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

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. 

Until recently, I had not really looked into buying any sort of apple computer mainly because my current system does everything I want and I do have the ability to run OSX on either a hackintosh if needed or a Virtual machine. I had passed a 21.5″ iMac in the local ‘Comet’ Store and it looked very clear and glossy and it got me thinking. I looked on Apple refurbished site and saw various models of the 27″ with £200 to £400 off. At this point we start to drop into the world of which version is worth the money, if any.

The various years and models.

While they all feature the amazing 27″ Screen, it seems that there is a few different configurations to choose from depending on what year it was made. We start with the CPU, we have the Core 2 Duo and we can agree I want to write these off as no use to me, this is old technology. We have the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 and apple mix it up somewhat with Dual Core Core i5 and Quad Core i5.

Graphics cards seems to be ATI 4670 (which I currently use in my Dell machine), ATI 4850, the ATI 5670 and 5770 I think. Of course the latest and greatest is always better of which your not going to get with the iMac but the 5770 I am sure beats my 4670 for example and even the 4850 is a good card.

Why the iMac?

Looking at the Mac Range, I have no interest in spending £600+ on a very underpowered mac mini (in my own view anyhow) and I have no need for a Laptop, this leave either the iMac or the Mac pro. While the Mac Pro is very powerful, it would be a waste of power with the 8 core model and I know that the 12 Core is just too much for me to spend on a computer. The iMac by chance though comes with a very nice 27″ Screen, I love real estate and this can deliver. My thought was simple enough, the Core i7 can provide enough power – if I can find a cheap one of them, that would be the model of choice.

What about the i3 or the i5 ?

The Core i3 is a dual core CPU (direct replacement for the Core 2 Duo) that has hyper threading to simulate 4 cores. The Core i5 is a Quad core unit, no hyper threading to my knowledge (I could be wrong) and finally the Core i7 has 4 real and 4 virtual core plus can over clock on the fly.  

The Future of the iMac

I read that the iMac is due a refresh, I do not want to buy a 2009 model only to find a month later they bring out the Sandy Bridge version for the same price with thunderbolt and a better graphics card. For now, I shall leave well alone, I have no great need for a mac as of now, it would just be nice to get rid of all my surplus computer and monitors and be left with the Dell XPS 435, Work Laptop and a 27″ iMac.

It has been known for many years that everything that comes out of Apple comes with an added premium, much like buying a BMW for example or a Sony – you are paying for the name. While you get the added build quality compared to the much cheaper ‘run of the mill’ brands, are we entering a time were people have to tighten there belts and could apple suffer during this time?

Jobs

I read a recent news story of a local firm who make and package Bacon and they employ 600 people. One of there major customers (ASDA – a large supermaket chain) choose to go somewhere else to get its bacon and this was such a drastic turn of events for this factor that it had to shed 180 People. This means this christmas 180 People will be sitting there without a job and slap bang at christmas time as well. Will these people think about spending £1000′s on an apple computer or £500 on an iPad? I think not.

Turning the screw

VAT (Value added Tax) is set to rise in the UK in January 2011 – from 17.5% to 20%. Everything that is bought has this TAX applied, this in turn means good go up, the price of food will go up and the money in your pay packet will feel the squeeze. This does not end here though, the price of Gas supplied to your home is due to go up in December, a handy time as it will be cold of course and people need to keep warm right? The price of Fuel for your car – this is set to rise by 8% by the end of the year – this has a knock on effect in that as well as costing you more to top up your car, the price of food and goods go up as they need to transport it via roads.

What has this got to do with apple?

You fancy a new mobile phone, you check the deals and you see you can get an Android phone for free as well as a lower contract with more minutes per month – compare this to an iPhone, not only are you locked into a 2 year contract but you get less talk time, less sms messages and less internet usage and you have to buy the phone. Does the Android do the same as the iPhone? Of course it does to the average consumer.

The iPad looks might fine but a starting price of £450 seems a lot when you start to compare it to the £179 Android Tablet computers. Remember the person on the street has no great technical background and the price will pull them toward the Android device – especially if the salesman can talk it up enough.

On the computer front, we have an Mac Mini which is junk compared to the equivalent priced windows machine. You can buy an Core i7 box for the price of that Mini – the only saving Grace is OS X but hey, just what does it do different? The IMac’s are good all-in-one computers but once again – given the above, people will start to think twice before chucking this kind of money down. We shall not even go towards the Mac Pro – this is to some people the price of a Car.

Sony you said?

I remember a time that a Sony TV was a no-brainer – yes it cost a lot more but you got a good end product for your money. When I went shopping for a new 42″ TV – it was hard to even consider the Sony even though they had marked the price down to the level of the LG I was buying, Sony had been outclassed and out-priced.

I have taken apart a Sony Laptop (I was fixing it and yes they do break) and I had to take my hat off and say how well it was put together. Was it worth the £1000 the person had paid for it? My view was once you take away the name of Sony, it had the same quality keyboard as any other Laptop, it had the same screen, the same CPU and so forth and at the end of the day, did the same job as that £369 Dell Laptop.

Have you say…..

I like all operating systems, I like Windows, I like OS X and I love Linux – I just do not feel though that Apple offer anything that you cannot do on the others. Feel free to put your thoughts though – I would love to hear them.

Before we begin, the story is not about me buying an Apple for Christmas, this is a tale of the ‘normal’ people view of apple, what there children are asking for and the shock factor when you tell them how much they cost, what they do and probably why there children want one. By the way – the picture above – Designed and hand-built by Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the Apple I was Apple’s first product, and went on sale in July 1976 at the distinctly unsettling price of $666.66. Only 200 units were produced, and unlike many other computers of the day, the Apple I came as a fully assembled circuit board containing around 30 chips.

My Son wants an Apple Computer for Christmas

My first encounter was a person at work wanted some advice, her son requested for Christmas he would like an Apple Computer, in fact he was specific – he wanted an Apple Mac Pro Desktop. The mother of course had seen all the desktop computers in the local stores and assumed it would cost about £500. I showed her the Website and explained that the mac Pro starts at £1999, this does not include a monitor or anything crazy like that. She was in shock – how could a computer cost so much money? She asked me “What does it do” and the best way I could describe this without been bias was it is built from the same parts as a normal PC (aka Dell) inside but the build quality is better and it runs a very different operating system called Mac OS X.

Now before people start hating on me – I had to keep this simple, to a person who has no great understanding outside the box on her desk made by Dell and Windows XP. We also discussed the iMac but each time the main shocker was the price.

I have heard about this Apple TV – What does it do?

The next question coming my way is the Apple TV – they heard it was only $99 and given the current Exchange rate of 0.6212 ($ to £) this means it will cost a mere £64 right? Well wrong, it cost £99. Wait one minute there, all they have done is changed the Symbols, do Apple not understand the world uses different currency and has a thing called Exchange rate?

What does this little device do though – well I do not own one but from my understand it connects via Wireless and sync’d up with iTunes and streams your iTunes content. The person seemed puzzled, did it not record your programs for you, show you TV and play movies and on and on? It seems people are confused over that this device does and I think it is the price that is making them look – after all it is made by apple right?

Bottom line on Apple products

You need to ask yourself, what can an Apple computer do for you, is there a program you must run and only out for Apple? Do you like the all-in-one of the iMac (I do) and do you prefer the look and feel of MAC OS X? I have proven (while I owned one) that in fact you can do anything on Linux, On OS X and finally Windows. Each one has something missing and I personally am not happy to be chucking money at an Apple, not when my current computer has enough power to cope easy and I could have bought 4 of my computers for one quad core Mac Pro – that’s the difference and of course Windows 7 is a very well behaved operating system with stable drivers.

I was a long time supporter of all things PC and by this I mean Windows, Linux, Build it yourself desktop machine and so forth – Apple were (and still are) expensive for what you actually get considering now they use the same hardware as a desktop PC. What you may also have noticed was  wrote about and Owned a top of the range iMac – so how come this post? Let me explain all.

My Nephew has been an apple fan for many years and no amount of showing and telling me how good they were would get me to part money buying one. He spotted on the Apple refurb store a top of the line 24” iMac 2.8GHz and bought it online for one of his children but for one reason or another he changed his mind of her having this item and instead of cancelling the order – he diverted this machine to my house and then emailed me telling me what had happened.

On the said email though in very small red writing – he made mention of me maybe paying him back one day, I had no requested this machine, had no plans to buy this machine – so why should I feel I should have to pay him back? Was this not a present as he mentioned in various other conversations? Time moved on and depending on his financial situation – this machine was either a present or on loan until I paid him money. I was not happy about this and told him that it was his and if he wants it back – take it, I would rather spend the money on a top end PC.

18 Months passed, I had already chucked the boxes out by now and due to the fact it had the biggest screen, fastest CPU and so forth – it became my main machine. He finished his current contract and was broke – so much so that he had to ask for this back or I pay him – whichever. Now I had a quick think about this (ignoring the fact about him needing money fast) and should I invest £800 – £1000 on this iMac or should I let him sell it, get whatever he can get and spend my money on top end PC Hardware?

To give an example – On Dell Refurb Site they had the Core i7 2.66GHz Quad Core Machine, 6 GIG ram, 750HD for about £550 (give or take) with a half decent graphics card – far in excess of either what I have now or what is included in the Mac (ATI 2600) – add to that a 24” Monitor which comes in at £150 let us say (also from Dell) and we have £700. Operating systems aside – you can see that the Dell machine will blow the Apple away and can be upgraded later on. Yes the iMac is good as its all-in-one but that is also its main problem.

To round up them – I am now a Vista / Windows 7 Person back to playing my games, writing this in fact on Live Writer and I personally cannot see myself buying a Mac of any type – who has £4500 for a Mac Pro anyhow?

While I am a proud owner of a iMac 24″ with all the trimming – I have come across 3 ‘features’ that in my eyes are plain stupid on the OS X Platform. Remember that I have various machines running XP, Vista, Ubuntu – so I am not a die hard Apple fanatic that will defend it no matter what, its good but not perfect.

REPLACE FILES

Let us imagine that I am moving some files around from drive to drive and a make a directory called Home_Movies. I start by moving some files but later choose the much quicker method of dragging the original “Home_Movies” onto the new drive. OS X at this point explains that there is already files in there as follows:

If you click STOP – nothing happens but if you click Replace – that is 100% what it does – it replaces whatever whatever was in there with the folder you are moving and the stuff that was already in there? Well that is gone for good, it is not in the recycle bin. Windows / Linux by default MERGES the files which makes more sense to me. B very careful of this feature otherwise you will loose a lot of files in the process.

IMPORT = REPLACE?

One of the programs I use is Wallet – it stores all your Serial numbers, login details and basically allows you to manage all your stuff in one place. I had another Wallet database file and silly me IMPORTED this into mine which resulted in mine been 100% replaced. Did the programmers not see fit to merge more than one database together? I can tell you now the windows version does import and merges the two – is this a new feature of the Mac?

iWeb – No Save, open or anything

iWeb is easy for the beginner to design web sites but did they not feel to Import, Open or whatever existing sites? What happens if you loose the file – if it goes from the side bar – that is your web site gone for good. Even Frontpage has all of these features and I see that as a very low level beginners program. This is a case of “My way or bust” attitude from the Mac programmers – very sloppy and very bad.

Apple New iMac 24″

New to my collection of Computers is the rather new style of iMac, I wish to go over this in a few details to give a sort of review if you like. The model in Question is as follows:

Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz Extreme
2 GIG Ram
500 GIG Hard Drive
24″ Display (1920 x 1200)
DVD writer (Slot loading)
ATi Radeon HD 2600 Pro

As you can See from the Picture, Its a Very Smart looking all-in-one machine and while it cannot be expanded too much, I think what it has in there would do somebody for quite some time.

Setting it up
It came pre-installed with Mac OS X 10.4.11 which surpsied me as I thought it would already have Leopard on there. There is One Power Plug for the entire system, keyboard (which is what they call Universal English – so not 100% quite UK in Layout) and a Mighty Mouse. There was a CD Inside with the 10.5 Upgrade – slotted this in and left it running for some time while it put the latest OS on there. I have a Wireless router – Set up for WPA2 and protected, the machine could not connect even though I supplied the correct password – Once installed though I connected no problems, so maybe a Install Glitch.

Getting to Grips with MAC OS/X
I have machines running XP Pro, Vista Ultimate and Ubuntu 7.10, So I already have messed with different ways of Working. Expose is similar to Compiz on Linux, showing all the open windows but there is a slight difference and an annoying one. If the application is closed (to the Dock) then Expose does not show this as a list, ALt+TAB does though and even if selected via Alt+tab, the window does not come up, you have to go to the WINDOW menu and display the window, this is quite annoying.

Spaces allow you to have Multiple Desktops and you can press a key (F4 by default) and jump around the Windows, there is also Ky combinations to quickly go to each window. I prefer the way Compiz on Linux does it though, I used the Cube on there and Scrolled the mouse wheel to quickly get to another application, much faster.

The Little things that matter
The scroll on the mouse is active in whatever window you are over, no selecting like Windows before you can scroll. There is a Built in Spell checker across ALL Applications – even though I had selected UK (English) it still had trouble with the word Colour and insisted it was spelt wrong. What about Screen Zooming – CTRL + Scroll Wheel and you can zoom into any part of the screen in real time yo make it easier to read.

Safari comes with web clip – this ties in with the Widgets so that if you had say a Stream (such as UStream) or something that changes a lot, then mark it out and its now a widget you can look at in real time on the widgets screen (F4). Applications are VERY easy to install and un-install, all you do is drag the program to Applications and its installed. Want to get rid of it? Simple, put it to Trash and that’s it gone. Mo registry to hack, no files hanging about.

With various add-ons, you can play just about any Video in Quicktime, there is also VLC to play any format you may have missed of course. The included Applications are the best I have seen such as iPhoto, Garageband to make your very own song and iMovie which beats Movie Maker in Windows any time of the day.

Stability
10.5.1 is not as stable as previous version from my own testing though now its seems fine, I am sure when 10.5.2 and so forth get out, it can only get better.