Tech DC » Apple

iTunes Match

Rick — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:11:02 +0000

Benefits

iTunes Match accomplishes a few things for me:

Updates my collection to 256 kbps aac files (higher quality)
Backs up my collection online (iCloud)
Makes it easier to use other Apple products for my music collection without needing to download everything. This makes it easier to use a lower capacity laptop, iPhone, or iPad.

It’s worked pretty seamlessly for me and costs $25/year, although you only need one year if you just are interested in accomplishing #1 above.

Updating to 256 kbps

I followed the Macworld instructions to create a Smart Playlist that shows just the songs needing an upgrade (see picture). Hold down option key when clicking the plus to add the conditional rule for iCloud Matched or Purchased.

Then I selected all the files and deleted them, making sure to NOT select to delete them from iCloud. Then I downloaded the files over a couple of days.

RIP Steve Jobs

Rick — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:12:25 +0000

by Tony Auth

Keynotes – Amazon and Apple

Rick — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:34:23 +0000

It’s been an exciting week of product announcements from Amazon and Apple. Decide who does a better Steve Jobs impersonation.

Amazon Kindle Press Conference – September 28, 2011, New York, NY

Apple Special Event – October 4, 2011, Cupertino, CA

Mac Eject Key for External Disk Drive

Rick — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 21:57:24 +0000

Apple keyboards have an eject key in the upper right corner that works with built-in Mac DVD drives. If you have a new Mac Mini without an optical drive, you might want to use a 3th party external disk drive. The problem is that the eject key doesn’t work for these drives.

Thanks to tjb1 at MacRumors who gave instructions on how to make the eject key work.

Download and install KeyRemap4Macbook. Restart is required for use.
Open System Preferences > KeyRepma4Macbook
Make sure you are on the “Change Key” menu and click in the search bar in KeyRemap4Macbook, not the search for System Preferences.
Type “eject” in the search bar and check the box next to “Eject to Command+Control+Option+Shift+E”
Exit System Preferences and open Automator.
Choose the template “Service” and hit “Choose” at the bottom right.
In the search bar at the top left, type “Run Shell Script”
Drag “Run Shell Script” from the left to the Workflow Area.
At the top above “Run Shell Script” click the arrows next to “Service receives selected text” and pick “no input” at the bottom of the list.
Next delete “cat” from the Shell Script and type this “drutil eject”
While in Automator go File > Save As > Eject
Close Automator and open System Preference > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts
In Keyboard Shortcuts choose Services in the left box.
In the right, scroll down to “General” and you should see “Eject” listed.
Make sure the box beside “Eject” is checked and double click on the right side, left of the scroll bar. This should open text box where you hold down Command+Control+Option+Shift+E. This will enter those keys as shown here.
Restart the operating system.
Close System Preferences and the Eject key should now eject your external cd/dvd/blu ray drive.

2011 Mac Mini Hard Drive Upgrade Video

Rick — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 15:27:46 +0000

We just upgraded a 2011 Apple Mac Mini to have an SSD, a second hard drive, and new RAM.

Video

.
Also available on YouTube in High Definition or Standard Definition.

IMPORTANT NOTE: at 2 minutes in, you should pop the fan cable up, not forward toward us, to remove it. Some people recommend using a plastic spatula to pop it up. (Thanks to Jon in the comments for pointing out this error)

Parts List

OCZ 120 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-120G
Western Digital 1TB Blue WD10JPVT 5400RPM, 8 MB cache, 2.5 inch, 9.5MM height hard drive
Corsair 8 GB DDR3 Laptop Memory Kit CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9
Apple Mac Mini Model MC816LL/A 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 dual-core processor, AMD Radeon HD 6630M graphics, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive
Cable: Apple Part 922-9560, also called “Apple Mac Mini Server (Mid 2010) Bottom Hard Drive Server Flex Cable” or “Hard Drive Flex Cable Bottom”. We used part number 1009005 at welovemacs.com. This is sold as a kit from ifixit.com.

Alternate Parts List

The OCZ Vertex 3 is the fastest consumer SSD at the moment. Other SSD’s that you might consider include:

Highest reliability SSD: Intel 510 Series 120 GB
Best value high capacity SSD: Lexar Media Crucial 512 GB m4

The Western Digital Blue drive mentioned above is high capacity and quiet. For a faster spinning hard drive consider:

Western Digital 750TB Black WD7500BPKT 7200RPM, 16 MB cache, 2.5 inch, 9.5MM height hard drive

The dedicated graphics in the mid-tier Mac Mini make it worth it for me. But for the cheapest Mini, consider:

Apple Mac Mini MC815LL/A 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 dual-core processor, integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000, 2GB RAM, 500GB hard drive

UPDATE: My video shows adding two 9.5MM height drives. I just upgraded another Mac Mini with a 9.5MM SSD and a 12.5MM standard hard drive. As with my first upgrade, the hard drive goes in the bottom slot (the side closest to the top of the case when upright). This does fit. But first you need to slide the logic board out slightly. Be sure to remove the IR port adapter before sliding out the logic board. The OWC video shows how to do this. I used a cut up coat hanger to insert into the logic board holes and slide it out.

First Boot

Starting with a blank hard drive is easy on the 2011 Mac Mini. Hold down Command-R to boot into Lion Recovery which allows you to format the drives and download Lion over the Internet.

TRIM Support in Lion

For optimal SSD performance, enable TRIM support within OS X Lion. Grant Pannell describes the terminal commands to enable TRIM.

Photos of Upgrade

Opened

Fan Removal

WiFi Connection

Empty Drive Bay

Original Hard Drive

Drive Bay Side View 1

Drive Bay Side View 2

New Hard Drive & Cable

New Hard Drive Insertion

New SSD

New SSD & Drive Cables Attached

New RAM

Attach Fan

My New Spotlight in Lion

Rick — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:57:46 +0000

Here’s a funny glitch that eventually corrected itself. After installing Mac OSX Lion, spotlight initially thought it needed 5 years to index all my files.

iPad 2 announced and parodied

Rick — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:17:08 +0000

Here’s the official video from Apple from their March 2 announcement:

And here’s the best parody video that I’ve seen of it so far:

Steve Jobs Takes Medical Leave

Rick — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 02:03:42 +0000

All the best to Steve Jobs who sent this to Apple employees today:

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve

Three stories told by Steve Jobs at Stanford’s 2005 commencement speech:

New MacBook Air’s (Late 2010) Review and Benchmarks

Robert — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:35:22 +0000

It would be easy to dismiss the new MacBook Air as slow due to its apparently slow processor but if you did, you’d be wrong.

Offerings

The new Air comes in 4 base models.

$994 – 11.6″ 1.4GHz CPU 64GB storage

$1194 – 11.6″ 1.4GHz CPU 128GB storage

$1294 – 13.3″ 1.86GHz CPU 128GB storage

$1594 – 13.3″ 1.86GHz CPU 256GB storage

What’s so special about it?

The obvious impressive feature of the Air is the size being extremely thin and weighing 2.3 lbs (11.6″ model) or 2.9 lbs (13.3″ model). But what really makes it worth having is what’s under the hood. The CPU is not cutting edge, maxing out at just 2.13GHz. However, the graphics and hard drive are so much faster, this more than offsets the CPU for most users.

Graphics (GPU)

The 320M graphics are about 2-3Xs faster than the previous 9400M. Graphics performance is becoming more and more important since apps like iPhoto and the Mac OS itself do a lot of animation and tasks that can be run on the GPU. The latest version of Mac OS X actually has the ability to run tasks that would normally be on the CPU on the GPU instead. Programs do have to be developed for that but it is something Apple is heavily pushing developers to do.

Disk Storage

The hard drive actually isn’t a hard drive. It has flash storage, much like that found in the iPhone or iPad. Flash storage is typically significantly faster but also very expensive. The price points that Apple has been able to create with this kind of fast storage is quite impressive. Any task that involves the disk will be massively faster than any other MacBook Apple offers. This is perhaps the most impressive feature of the new Airs. There are various hard drive tasks but most will fall in the range of 2-6Xs faster than a hard drive found in other MacBooks.

Screen

These MacBook Air’s have a much higher ppi (pixels per inch) than the other MacBooks. The higher the ppi, the sharper things look. The 13.3″ Air actually has the same resolution as the 15.4″ MacBook Pro. That means if you had them side by side, they could show the exact same content on the screen at the same time though the Air’s would appear slightly smaller since the pixels are squeezed into a smaller screen.

One thing I immediately noticed on the screen was that it seemed to be less reflective than the other MacBook’s. This is a photo of the Air 13.3″ next to a MacBook Pro 15.4″ with the screens pointed at the same set of windows.

The screen is clearly less reflective. This may be because the Pro has that sheet of glass across the whole area and the Air does not. Whatever the reason, I far prefer a less reflective screen.

What is it no good at?

Multi-threaded CPU intensive tasks are definitely the biggest weak point. In this regard, the MacBook Pro i5 is about twice as fast. If you do a lot of this, you may not be satisfied with the Air. If you don’t know what multi-threading is, then this likely won’t be a problem for you. An example of this is making digital backups of your DVDs with Handbrake. Handbrake is multi-CPU optimized and will perform much better on any other Mac.

Flash storage is typically smaller. The $999 MacBook Air has just 64GB storage. The 11.6″ can have up to 128GB and the 13.3″ starts at 128GB and goes up to 256GB. If you don’t plan on storing lots of photos or movies, the 64GB or 128GB should not be a problem.

Real World

In informal real world feel tests, typical tasks like browsing, email and application startup don’t feel slow at all. Safari and Mail load on one bounce in the dock. iPhoto feels quite fast, probably because loading all those photos from the faster storage really helps. For typical day to day use of a normal user, this MacBook Air is not only decent, but it feels faster than others just because of the flash drive storage.

Benchmarks

We benchmarked the MacBook Air 13.3″ 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo which is the fastest model. The overall Xbench score was 180. In comparison, a previous generation MacBook Pro 15.4″ 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo gets about a 137 and current generation MacBook Pro i7 gets about 174. The Xbench overall score tries to take every type of performance into account. This doesn’t mean the Air is faster than an i7. At multi-threading, the i7 is more than twice as fast. But overall, the Air is competitive because of the big gains in disk speed and graphics. The Xbench disk score was 238 compared to other MacBooks which get around 55 at best. It is this disk score that really raises the overall score.

Xcode is a development program for creating software for the Mac or iOS. I’ve heard a lot about how this Air still couldn’t possibly be used by developers. Well, we tested a rather large project consisting of over 20K lines of code to compile and about 15MBs of resources (images and data files). When building a project in Xcode, it has to do both file copying (disk intensive) and code compiling (CPU intensive). Building this project took 15s on a quad core Mac Pro with software raid drives and 33s on a MacBook Pro 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo. The 2.13GHz Air was able to do it in 24s, much faster than the MacBook Pro. This was a surprise but shows just how the old hard drives cause a slowdown of all the tasks in building the project.

Conclusion

All previous MacBook Air’s were higher priced and underpowered. They had much slower CPUs even though they were the same clock speeds. They had either slow hard drives or insanely expensive SSDs (solid-state drives) and subpar graphics. Apple clearly worked hard to make a product that could truly be a potential system for almost anyone.

The 11.6″ MacBook Air should be an attractive option at less than $1,000. If you want small, this is it. It is just 1.4GHz but for most uses, this should be fast enough. The $1300 model is probably the best value, offering you enough storage with 128GB and a much faster CPU at 1.86GHz.

Snow Leopard Review

Robert — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:29:13 +0000

Snow Leopard

The latest version of Mac OS X is out, already with a system update available. It costs $29 but you can find it cheaper at places like amazon.com. Overall it is probably worth getting for most users but it is not without its troubles.

The Good

The behind-the-scenes components have been optimized to be far more efficient. For apps that are designed to take advantage of the new OS, they are significantly faster. For now, that mainly means Apple applications like Mail or Safari. Boot time and resume time are also much faster.

There is a new dock expose feature where you can hold down on an app icon in the dock to see all of its windows only in expose. This can be handy if you have a lot of open windows and only want to see those of a particular program. This is one of the very few new features since this OS is mainly just background improvements.

Several of the OS enhancements are not being taken advantage of yet by third party application providers. Once snow leopard versions of programs come out, the benefits will become far more prominent. The new OpenCL feature is particularly interesting. Typically your powerful graphics card is not doing very much. OpenCL allows programs to perform calculations that would normally be done on the CPU to also be done on the video card. For many tasks, this could result in massive speed improvements. Only time will tell how many developers take advantage of this but it seems likely for the big developers like Adobe to do so.

The Bad

Besides Apple apps, most programs don’t seem much faster. In fact, some seem a tad slower, probably in need of a snow leopard built version. In the worst case, there are some applications that don’t run in snow leopard at all. Some of the more notable ones are older versions of Photoshop or Parallels.

Since installing snow leopard, I’ve seen an odd behavior every few days where the transparent menu bar becomes opaque white and the system becomes quite sluggish for no apparent reason with no programs using up a lot of resources. Only a reboot resolves things. This is very un-Mac behavior. This is an upgraded system that has been migrated from other Macs a few times so it is possible it just needs a fresh install of the OS from scratch but that just makes me feel like I’m using Windows again. I’ve only seen this on one system, a current model Mac Pro.

Perhaps the worst thing about Snow Leopard is just that it isn’t a major change and there isn’t much obvious benefit besides some current performance improvements while waiting for programs to further take advantage.

Conclusion

Snow Leopard will probably be pretty sweet once there are more programs built to fully use it. In the mean time, I do enjoy the fastest browser I’ve ever used and having my email pop up instantly. You definitely can’t argue with the $29 price. However, there’s really no rush for most users to upgrade. Waiting a few months is probably more than fine so you can give developers time to make necessary changes.