I'd like to take this opportunity to wish Steve Jobs a Happy Birthday. And, to add good vibes out into the universe for his recovery.
Like millions of others, I have been touched by or benefited from Steve Jobs' vision, commitment to his ideas and tenacity.
My Mac and Apple devices have brought me great joy over the years. The iPod literally lit up my life. It has brought a world of music to my ears that I never imagined, yet alone, thought possible. In the old iPod commercials where you see the persons shadow dancing while they actually may be just sitting, standing or walking…oh, yeah, that's me.
Some devices have enhanced my life greater than I could have imagined and some have even changed it altogether. I wasn't even into computers. I took a look at a, funny-looking, Macintosh 128K computer, and wondered, "What will that thing ever do for me?" Two years later I was doing CAD drawings, yes CAD, on a Macintosh SE. It was a clinic in scrolling, but, I have been a Mac lover ever since.
So just like the light bulb, the automobile, the telephone; my computer of choice is happily, just as ingrained in my day to day existence. The saying still applies, "I love my Mac."
So, thank you Mr. Jobs, Happy Birthday, and wishing you the best of health.
CH
:::
Do you tire of looking for a Wi-Fi hotspot to connect your iPod Touch?
It's 2011 already…
Surfing the Internet shouldn't be so hard to do no matter what the device or where you are.
But, that's just my opinion.
And possibly the opinion of Sprint as well.
Or maybe just a smart move to step into the iDevice craze.
Sprint is aiming to make your iPod Touch, a Wi-Fi device, into a 3G device, in a round about way, with the "ZTE Peel™."
When I talk with my friends that don't have iPhones (and want them), the usual answer I get these days is "I'm just waiting for it to come to Verizon." There seems to be a lot of "I hate AT&T" sentiments out there. For the record, and I'll say it again – I don't have a problem with AT&T and even if the iPhone were offered on Verizon tomorrow I'd probably stay right where I am. First off I live in Michigan and although I travel the world for work, my AT&T service in my area has actually been quite good. I get 4 bars in my basement. I don't drop a lot of calls and the only time I do have issues is when I travel to known problem areas (such as Times Square NYC and the Tampa Bay FL area). So no I'm not an AT&T hater. I don't love them or hate them. They provide a service that has worked out for me. When I travel outside the US I need a GSM based phone and at that point I'm roaming on the local carriers anyway. Nonetheless, AT&T doesn't have a good reputation and certainly the Apple/AT&T relationship has been a bumpy one at times. Only Apple and Verizon know for sure when they will join hands and release an iPhone on the much praised Verizon network (everyone now says 2011 – keep in mind that these were the same people that swore it would be 2010 and 2009 before that), but I had a thought about Apple & Verizon…
What if Apple Bought Verizon?
Apple is all about "control." They like to control every aspect of their products and services. Certainly not being able to deliver data tethering and MMS for so long was a pain for them as well as other things that had to wait for AT&T's network to get up to speed. So that got me to thinking that a Verizon buyout by Apple would probably be a good thing (at least for Apple). They would be buying a popular network and then be able to completely control the user experience on the iPhone. While I'm sure this would piss off not only AT&T, but the whole industry (especially Droid handset makers), it's an interesting thought. It's also not the first time that Apple would have pissed off the whole industry 
While we'll probably never see such an acquisition take place, I bet the thought has crossed Steve's mind at least once. In any case I anxiously await the iPhone adding additional US carriers for a few reasons:
- With the iPhone on more than one carrier it will force AT&T to be more competitive (a win for us all). Right now they are the only iPhone game in town and therefore they can do things like charge a $25 (just because we can) tethering fee on top of your data plan without adding any more data.
- A multi-carrier iPhone would relieve some of the stress on having everything iPhone fall on one carrier (AT&T). Honestly, I'm not sure that Verizon would have done much better if they suddenly had an influx of millions of data hungry users. We'll never know, but it's easy to say your network is the best when you don't have the same volume of traffic.
- Lastly it will shut people up I get a little tired at times of Verizon users telling me how they never ever drop a call ever and how Verizon bows down to their every wish. Keep in mind that I do have a Verizon data card and I know for a fact that just like any other carrier their service is great in some areas and not so great in others. However, I don't argue. I just smile, because I really don't care one way or the other. I'm fine with my service and you're fine with yours, great! It's phone service, not a religion.
Understanding that you would probably wait till your contract was up if you have one, but what would you do…
I'm a busy guy and while I have several RSS feeds that I check everyday, there is one site that serves up ALL of the news I care about when it comes to Apple and industry related news. That site is macsurfer.com. This is the one page I can go to and see all of the headlines each day on topics that interest me and stories I would have otherwise missed.
If you're even remotely interested in anything Apple related or want to know what's going on in the industry at any given time this is the site you need to go to!
Apple made their case on July 16th (like it or not) during their press conference about the iPhone 4's reception problems that some users are having. They offered their explanation and theories backed by their research data, FREE iPhone 4 cases (order your FREE iPhone 4 Case using Apple's FREE App here from 
)and a no restocking fee return policy. In my opinion that should be the end of it. Either you want an iPhone 4 or you don't. If you got one and it's not working for you, take it back. What more could you ask for? Yet they (Apple) insist upon continuing to fuel this (in their own words "blown out of proportion story") by posting NEW videos regularly to Apple.com/antenna on how other manufacturer's phones lose signal when you hold them too.
In my opinion this is a MISTAKE. Apple just LET IT GO!
Your motto/stance should not be "look, see the other guys lose signal too. Their phones are just as bad as ours."
The real problem – It's not about the bars!
My take on the whole signal loss/bars display thing is that the only time someone even bothers to look at the number of bars they have is either when they drop a call or can't make one. The "death grip" as it has been called means that someone holds a phone in a fairly natural way (not as tightly Apple demonstrates in some of their videos) up to their face and they talk. If the call drops they then pull the phone down and look to see why. That's the "real problem" and not the number of bars. Saying that other companies lose bars too is not really telling the whole story (and it's one that no one is arguing). I know that Apple says with numbers to back it up that the iPhone 4 doesn't drop that many calls. However, it does drop more calls (by their own admission) than the previous iPhone 3GS. Even if it's by a small percentage, it does drop more.
Prior to the iPhone 4, when was the last time you looked at or cared about the number of bars on the display of your phone? It comes down to you can either make calls reliably or you can't!
Apple if you want to impress me about how the iPhone 4 holds up against the competition then make videos of someone holding all the various phones the same way while on calls in real world environments (outside, inside, on a train, etc.) and not just in your testing labs where the conditions are optimal.
As far as your customers are concerned it doesn't matter what the other phones do or don't do when you hold them. It matters what YOUR iPhone 4 does and whether or not the call will drop? According to AT&T out of their recent 3.2 million iPhone activations only 27% (yes, a very nice number) were NEW accounts. This means to me that a large number of iPhone 4 owners are upgrading from previous iPhone models and that's what they are comparing the iPhone 4 to. Not your competitors. iPhone 4 users are using their iPhones the same way that they did with their iPhone 3G/3GS case or no case and expect to have the same if not better call quality. Speaking of AT&T, it appears that 73% of iPhone users are VERY SATISFIED with AT&T. Wow! So apparently we can't blame them for everything.
I would also dare to say that a large number of perceived dropped calls that some people are experiencing is due to proximity sensor issues "FaceDialing" if you will. If you were to fix that issue as fast as you fixed the cosmetic signal display issue, you might have less people complaining.
As an iPhone 4 user overall, I'm happy. I don't need for you to continue to show me how every other phone loses bars when you hold it. I do care about not dropping calls. Spend that time and energy improving your own products.
Here are 3 hot issues affecting some of your iPhone 4 users:
Bluetooth Sound Quality/Disconnects
I'm sure they would appreciate these issues being addressed much more over another video of another phone dropping signal.
UPDATE 8/1/2010: It's redeeming to see that Apple pulled down the videos from their Antenna Page. I guess I wasn't too wrong after all
On a lighter note…
Well of course it is! However, I can see why some are beginning to raise this question because there wasn't even a brief mention of the Mac or Mac OS X at last weeks WWDC Steve Jobs Keynote. WWWC (WorldWide Developer Conference) is the annual event where the Apple developer community comes together to find out about new tools and products for developing for Apple's platform. It's not uncommon for Apple to showcase the next version of the Mac OS and even release a new hardware product here and there. However, at this year's conference the focus was 100% on Apple's mobile business. So if you're not into iPhones, iPads and iPods, there wasn't ANYTHING for you at the keynote. Not even stats on how well the Macs are selling. Now of course Apple did hold sessions throughout the week on the Mac OS and other areas, but the attention is on the "new shinny object" and that's the iOS. Apple has traditionally been a company that focuses the bulk of their attention on what's hot at any given moment. Also who could argue with the companies financial success. So whatever they're doing as a BUSINESS it's working. Still, I want to know…
Where's my NEW Mac Pro?
I've been patiently waiting with cash in hand to buy the new 2010 Mac Pro tower. The last Mac Pro was introduced in March of 2009! Yes, 16 months ago, which is an eternity in the computer hardware space. No question Apple is now a Consumer Electronics Company and doing great with the Mobile business and also equally well with the notebook (MacBook - I love my NEW Core i7 MacBook Pro) and consumer desktop (iMac) lines too. What about us pros? Much smaller market for sure, but we do buy the most expensive products Apple sells.
Just a few quick stats
The current Mac Pro was introduced March 2009
The current Apple 30" Cinema Display was introduced March 2006 <- yes 4 years ago
Apple recently retired the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC campaign
The Bottom Line
Apple should continue to fight the battles that make it successful as a company, however, they also shouldn't take their eye off the bread and butter market either. It would be weird to wake up one day to find all those shiny new iDevices docked to PCs.
When Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 it was clear that the iPod was destined to be a mobile extension of your music library. As time went on Apple continued to add multimedia capabilities to it including TV shows, movies and more. For the most part it still makes sense that you would use a computer to manage your media library and only sync the content you want onto your iPod. I guess it also still makes sense that you would do the same for an iPhone. However, do we really need a computer to use an iPad?
The woman who tried to buy an iPad
By now most of you have heard the story about the woman who is disabled and on a fixed income, who saved up her money to buy an iPad as her "first computer", only to be turned down because she wanted to pay with cash. I'm not here to get into that debate right now about how paranoid Apple is about someone potentially buying several iPads just to sell re-sale them. So they restrict your method of payment and quantities as a deterrent. Nope, i'm not here to talk about that at all. The one thing that I haven't seen anyone mention is what if she was allowed to buy it? Then what? She gets home with the iPad she saved up for month after month only to take it out of the box and not be able to use it. That's right. When you take an iPad out of the box and turn it on you can't do ANYTHING until you connect it to a modern day computer running iTunes to set it up. The question in 2010 is Why?
What reason does the iPad "need" a computer?
For the past 9 Weeks I've been doing a series called "10 Tip Mondays" where I've given 10 Tips on various Mac Apps or OS X features. I decided to round out this series with "10 Random Mac Tips". This will be 10 Tips off the top of my head and then of course followed by the links to the other 90 Tips to make the title of this post a true statement. So here we go in no particular order:
1. Partition a drive without reformatting
One of my favorite Snow Leopard features is the ability to partition a hard drive WITHOUT having to reformat it first. As long as you're not currently booted off that drive, you can plug it in, open Disk Utility and partition it without having to reformat it. I just did this recently on an external portable Firewire drive so that I could create a second boot partition for beta testing. It worked perfectly without losing the contents. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BACKUP FIRST BEFORE DOING ANY WORK IN DISK UTILITY.
2. Multiple Time Machine Backups
Now you can have multiple Time Machine Backups. If you go to your Time Machine prefs and choose a different drive you can of course backup to it. However, if you later go back and set Time Machine to backup to the first drive Time Machine will pick up where it left off. This is great for creating offsite backups or going between two drives such as a Time Capsule at home and a portable drive on the road.
3. Use Font Book to check for damaged fonts
Weird things can happen including frequent crashes if you've got a damaged Font. You may never even know it if it's a Font that you don't use often. However, some Apps build their Font menus upon launch based on your installed fonts, so if one or more of them is damaged then you can experience issues. Luckily Font Book can check for damaged Fonts. Just select your fonts in Font Book and choose Validate Fonts from the File menu.
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Before he appeared on Dancing with the Stars…
On October 22, 2000, Apple Co-Founder Steve "The Woz" Wozniak made a special visit to MacGroup-Detroit, Inc. During his keynote lecture Woz told us many stories about the beginning of his career, the invention of the personal computer that would revolutionize the industry and how he and Steve Jobs started Apple Computer, Inc.
Thanks to the advances in technology over the years, MacGroup is pleased to be able to make this video available to Macintosh community at large for the first time as a FREE download on MacGroup TV via iTunes. Please accept this as our Holiday Gift to you!
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