Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
If you know me, you will know I hate Mac’s. However, the day has finally arrived where I decided to take a risk and go to buy one for myself. Not being a strong follower of the Apple movement, I purchased my MacBook Pro on sunday 7th June. I got home, installed some apps (dragging an icon around the screen seemed to be how you install an app), and started to get used to the interface. All was great until the afternoon on Monday. I had James, the designer @ Just Develop It send me a text message telling me Apple dropped the price of the MacBook Range and also upgraded all of the hardware… Gutted.
I called the Apple Store straight away, and they said it would be fine to just bring it back and get a new one when it came in stock. Yesterday it arrived at the store so I went down and exchanged my old MacBook Pro for a nice shiny new one. They even gave me money back. Money Back for an upgrade? Are they mad. I dont know how I have gone from hating apple, to loving them within the space of a week, and also now being the owner of my second apple.
I have to admit, Apple products are Very well designed, even the packaging is amazing. I hope that my previous view on Mac Users was wrong, because I dont want to trade productivity for a good looking laptop. Setup was fairly painless with nearly everything being done for me, and I just had to go into the settings to tweak the system to act more like windows. Working out all the short cut keys didnt take long (apart from Home & End, which I later found to just be cmd + the arrow keys) . I have enabled the ‘right’ mouse button (bottom right of the trackpad) and am loving Expose and Spaces. The only problem I have faced so far is the mouse guestures in Opera, but then what do you expect from a trackpad 
Without having the full expierence of a Mac yet, im going to hold of saying any more unless it turns out to be a nightmare
The Ultimate Wireless Base Station – Apparently
I purchased a 1TB Apple Time Capsule two weeks ago in the hope that it would work perfectly with iTunes, Apple TV and most of all, file sharing.
Im sorry to report that it did a pretty awful job at all of these things I expected to come as standard. On the up side of this, the wireless connectivity I received was amazing, and I can’t fault apple there.
The Setup Process
When I first plugged in my Time Capsule, I got a wireless signal straight away and connected my laptop instantly. I installed the CD that came in the HUGE box and the setup program ran away and connected and asked me for more information to join the network. As I was in the office at the time, I decided to give this a miss until I got home (where the TC would be living), and tried to access the default network share. This just prompted me for some logins, obviously I hadn’t setup the device, so I shut everything down and waited till I got home. So far, not looking too great compared to other NAS drives I have purchased.
When I arrived home, I plugged in and went through the setup. Now, apple have some great ‘Extend your wireless network’ option, which sounds great, but in fact simply just brings down your existing network and the time capsule. So I had to reset the device settings and go again. Finally, I got everything setup and working as it should.
Connecting To The Drive
Apple decided it wanted to have the IP address of 192.168.0.2, (very annoying as there is already a machine in the office on that IP, so using the Time Capsule when connected to VPN was a big no no unless I wanted to change all my local IP setup. So I went ahead and just didn’t connect to VPN until I had transferred all my files. And I wish it was that easy. \\192.168.0.2 – The usual ‘Windows’ way only worked about 50% of the time. I can’t even start to wonder how I can ping the TC but not connect to the file share. I then setup a hostname for the damn thing and got going on \\timecap which actually worked out pretty well.
After I started transferring the 600GB or so (in a few different connections) the whole thing would seem to close all the transfer windows and the drive would appear offline. I then had to wait about 10 minutes and it would automagically come back online. During this time, I was able to access the internet without problems, but the time capsule configuration tool could not see the device, and nor could windows. I was however connected to the wireless network provided by the TC (so I guess it only half crashed).
Refund Time
So, obviously 90% of Apple devices are not for me, and im not at all upset about that. I have the iPhone and the Apple TV, but I think that is about as far as my life will delve into Apple. I phoned Apple today and after telling them I had a windows machine, they were fresh out of ideas of how to fix the problems (I would like to point out, they didn’t have any ideas… at all). I requested a full refund, and somehow, being passed around various departments, this ended up to be a replacement? I shouldn’t think so Apple. I want my money back! In the end they decided they could give me a refund, so im waiting for a call from their courier to arrange a time for collection.
It sucks that Apple can’t create products that just work… they are big enough!
I have ordered up my new NAS drive, which supports iTunes amongst other things, so I hope all goes well
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SEAGATE BARRACUDA 7200.11 1TB SATA II 7200RPM 32MB CACHE 11MS 300MB/S
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SYNOLOGY DS108J 1-BAY SATA NAS SERVER FOR HOME AND SMALL WORKGROUP
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It arrives tomorrow! YEY! I can hopefully get my data off the Time Capsule and onto my new drive before the TC is collected.