £1400 price tag – we only have left £750 to play with, maybe not such a mega amazing machine now right? The whole point of the iMac anyhow is that it is a machine that has everything ‘most’ people need with one plug, boots very fast indeed and very easy to add and remove software and generally does not slow down as fast as say Windows does.

Resell value

Like a good car, you can sell the thing and get a good price back, if you were to take let us say a Acer Desktop, you will be lucky if you get that much at all for 2009 model of the computer. I want to add that you can buy for example Apple Care at any point in your first year, right up to the point of the last day and get the extended cover, normally you only get sold the cover when you are buying something in the store and most of the time the cover they sell if not of any use.

Anything Apple can do, windows can do just as well

I have been through most windows operating systems, from DOS to Windows 3.11 and all the way up to Windows 7. I have used and worked with most Linux installs in my time and I have only ever worked on Mac OS X but not the versions before it. I can tell you that any of the operating systems out today can do whatever it is you ask of it, the only difference is how easy, how much and how much effort you are going to put in to find the required software.

If we were to talk about Video editing (for the normal people that is), iMovie is very easy to produce a good looking video, very easy to get the exact bit you needed on the time line and it seems fast enough to output the end video. Movie Maker on the PC is not as good and missing a lot (in my eyes) and if you step up to Sony Vegas, not only does it cost a lot of money but the interface is not as easy to work with but you can do a lot more than say iMovie – it’s all relative.

Boot times

My job is to do IT Support and I have seen a lot of windows boxes that take so long to boot and be ready that you can go and make a coffee while it starts. Even a Core i7 with 9 GIG ram can still take some time to boot and even though the desktop comes up, it is still not useable at that point in time. Mac OSX (even on a hackintosh) is very fast to boot which means I can power the computer on, check my various things and power down.

Multiple screens and other goodies

In OSX we had spaces which is now called Mission Control and this lets you quickly jump from space to space. Linux has had this for areas also with the cube and such and also why I like using Linux sometimes. I can set my programs to start on whatever screen and when the computer starts up, I have all the programs to hand without my screen been cluttered with programs.

Bottom Line

I am not here to convince you all that you should hit the apple store and get buying a new computer but you do good a decent machine for the price especially as I did and buy a decent refurbished machine. If you are a hardcore gamer then whilst most games run fine, it will never compete with the latest and the greatest of the pc world. Maybe give a virtual mac a try or hackinitosh your current machine to see if OSX offers anything you may like.

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.

Will the drive fail on Windows?

It crossed my mind that the drive was getting hot after constant use and failed, to make sure this was the case I plugged it into a computer running Windows 7 and the goal her was to torture test the drive and see if it either kept working or indeed failed.

I formatted the Drive and made sure it was a full not a quick format – this took a long while (as you would expect) and at no point during this test did the drive stop working. I then moved onto copying as close to 500GIG and once again this took a long while but passed with flying colours. It was obvious from these test so far then that the drive was as much working as humanly possible right.

Testing once again on OSX Lion

Now that we know it is working, let us move it back to the iMac, started copying some files and after 10 minutes (it’s a random time) the light goes out, the drive is no longer there and I did try all the USB Ports on the back of the computer.

I shall do more testing with other drives (I have a 320GIG handy) to see if this a LION issue.

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.

Apple Support – second to none

I Always assumed that apple support were great, I called them up and then went through the issue, tried it and explained to me that in fact the servers were overloaded and I was to try again either later on that day or in fact the next day. As this was the first time I had called and could beileve maybe that was the case, I ended the call but not before the guy was trying to sell me Apple care of course.

I searched around the web and spotted something, every time they have a major upgrade such as Leopard, Snow Leopard and iLife, people struggle to get verified on the apple site.  I left this until the next morning, surely this would be fixed by then right?

The day after the day before

I tried at 8am UK time, still the same, I called Apple support and got the same old story, servers are too busy. I took his name this time, he was called Kiren. He told me to try later, it should work by then – I hung up. I tried many times whilst at work and finally when I got home, I had one last go before calling Apple. No Surprise then that the page did not work and I called once again apple support, this took 10 minutes to get a person so they must be getting a lot of issues same as mine.

We went through the normal blurb and he tried to get his supervisor to maybe get an answer but he failed at that and asked if I wanted to wait for this guy or just leave it until one day it might work? The other suggestion he gave me was why do I not just go out and buy it if I wanted it that badly, after all it was only £22 or something.

I have a better idea on how to get Lion and no need for serial numbers – you failed Apple.

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.

The Arrival of the Hardware

The box arrived at 7:30am on a Tuesday and if you recall I ordered it on a Sunday – so that’s not bad going at all and it saved waiting in all day for this to arrive. I was expecting after watching various un-boxing video’s for the plain outer box to have another one inside but with refurbished it seems there is not inner box, no marking whatsoever with iMac on the side and so forth. I checked it over, it looked un-marked and got it set up in place. The good thing about the imac is that there is one plug with no other wires at all (apart form the network cable of course). The Mouse and keyboard is now Bluetooth, my old one was the wired version with keypad and the mouse was the one with the little ball.

Boot it for the first time

On the first Boot, the white screen seemed to stay on for ages and then finally the welcome video played, it soon picked up many updates, rebooted and found yet more updates. I have seen people complain about Windows 7 doing this but it seems Apple are the same, maybe not as many reboots of course.

Getting used to the Hardware

The keyboard is really small and most of the functions keys already do something so this never left many for stuff like spaces (which I placed on F6). Typing on the keyboard was not as good as say my Logitech keyboard and for normal day to day stuff this is fine but if I were to write a blog post or a long email I think I shall carry on using the Windows machine. The mouse as I had heard is not the best thing in the world, the shape does not lend itself to be held properly (too thin) and it does not always respond to the clicks and swipes. Quite often I had gone back two pages as I had used two fingers and it took this as a swipe. I have heard the batteries run out quickly so this I shall see. I cannot see myself buying with the Apple charger or the induction charging device from apple – I would rather just change the keyboard and mouse.

The super large display

As everybody has pointed out, the display is big and let us not forget that apple have spaces which means you can have 4 (or more) virtual screens with applications on each, this increases productivity a lot. If you find the text is a bit small to read, remember that OSX allows you to zoom in with the mouse on any part of the screen. There is the option to use the display as an input (not sure how that works) and even get devices to attach your PS3 for example. I need to say though that the screen is very bright and as it is reflective, acts almost like a mirror and can be distracting.

The Speed of the machine

To make sure I had an Core i7 in there, I did about this mac and was happy to see instead of supply 4 GIG ram (2 x 2) they had in fact gave me 2 x 4Gigs to give me a total of 8 GIG ram. I have already price the Ram and I can get a 4GIG stick for £28, for now I am happy to leave it running with 8GIG ram.

One of the things I did was try a virtual machines running Windows 7 and this is while I had all sorts of programs open and it all ran without even stressing the machine. One thing I did notice though was the noise grew a lot louder due to the Fans running on full. To compare, in the Dell Desktop (also Core i7) this is not the case as it has a full case to spread the air around while the iMac is a lot thinner of course.

The Speed of powering up the machine

I alwasy thought my Dell Windows 7 machine was slow at starting up and I do not count the time it takes to get to the desktop but rather the time it is before I can actually use the machine. I knew what was slowing my machine down though and this is the fact I have lot of backdrops on my NAS drive and the desktop switcher it working out what picture to choose next. The iMac stays at the white screen doing nothing (in my eyes) for as long as my windows machine is loading to the desktop, once I get the spinning wheel, it takes mere seconds to get to the desktop and of course is now is ready to work (unlike Windows). The iMac is faster but not by that much which surprised me, maybe if I had SSD it would boot very fast indeed.

Conclusion

Given the speed, the ease of use that comes with OSX and the fact there is no wires trailing all over the place combined with the large display makes this machine more than worth the money. I would suggest that the Core i5 and even last years models (2010 – the one I bought) are more than enough to do day to day stuff as well as play games. I will probably be replacing the mouse and keyboard at some stage but for now I shall try and get along with what was supplied.

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.

The New models

The main features of the new models were simply Thunderbolt, the New HD iSight Camera and a faster graphics Card (ATI 6770M or ATI 6970M). Now while thunderbolt sounds a great idea, I do not see myself buying anything that will plug into this thing – I already have various NAS Drives so I wont be buying an external Thunderbolt drive. As for the Webcam, this is a nice update but I have various Webcam’s anyhow and I much prefer the flexibility of a seperate movable webcam. This leave the graphics card – it is always better to have the best there is when dealing with an all-in-one type machine as you cannot upgrade this.

How much is too much?

I looked at the New models and £1399 & £1649 seemed to be a lot of money to chuck down, this was holding me back to be honest as I had some money set aside but not enough to clear the whole amount. I did not want to get financing as I felt that this added even more money to the cost of the machine in the long run.

Refurbished

I already know about this section of the apple store and often have a look there but there is not that many 27 inch models for sale. Today I went there and there was a selection of 4 models to choose from:

• Core i3 3.2Ghz, ATI 5670 512MB ram (2010 Model) – £1,049
• Core i5 2.66GHz, ATI 4850 512MB Ram (2009 Model) – £1,099
• Core i5 2.8Ghz, ATI 5750 1Gig Ram (2010 Model) – £1,189
• Core i7 2.93GHZ, ATI 5750 1Gig Ram (2010 Model) – £1,289

If we ignore the i3 Model and the 2009 Model, this leave a choice of two machines to go for – the Core i5 or the Core i7 – this is were the benchmarks come into play.

We can see the 2010 i7 Model sits second in that list while the 2010 i5 model sits about 10th – so the last year core i7 is still quite a performer. We can also see by the pricing that for an extra £100 – we get a jump in CPU basically. I jumped straight onto the buy it now page and went ahead and completed the transaction – it should arrive by Tuesday (5th July).

What about all the other machines you own?

I have a few machines scattered about that I got by way of upgrades along the way and just put them to use as you get next to nothing for a second hand windows box these days. My plan is simple enough, I can sell my Laptop for say £200-250 (I checked e-bay for the value), I plan to sell this at work as it is easier to get rid of and get the money quickly. As for the desktop machines, I maybe will also try and sell them as well at work but I am not sure how viable selling a desktop is – I may only get a small amount of money and it may be better to carry on using the machines for odd tasks as I am doing now. The problem is I do not have the space for 2 major machines along with the rest to fit on one desk. 

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”?

What am I using at the moment?

I bought my Dell XPS 435MT System some time back, it features an Intel Core i7 running at 2.67GHz. I combined this with an ATI 4670 Graphics card, this was cheap, silent (passive heatsink) and does not require a large Power Supply Unit to operate. I bought some DDR3 Ram as well to take the machine to 9 GIG’s ram and this all runs on Windows 7 Ultimate edition. The key thing here about this system is that it it silent, the days of fitting 9 fans and having some thing hum away n the corner is long gone. The other fact was it was cheap, refurbished kit saved a lot of money and as good as buying new in my eyes.

Decisions, Decisions

Looking at the Apple website – we have a choice between spending £1,089 on a refurbished Last year 27″ iMac with the Core i5 running at 2.8GHz and the ATI 5750 graphics card. The other option is to get the extra cash out and buy the brand new 2011 27″ iMac which has the 2.7Ghz Core i5 (Sandy Bride model – 25% Faster), ATI 6770M with 512MB, HD iSight camera and finally thunderbolt connectors. This comes in at £1399, so £300 extra?

Normally Money wins out every single time and it depends on what the iMac will be used for that will determine which route to take right? I already have various HD webcams and thunderbolt is nice to have but what devices are there? If the price of the Refurbished was Core i7 Model, then it would be a no-brainer. I shall think about it longer, maybe raise more of the money required.