iPhone

I’ve been flattered, over the past week, to have several people ask me whether I would be buying or whether I had bought an iPhone — flattered that people thought I might possibly have the financial wherewithal or budgetary flexibility to buy one. However, with our recent house purchase, all the usual monthly bills, and the continuous challenge of supporting a family of three on one income, it simply hasn’t been a possibility.

Sure, I’d love to have one. If Apple is listening, here are some things that would make me more likely to buy one:

• Offer the iPhone for Sprint customers. I’ve been a Sprint customer for seven years, and have no desire to switch to another carrier, particularly AT&T, Apple’s partner, since I’ve heard some pretty bad things about AT&T/Cingular’s service. However, Apple’s deal with AT&T is for five years, so there’s always the possibility they could offer a Sprint plan after that.
• Offer the iPhone for $300 or less, without subsidy. That’s about the price of a new iPod, and being an iPod user, I can conceive of wanting to buy a new one within a few years. $500 is just a bit too much for me to pay for a pocket-sized device, especially when I get a new cell phone for free every two years.
• Make the iPhone work better as a phone. From all of the reviews I’ve read, the phone functionality is one of its weakest points. I don’t want to spend all that money and be stuck with a phone that’s a pain to use.
• Offer more storage. If this thing is going to replace my iPod, it’s got to have at least 20 GB of storage space.

In the meantime, however, I’ve come up with what I think you’ll find is an elegant workaround. It has many of the features of the iPhone: it has some of the features you’d expect from an iPhone: high quality audio playback, cell phone and contact manager functionality, web browsing, and a digital camera. It even has some features you won’t get in the iPhone: 20 GB of storage space, a five-megapixel camera with 4x optical zoom and flash, and the ability to run on the Sprint network.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the MyPhone.

mini Computer, Max capability

To follow up on a comment Angela had left on my original post about the mini, here’s a run-down on the capabilities of the Mac mini, in no particular order:

• Yup, that’s our “tower”.
• The mini itself is six inches wide, six inches deep, and two inches tall. The whole machine can sit on one of my outstretched hands. In the picture above, it is sitting on top of a matching drive enclosure called the miniStack. the miniStack has the same width and depth as the mini, but is just one and a half inches tall.
• You can read Apple’s official spiel on the mini here.
• It contains a slot-loading “SuperDrive”, which is an optical drive that can read, write, and rewrite both CDs and DVDs. It can even write and rewrite dual-layer DVDs at up to 8x speed. Just stick your disc into the front, and it pulls it right in!
• It has two RAM slots. Each one can take up to a 1 GB DDR2 PC2-5300 SDRAM. It came installed with two 256 MB RAM chips for a total of 512 MB, but I upgraded it to two 1 GB RAM chips for a total of 2 GB of RAM. The machine was very fast with just 512 MB, but it did take an extra second or two to switch between applications when running a lot of applications. With 2 GB you can switch apps instantaneously. If you don’t feel comfortable working inside of a computer and possibly voiding your warranty, have Apple do the upgrade for you. If, like me, you are comfortable working in computers, it might be worth it. Yes, even though I goofed up the first time, I wouldn’t hesitate to make the same decision again (this time with the benefit of a lesson learned).
• It has a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo processor (also known as a dual core processor). To put it simply, dual core means that the computer can perform two separate tasks at the same time, each one running at 1.66 GHz. It’s actually more complicated than that, but I can give you the more complicated answer another time. Compare that to our old Mac, which had only a single core 450 MHz processor. Just one of the two cores in the mini is almost four times faster than that.
• It came with an 80 GB internal hard drive, but that was barely big enough to hold our existing collection of movies, music, and photos. Rather than order it with a larger hard drive (the internal hard drives spin at 5400 RPM and thus are a bit slow), we ordered an external drive enclosure called a miniStack. This sits neatly under the mini and lets you add an additional hard drive. We ordered it with a 320 GB hard drive, so we’ll have plenty of room for baby photos and videos.
• The mini comes with Apple’s excellent iLife ‘06 software package. I won’t take up your time by telling you everything it does, but suffice to say, it lets you do some very cool stuff with photos, video, music, and more. Be on the lookout for more cool creations from the Wood Family thanks to iLife ‘06. Don’t take my word for it… head over and take the tour.

So that’s a little blurb on what’s cool about the mini. I’m really enjoying it, and I’m excited about the creative possibilities it holds. It’s so much easier to put together movies and edit photos when you have a blazingly fast computer to work with.

Drama King

Just to clarify a bit from my last post, I’d say that my interpretation of the situation was rather over-dramatized. In the grand scheme of things, it really was no big deal. The computer was completely usable with the IR receiver broken, we didn’t lose any data, and though I lost a bit of pride, I’ve mostly gained it back since successfully completing the repair. There was no household crisis, Becky didn’t yell at me for breaking the computer, it was pretty much 100% me being very hard on myself.

Thank you all for your concern.

Oh, and Mr. Anonymous, I would be more inclined to approve your mean-spirited comment if you would leave a valid email address. Then again, maybe not.

A Humbling Learning Experience

I recently blogged about the new Mac mini Core Duo that we purchased on Saturday, March 18. Well, up until now, I haven’t really given you the whole truth. I wanted to wait until the story had ended in a way that I found satisfactory before I told the whole thing. Kind of selfish of me, I know, but hey… it’s our blog and we’ll write how we want to. Anyway, it’s pretty embarassing and humbling, but I need to get it out there for everyone to hear:

I broke our brand new Mac. Continue reading…

Our New Baby

No, not that baby. This one:

(You can see all of the photos here.)

We purchased a Mac mini Core Duo on Saturday at the Rockingham Park Apple Store in Salem, NH (no sales tax!). We were originally thinking of getting the new iMac, but we opted to get the mini for several reasons:

• We don’t need or want the built-in iSight that comes with the iMac.
• We already have a good keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
• I don’t like the mouse that comes with the iMac, anyway.
• The mini is almost as fast as the lower end iMac we were considering, and way, way, way faster than the 450 MHz PowerMac G4 that was our main machine. For proof, check out the XBench comparison of these two specific machines.
• We were able to get more RAM and hard drive space for the mini than we would have been able to afford with the iMac, due to the cost savings of not having the iSight, keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

We bought just the base model (512 megs RAM, 80 gb hard disk) at the Apple Store, so that we could buy less-expensive add-ons elsewhere. You can definitely feel the pinch with only 512 megs of RAM. When running several applications at the same time, for example iPhoto, Safari, Adium, and Mail, there is a bit of lag when switching back and forth, because the system has to take one application out of RAM and write it to disk, while reading another application off of disk and into RAM (also known as swapping). That should be solved, however, when the 2 GB RAM upgrade arrives from OWC later this week. More RAM means less swapping and less waiting when switching applications.

Beyond the lag when switching applications, performance is quite impressive. Most of the typical tasks like email, instant messaging, and web browsing aren’t dramatically faster than they were on the G4/450. It’s in the multimedia applications that the mini really shines. I haven’t had much chance to use iMovie, but iPhoto is extremely impressive… the speed is just amazing. I’m really looking forward to playing around with iLife ‘06.

We’re also getting a miniStack v2 with a 320 gb, 7200 RPM hard drive, which will give us plenty of storage space, not to mention a faster disk than the mini’s included 5400 RPM model. It also provides some extra USB ports and extra FireWire ports (handy, since the mini only has a single FireWire port).

I’m pretty excited about this purchase, because it’s the fastest Mac we’ve ever owned. I started with a Mac clone in 1997, running with a 180 MHz PowerPC 604e processor. Then I bought a PowerBook G3 400 MHz in 2001, just after the first PowerBook G4’s were introduced. Most recently, we purchased a PowerMac G4 450 MHz to replace the Mac clone. Jumping up to a Dual Core 1.66 GHz is a huge step.

Apple Store Derby Street

The Facade

On Saturday, I attended the opening of the seventh Apple Store in the Greater Boston area. The first six were Northshore (our “home” store), CambridgeSide, Chestnut Hill, Rockingham Park, South Shore, and Burlington. Saturday’s grand opening was the Derby Street Apple Store, at the Derby Street Shoppes in Hingham, MA.

The Derby Street Shoppes is a ‘lifestyle center’, a new and growing breed of shopping establishment. This is an arrangement with various stores of the type you’d find in a mall, only the store fronts are outside. I call it an overgrown strip mall. In any case, the Apple Store is located in between The Children’s Place and Burton’s Grill. It’s an average size Apple Store, with all of the features one would expect - lots of Apple and third party hardware and software, plenty of things to play with, and technical help at the Genius Bar.

I arrived at about 8:30 a.m., and at that point nobody was in line. A bunch of people were waiting around in their cars - a wise move, considering how cold it was. At about 9 a.m., the management came out and set up the velvet ropes. After that, people started getting in line. I ended up being about #20 in line after taking some photos. Once I was in line, I shot some more photos from my spot, and shot some video as well.

Since I’ve already been to many other Apple Stores, I wasn’t entralled as much by the store and its contents, but rather by the grand opening event, and all of the hoopla and crowds surrounding it. To that effect, you can check out my photo gallery of the event, as well as a movie that I shot with our new camcorder and edited in iMovie.

Enjoy!

Update

Here’s some other coverage from around the Interweb.

• Cape Cod Cyclist made a day of it
• V1Beta showed up to get a t-shirt
• Jishman goes to see yet another Apple Store
• TUAW has their call out for reports
• IFOAppleStore noted V1Beta’s photos of the grey-stone facade

Front Row

Apple’s latest iMac G5 comes with a piece of software called Front Row. This software is a pretty interface to the various types of media on your computer - movies, music, photos, and DVDs. The iMac G5 comes with the software pre-installed, and also includes a wireless remote so that you can control your Mac from the couch. But those of us who don’t have the new iMac can’t take advantage of this feature. Or can we?

Enter Front Row Enabler, a bit of software hackery that will allow users of Macs other than the latest iMac G5 to use Front Row. I downloaded it and installed it today on my Sawtooth PowerMac G4/450 (quite an old machine), and it actually works really well! Of course, I don’t have a remote, so I have to be sitting at the computer to use it. But it’s still pretty cool. Who says you can’t teach an old Mac new tricks?

Exciting Store Openings!

The Boston area has two very exciting store openings coming up!

First, we have the Apple Store Burlington Mall opening on Saturday, November 5 at 10 a.m.. Becky and I will be waiting in line early in the morning for the grand opening. The first 1,000 people through the door get free t-shirts! We probably won’t have much reason to visit the Burlington location on a regular basis, since the Northshore location is just minutes away from our house. But it will be cool to attend the opening day festivities. For an example of what those festivities might entail, check out the photos from the Chestnut Hill opening day event.

Next, we have the IKEA Stoughton opening on Wednesday, November 9 at 10 a.m. This will be the first IKEA in Massachusetts! Up until now, the closest one was in New Haven, CT. Sadly, we both have to work on the day of the grand opening, but we do plan on taking a trip out there sometime soon to check it out!