Tag Archives: apple

Resource constrained…

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Everything in life more or less comes down to a competition between wants, needs, and the resources to make those things reality. Needs are fairly basic – those things we must have to sustain life. Wants are more problematic in that the more we have, the more we tend to want. Resources, of course, are very nearly always constrained in one way or another. Having spent six days sitting at home over the previous month and a half when I would have otherwise been working, the constraints are a little tighter now than usual. That’s a shame, because we’re ramping up to that time of year when the wants start following an upward trend. Put another way, it’s the time of year when Apple starts rolling out it’s new mobile toys.

Over the next two months, the boys and girls in Cupertino are set to roll out new versions of the iPhone, iPad, and several varieties of actual computers. Given that I’m currently limping along with a 2008 model MacBookPro, upgrading that really should be my first priority. Of all the machines in the house, it’s the real workhorse and takes the lion’s share of abuse in blogging and general writing. Now that the battery issue is resolved, my iPhone is working well enough and could easily last another year in service. The iPad mini gets its share of daily use, too, but basic web browsing doesn’t exactly tax its considerable abilities. It really should be the last thing I’m looking at replacing right now.

When it comes to new toys, of course, logic and service life remaining don’t exactly play a role in my analysis. It’s almost a mortal lock that I’ll be up in the wee hours of a morning soon after September 10th ordering a new phone on its first day of availability. If I have to make a case for needing a new one, I can always fall back on the fact that the old, standard 8GB of mobile storage isn’t what it use to be. Which is both true and sad all at the same time. I’m a little more hesitant about replacing the iPad at this point. If there isn’t a true retina screen built into the mini this time around, I think I can justify waiting for the next generation in my own mind. Without some exceptional change, a two year replacement on tablets almost feels reasonable. As far as getting over the hump and bringing a new laptop into the family, well, it’s probably going to remain in the easy to justify but unlikely to happen column this time around.

Funny how I can justify a new phone every year in my own mind, but not a laptop unless there is literally smoke poring out of the back of it. Stupid resource constraints always forcing me into the fun decision instead of the responsible one.

Battery backup…

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A couple of months ago I finally had to break down and face that my iPhone 5 was falling down on the job. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the blasted thing to hold a charge for any longer than about six hours under what I would consider not particularly heavy use. A trip to the Apple Store, a battery swap out, and all was right with the world. Or at least it was for about a month.

Apple_LogoI’ve been trying to avoid admitting it to myself, but when I looked at my phone at 9:45 this morning and saw it holding only a 48% charge I’ve been forced to finally admit that history is repeating itself. Which means come Furlough Friday, I’ll probably be trudging back to the Apple Store in the hopes that they can right what has once again gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Sleek as it is, I can’t say that iPhone 5 has been my best Apple experience. If it were my first, I think I’d have a tough time justifying sticking with the platform at this point. I’m absolutely dependant on my phone and need it to be something that “just works,” rather than something I’m hauling around extra charging cables and an external battery pack just to keep in service. My last, Hail Mary play is restoring the phone to factory presets and adding apps back one by one to see if I can determine if one of them is causing a battery sucking do loop. That’s pretty much the only big gun I have left.

If all else fails, I hope there’s a Genius in Delaware who can fix my phone. If we go for round three of this mess, it’s going to be time to start seriously looking at other options and that’s not a road I particularly want to have to go down.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Myspace. I got an email from Myspace this morning. Talk about getting a blast from the past right in the ol’ inbox. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m a fan of social media in all its many flavors, but I can’t think of any good reason to pick up where 2006 left off. It’s cute that they’re trying desperately to rebrand themselves as a music and lifestyle site, but I won’t be signing up any time soon. Been there, done that. It’s time to let the next generation become friends with Tom. Sorry, old friend, from here on out gmail will be catching you in the spam filter.

2. WWDC 2013. Apple held its annual World Wide Developer’s Conference this week. There was the usual introduction of new OS and iOS variants, a few new gee whiz gadgets, even some legitimate “wow” elements… but this year felt like it was lacking a certain punch. For the first time in a long time, I’m walking away from the coverage of WWDC and not chomping at the bit for something I need to have right now. I don’t know if that’s a product of me getting more jaded about tech, learning to be interested in other things, or if Apple just isn’t bringing the wow like they use to. Either way, it’s less extensive for me in the end, but it’s kind of annoying too.

3. Game of Thrones. Season 3 hasn’t been over for a week yet and I’m already showing some early signs of withdrawal. They pack some of the best television content in history into ten hour-long episodes, but when it’s over there’s such a ridiculous wait for the next season. By contrast other programs I enjoy tend to show up with 16 or even 22 episodes a season. Excepting that kind of production run from GoT is unreasonable, I know. Still, I’m not down with the year-long wait for season 4 to roll out on HBO. Mercifully True Blood shows up this Sunday… and after that it’s Boardwalk Empire… and then Walking Dead should be right around the corner. The 9PM Sunday time slot will be well covered, but I’ll miss Westeros… and dragons. I’ll definitely miss dragons.

Mission Complete (minus nine)…

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The great heroic project of our age is more or less finished. For all practical purposes, I’m calling the effort to transfer my DVD collection to hard disk mission complete. With the exception of nine disks that I’ll need other software to rip and encode effectively, I managed to bring down the curtain three weeks ahead of my self-imposed deadline of the end of the year. As far as those couple of outliers go, well, I’ll get to them when I Screen Shot 2012-12-11 at 5.12.24 PMget to them. For the most those few disks are fairly oddball titles that you’d really only want to watch once or twice in a lifetime anyway. Still, I have them, and it would be nice to go from finished to really finished eventually.

So, you’re asking, what’s the tale of the tape? Weighing in at a grand total of 1.21 TB (1210 GB), I’ve got 123 movies and 1380 separate television episodes, and 1185 songs available for streaming to every television and iDevice in the house across my own network. Put another way, that’s 10.5 days of back-to-back movies, 44 days of television, and about 3 days of uninterrupted music. That’s certainly not the biggest personal audio-visual library out there, but I’m proud of my little collection. That should prove to be more than enough to keep me entertained during the impending apocalypse.

It’s alot like having a 24/7 commercial free television station that plays only content that you know you’re going to like. I had a real geek-out moment there when I realized just how awesome it really is. Using the Apple TV interface makes it very similar experience to actual channel surfing. When you get bored with one show you can switch immediately to another and then back again even on a TV in a different room. Basically, it’s what TV would be if television wasn’t just an avenue to put eyeballs on advertisements. It’s possible that I’m in love.

In the interest of keeping things safe and sound, I’ve got a redundant copy on site and an offsite backup ready to go into rotation. It might seem like overkill, but iTunes, as we all know, sometimes does funny things and this isn’t a process that I want to go through a second time. I’m not there yet, but I think I’ve taken a big step towards making cable television pretty irrelevant in my life.

Sadly there are still several large boxes of CDs stashed in the basement that need to be ripped since I seem to have lost alot of content dragging it from computer to computer over the last five or six years. Since I seem to have finally stumbled on a solution that’s is going to stick, it might just be time to go ahead and rebuild my audio library while I’m at it… but that’s a project for a later date. I don’t think I can stomach seeing any more shiny plastic discs just yet.

Shelf life…

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From the moment you buy any new bit of technology, the clock is running. Call it shelf life, planned obsolesce, or corporate money grubbing, the only great truism in high tech, is the next great thing is always just around the corner. Another, more or less unspoken truth has always been that Apple released it’s new and improved products about a year after the last model came out. Amortized out over a period of 12 months, even a $700 iPad could almost be considered a yearly purchase, especially when you account for its relatively high resale value. By the time it was said and done, the total cost of ownership of my first two iPads came out to something like $20 a month… or one vinti vanilla latte a week.

In rolling out the iPad 4 just seven months after the 3rd iteration launched, Apple has thrown my TCOO calculation all out of whack. The device got a serious spec bump and I would love to have the additional processing power/speed, but the fact is there’s nothing the 4 does that the 3 can’t do (almost) as well. This time around, I’m just not seeing the typical “killer” feature that would usually drive me to switch to the latest and greatest model. Of course that explains why that iPad 3 has been discontinued rather than simply sold at a lower price point. The specs and performance are just too close to the new flagship. I know there are plenty of people who will be up early on Friday to drop in their order, though. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t strongly consider it if for no other reason than to be able to use the same charging cable for my phone and my tablet. Unless you’re in that position, it’s hard to describe just how annoying that actually is. Still, it doesn’t look like I’m going to be a buyer for iPad 4.

Having ruled out full sized iPad out of the equation still leaves me to consider the iPad mini. Since I many use my iPad as an e-reader, I have to admit this one is tempting. I like the idea of a smaller/lighter device, but don’t think I can get past what feels like a “downgrade” in specs going from iPad 3 to iPad mini, by which I mean losing the retina display and not gaining anything particularly impressive in terms of overall performance. I’m really going to have to hold on in my hand before I’m ready to pass judgment one way or the other.

Don’t take any of this as a slam against the world’s most valuable company, because it’s not. I think Apple rolled out a truly ridiculous number of new, improved, and magical devices today. If there’s any of them that I’m super desirous of at the moment, it would be the new retina 13-inch MacBook Pro, but with its 2008-model ancestor basically still running like it was new out of the box and a Mac mini doing all of the heavy lifting in this house, a $1700 bill from the Apple store just isn’t on the table at the moment.

It seems I’m at that uncomfortable point in product life cycles where there just isn’t much incentive to change what’s currently working. If I weren’t already sitting so close to the state of the art, though, any of the new toys Tim and Company spent the afternoon showing off would be a pretty damned impressive addition to the collection.

Mini…

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So it seems that Apple is going to go ahead an announce the iPad Mini next week. Between now and then I’ll be doing my best to convince myself that trading in a six month old full sized iPad for a smaller version is a bad idea. I’m serious this time. Unless there are some pretty damned compelling features, I’m most likely going to be sitting this one out… although I won’t lie, it would be nice to have all my i-devices using a standard power source again. Keeping up with the old 30-pin docking cord and the new lightning cord has been a legitimate hassle, but I’m not sure it’s been enough of a hassle to justify switching devices in the middle of the product cycle. Even so, I’ll be watching next week’s media event with some serious interest.

Complicating matters even more, is the notion I’ve been kicking around of retiring my original Kindle keyboard e-reader in favor of the new Paperwhite model. I love reading on the Kindle. It does one thing and it does that one thing incredibly well. Even though Kindlem, to me, is a better reading exoerience, I default to the iPad for reading at night for the simple reason that it doesn’t require keeping a light on to do it. The front-lit Paperwhite appears to be the solution to needing either a backlit screen or an external light source at night. I’d really like to give it a test drive for a few nights and see how it handles. Sometimes I think it’s a real pity that there’s so much amazing tech on the market right now and so few hours in which to play with it all… but usually I just lump it into the category called “Awesome.”

Day 2…

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I had good intentions of getting a hands on review of the iPhone 5 done and posted last night, alas, my new job as nursemaid pretty much slammed the door on that idea. I haven’t even had time yet to really put the phone through its paces. The only think I can really add at the moment to yesterday’s first impression of it being super light is that it also feels fast and very responsive to inputs. Data speeds seem improved even here in Cecil County, BFE, so I’ll be very interested to see how it handles the next time I wander into LTE coverage. The only snag so far was a few apps that absolutely refused to restore from iTunes. After downloading them directly through the iTunes app, all was once again right with the world. So far, my day two impression is similar to one that is floating around out in the tech forums… iPhone 5 and iOS 6 are essentially refinements to what was already a solid device. Bottom line, is it worth the cost of upgrade from a 4S? For a heavy user bent on squeezing out every ounce of performance from the iPhone or a iOS gamer who wants more screen real estate, yes, absolutely with the upgrade. For the casual user wanting to check mail, text, and play angry birds, it’s not so much of a necessity.

What Annoys Jeff This Week?

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So it’s Thursday and by now you’re surely wondering what annoys Jeff this week. From a host of things, here are the three that made the final cut this time around:

1. Religious zealots. Every religion since the dawn of time has been based on what it’s followers (or creators) considered some kind of “revealed truth” about the universe and our place in it… and mostly, the central tenant of most major religions is the same: Try not to be a doucebag. The problem arises when people make an addendum to this basic philosophy and you end up with something more like: Don’t be a douchebag, unless the person you’re acting like a douchebag towards doesn’t subscribe to every particular detail of your system of beliefs. I’m not known as the most laid back guy in the world, but at the end of the day, if you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. Jesus, Vishnu, Buddha, and Mohammed all seem to agree on that point. So yeah, don’t be a douchebag zealot, regardless of who hears your prayers.

2. First world problems. I don’t need a new iPhone. I definitely don’t need a $600 new iPhone. I’m not even particularly impressed with the incremental design improvements the leaks have shown this time around. And yet somehow despite those three pieces of evidence to the contrary, I really, really want to order the new iPhone when it’s launched next week. Not even my best mental gymnastics can manage to transform this from a “want” into a “need.” And lord knows I’ve tried. That a slightly lengthened form factor, a marginally larger screen, and a couple of as yet unknown new bells and whistles can cause me this much gnashing of teeth is an impressive tribute to the power of marketing… and a slightly disturbing testament to my priorities.

3. It’s not the end of the world. I’m constantly amazed at people’s misguided assessment of their importance in the grand scheme of things. Nothing makes me want to bang my head against the keyboard more than people who spend all day lost in a haze of everything they do being an emergency. Things worked just fine before we showed up and unless you’re actually the next Einstein of your field, they’re keep going along in more or less the same direction long after we’re all singing with the choir invisible. The sooner you come to grips with that fact, the less bothersome these nominal “emergencies” become.

What annoys Jeff this week?

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Since I’ve been sitting here on the couch for two days now, there hasn’t been all that much opportunity for things to rub me the wrong way me this week… other than the enforced requirement to just sit around, of course. Don’t worry, though, that doesn’t mean the week is going to get off scott free. There are still a few things that annoy me.

1. Good, thoughtful people on both sides of an issue can disagree without necessarily becoming total douche bags. Just because we hold different beliefs and values doesn’t mean we have to scream past one another rather than discussing events and the way ahead using at least some small modicum of rational thought. Nothing turns me off faster than a politician or talking head insisting that theirs is the only possible right solution to whatever the problem happens to be. In math and physics there might only be one right answer… in the humanities, we’re blessed with many different paths to the same result, but that requires everyone to shut their filthy pie holes for a few minutes and listenen to someone else. I’m not holding my breath on that happening.

2. When it comes to getting your hands on the latest and greatest electronic toys, timing is everything. That’s why I got immediately disgruntled when I looked at the likely launch of the new iPhone and discovered that I was going to be stuck in class when consensus says the window for pre-orders is going to open. Sure, it’s a first world problem and all, but I want my shiny new piece of kit, damnit. I may just have to be more creative than usual at getting my order in before ship-by dates slip out to a month or more.

3. Ace bandages suck. No matter how I try to wrap one around my ankle it always ends up with a lump under my foot, or not being tight enough around the ankle, or cutting off circulation to my toes. Honest to God, I looked up a “how to” demonstration video on YouTube and still can’t get it more than halfassed done. If I’m every Secretary of Education, I’m going to insist that schools teach basic first aid and injury care, in the hopes that the 30-somethings of the future have a clue what they’re doing when their body starts falling apart at the margins.