YES! My MacBook Pro is maxed out on RAM, and currently has the biggest hard drive one can put in a laptop! It really is amazing. I bought 4 gigs of RAM for $88.00. That’s like dirt cheap… does anyone remember so many moons ago (say like 4 years) when 4 gigs of RAM was something akin to $400.00? Yeah… it’s amazing. And it’s not like my computer was slow or anything, but going from 2 gigs to 4 gigs is just an amazing difference.

I was also running out of hard drive space, so I order the Western Digital 320 Scorpio. $129.00. Amazing… I moved a bunch of stuff of my external drives and back onto my laptop hard drive (like all my photos) and still have 85 gigs free! I’m elated!

From MacNN.com

For those who have Macs, and/or who care…

Please note if this were named like a Windows Service Pack, this would be SP3. XP has been out since 2001, and they just now made it to SP3. I feel sorry for you Windows sufferers. Good old MS just has a hard time getting the updates out!

I normally don’t gripe about Apple stuff in public, after all look at the alternative! But once in a while I indulge my desire to gripe about even the best things in life.

You see, I had been having this annoyance with my MacBook Pro… but let me back up.

I purchased my first Apple computer, a shiny new 1.33 GHz Powerbook G4 in the later half of 2004. Came with Panther (10.3.x… .5 or .6 I believe). Now, you must understand that I bought this my first Mac somewhat grudgingly. I had held that Apple Computer products were akin to evil Martians, here to invade, and completely stupid. And ya know, they were incompatible, no software, couldn’t do anything, only appealed to a specialty group… etc. etc.

Well, I quickly fell in love with my Powerbook! I learned that there is an abundance of good software, that it made even the smallest of everyday computing tasks so much easier and friendlier. But the time came recently when my beloved Powerbook just wasn’t cutting it anymore. It was a good solid computer, but really showing it’s age after these few years. It really wasn’t a viable main computer anymore as far as the power I needed, editing, graphics, etc.

So, after a few sobs, I parted with my Powerbook (which is still in good use by a good friend of mine), and bought my current computer, a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo MacBook Pro. And I really do love this computer, it’s FAST!!! But there was one thing in particular that was bothering me about this computer. That was it’s little problem with waking up from sleep (you PC folks call it System Standby… but whatever). For that matter, I hated how long it took it to even actually go to sleep. When I close my computer, I want it to go to sleep right away so I can put it in my backpack and haul it off RIGHT AWAY! I don’t want to wait for it for 60 to 90 seconds then take it away. I want it to be ready now. My Powerbook had always gone to sleep and woken up instantly, why was this new computer being such a pain.

Well technically, I knew “why” it was being such a pain… it’s because all Apple portables since about sometime in 2006 do something called safe sleep. Safe Sleep is a combination of something you PC people call Hibernation, and regular good old fashion Sleep (system standby). When you put one of these safe sleepin’ Apple portables to sleep, they first write the entire contents of the RAM to hard drive, like a PC does when it Hibernates (only it does seem at least a little faster than a windoze PC), but then it doesn’t hardware suspend as does a hibernating PC, noooooo, it then goes to sleep just like the old models used to, only now with more hassle and time involved. The idea is that, in the VERY UNLIKELY event that your battery goes complete dead, or falls out, or whatever, that your computer will still come back to life in the same state you put it to sleep in (only it would just take a little longer to write the contents of RAM back to the RAM from the hard drive). Of course this is just stupid because even if the battery died or whatever, your computer is going to be just fine… you just have to boot it back up. And if you had unsaved documents before you put your computer to sleep, well frankly, your just STOOPID anyway!

So that explained why the stupid computer took so long to get to sleep. But there was this other problem, waking up from sleep. It seemed that, the first time you put the computer to sleep after a cold boot, it would wake up normally. And the second time was usually alright too. But after that, it’s pretty much a crap-shoot as to whether the computer would wake up at all, or if it did, the whole system might be unstable, requiring a re-boot which of course, as you might guess, completely defeats the purpose of putting the thing to sleep as opposed to just shutting it down in the first place. In fact, I started shutting the thing down completely almost anytime I needed to pack the thing somewhere. I mean, it took the same amount of time to go to sleep as it did to shut down. And a cold boot insured that the system wasn’t somehow destabilized by whatever sleep bug was plaguing it.

But on a hunch, I figured that, OS X being OS X, this whole safe sleep thing had to just be a preference in a .plist preference file somewhere. So I did some googling and found a preference pane plug-in that will allow you to turn off safe sleep completely (called Smart Sleep, available here). So I downloaded it, turned off Safe Sleep, and would you know that not only did it fix this problem of taking 300 years to actually get to sleep, but it COMPLETELY cured the “stability on wake” issue. So obviously SOMEONE (I’m looking at you Apple) let this whole safe sleep business slip out of Cupertino with some stability issues!

But who in the world needs safe sleep anyway. I hated hibernation because it literally takes the same amount of time, if not more, to shut down and boot a PC anyway. So why would we introduce this as a “feature” on OS X? And then not even really allow us to USE the feature, but tie it to sleeping.

So that’s my gripe. It’s actually two gripes about the same thing. 1). Why do we even have this bother in the first place, and 2). why was it allowed to get out of the gates with such a huge stability issue? This is very unlike the Apple I used to know and love…

But again, as a whole, I still think Apple is years beyond anyone else in the computer world so… Like I said, look at the garbage you would have to put up with from the alternative.

This is one of the many reasons I love Apple!

We can’t ship junk. There are thresholds we can’t cross because of who we are. The difference is, we don’t offer stripped-down, lousy products.

- Apple CEO Steve Jobs, August 7, 2007

Yes, this is a post about Apple’s newest OS for their Macintosh computer, and that OS is code named Leopard.

Leopard, or OS 10.5 is the 6th installment of Mac OS X, and yes I am running that Operating system on my MacBook Pro right now. You see, I decided to be safe and sensible this time around, having bought the last upgrade, Tiger, the day it came out… and getting a little burned by it, I decided to wait a little while and let all the developers get their apps up to snuff and even for Apple to get an update or two out there… HA!

So…

I made it to a whole six days before my Apple fanboy geekness won me back over to reason and I rushed to the Apple store to drink my cool-aid pick up my copy of Leopard.

While the upgrade to Tiger was a very bumpy ride in terms of compatibility with existing apps and drivers of which most were broken, I must say this seems to be a much smoother upgrade. Only two apps have been broken so far, and both developers have promised upgrades within the month.

So on to the wonderfulness that is Leopard!

Right out of the box and into the installation screen, you can tell OS X is feeling much more refined these days. It’s just a feeling of… grown-upness. I don’t quite know how to put my finger on it. The installation options were a bit more streamlined and intuitive, and the graphics were great, even on just the OS installer.

So after having made a disk image clone of my Tiger installation so that in case of emergency I could re-image my hard drive right back to it’s previous working state, I inserted the Leopard DVD and booted into the installer.

I opted for a wipe and clean install, there’s just something about starting completely fresh… so at 3:10 in the afternoon the installer started doing it’s thing.

At 3:28 it automatically rebooted.

At 3:33 I was looking at my brand new shiny desktop. I was amazed as this seemed much faster than a Tiger install. Very Impressive!

Now let me ramble randomly about this OS.

So, I LOVE stacks! What a brilliant idea! It makes my life that much easier.

Having To Dos and Notes Integrated into Mail is also awesome, now if only I could sync those properly with my iPhone (uhh, hello Apple, are you reading???)

Spaces is such a beautiful thing. I had never seen Virtual Desktops done right until now. It is intuitive and easy to use, and WELL INTEGRATED!!! The level of integration is what makes it work so well IMO.

All the nice new little visual enhancements are nice, subtle little things like new animations in iChat when accepting a chat invitation, the nice and completely smooth, no jitter, spaces transitions, all these little things just feel so refined. This is definitely the most refined version of OS X yet.

But let me tell you one of the features I have been looking forward to most. That is TIME MACHINE! What a life saver. I backed up manually for a long time, then I tried using DeJaVu for a while, but I was less than impressed. So clunky and un-reliable. I moved on to try many different various automated means of backup but was never satisfied with any of them. But Time Machine, ahhhhh, what a beauty. It saves whole system, and incremental backups all at once, keeps tabs on everything, doesn’t slow down the system at all, is very easy to use and set up, and best of all it just WORKS! Time Machine alone was worth the money.

Spotlight is FAST! Blazing fast. It worked fine before in Tiger, but it’s plain snappy now in Leopard. It’s very nice. For that matter (and I’m not making this up) my Laptop is noticeably faster all around with Leopard. I’m going to attribute that to the fully 64 bit architecture.

As to peoples complaints about the visual changes in Leopard, what a bunch of whiners. The barely translucent menu bar is beautiful in my opinion, and I LOVE the 3d dock. I certainly didn’t have a complaint about the dock even to start with, but using Tiger on the computers at work, then coming back to my Laptop, Leopard is just so much more visually appealing.

Well, I can’t think of anything else to say about Leopard right now so I guess I’ll quit boring the pants off of all 2 of my readers…

For those of you living under a rock, Apple yesterday announced that (among other things) the iPhone would now be only $399.00 for the 8 gig model and they would no longer sell the 4 gig model.

Since yesterday, the entire iPhone user community has been in an uproar. Words and phrases like, “I’ve been cheated” “ripped off” “price gouging” etc. have been floating around. Some who have been Apple faithfuls and buy all the new products are vowing to never be an Apple customer again.

Now, I don’t know how much of this is actually just the media and press picking up on only the negative (since when has a company lowering a product price point been a negative?), but the fact remains that there are a LOT of people whining like little babies because they feel ripped off. But the fact of the matter is, no one has been cheated, no one has been ripped off. This is technology folks. You would think in the year 2007 we would be used to this. Does no one else remember the RAZR? over $300.00 for a stinking flip phone that has (IMO) no really usable features save the actual phone. I don’t remember the exact price, but it was HIGH. And it came down quickly too!

Here are the facts. Apple announced the pricing of the iPhone models well in advance of release. People were forced to think about it. There wasn’t any impulse buying, people went to the store knowing what they were going to pay because they had known for months in advance. IMO, the iPhone is the best phone on the market and Apple had a right to charge whatever they wanted (and still does have the right if they wanted to IMO). The customer had the right to either buy one or not. The customer agreed to pay the price Apple asked for the iPhone. End of story! There is no ripping off or cheating going on here. It’s Apple’s product and those of us who were early adopters felt that being on the bleeding edge of technology by paying $599.00 for an 8 gig iPhone was worth the money. Obviously we felt this way or we would not have purchased the iPhone.

So to the whining iPhone users:

Apple says, for $600 you can have our new iPhone, Customer pays price, end of story. Because it’s not bleeding edge anymore, and they drop the price you feel cheated? That’s just wrong. You’ve had an iPhone longer than the folks who are running to get one now that they are cheaper. You paid to do that, as did I.

I’m perfectly happy with my iPhone, even at $600. Apple doesn’t owe anyone anything, they were quite justified in charging the price that they did, because obviously folks wanted to be on the bleeding edge at that price.

So whimpering iPhone users… GET A LIFE!