The Apple thread

[piku]

AppleCare is, as warranties go, one of the better ones.

Yeah absolutely - well worth having for the portables, slightly less necessary for the desktops I'd have said, but even then the price of being able to take it back to the store and go "just fix it already" rather than having to fiddle might sway it.

This is a major major win for Apple. I really like the way I just took my Mac to my nearest Mac store and said "fix it, it's broke", then collected it a week later.

No arsing around on the phone following tedious trouble shooting crap, no having to arrange a courier, losing the laptop for a month and finally getting it back after a month of hassle. Just two trips to the Apple store and it was sorted.

Had I know it'd be that simple I would have got it repaired earlier. It was one of those faults that didn't really stop the laptop from working - I could tweak the screen so it didn't distort - so thinking it would be endless hassle I left it.

You buy a PC and when it breaks you're either screwed, or have to fart around on a 50p/minute helpline for an hour.

Then again, for £700 I expect a high level of customer service

[pogo]

Whether the same lifespan will be likely for the intel machines, I don't know, although Apple are generally pretty good about not EOLing their hardware terribly fast. This is probably because they have a finite hardware base to support, and so can actually spend the time optimising (or, at least, testing) for the older machines.

Apple are also a software company, probably the leading vendor of software to owners of older Macs. The margins on software are much better than hardware, so they've every incentive to release OS X and iLife versions that run on older Macs. And the more copies of Leopard they sell the quicker apps are released for it and the quicker Apple can drop support for older versions themselves.

As for current Intel Mac longevity, I think it will be the best of any Mac ever, because I think these processors are the most future-proof we've seen. Apple made a big leap in the upgrade from PowerPC, but upgrades since have been much more incremental. I don't think we will ever see a jump like those between G3, G4, G5 and x86 again. We will see more cores, even in consumer PCs, but to most users >2 cores makes little difference.

[goldfish]

Can anyone suggest a good way of procuring an iSight camera, or recommend an alternative? I'm setting my old eMac up for my sister to use, and want to give her a way of using iChat DV, but it seems to need a firewire based camera. And of course the iSight looks pretty cool...

Simon

[tufty]

Can anyone suggest a good way of procuring an iSight camera, or recommend an alternative? I'm setting my old eMac up for my sister to use, and want to give her a way of using iChat DV, but it seems to need a firewire based camera. And of course the iSight looks pretty cool...

iSights are fucking expensive, even second hand. Probably better to look at laying your hands on a usb video class camera (supported in ichat since 10.4.9). You can always paint a toilet tube silver and put the camera inside it :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US ... ss_devices

Simon

[matt]

I use my Xbox 360 "Live Vision" camera with my Mac. Requires 10.4.9 or better, as tufty says, but works a treat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Live_Vision

matt

[goldfish]

Thanks chaps. I've plonked for a cheapish logitech job. I'm a little concerned about the USB1-ness of my eMac, but have got 10.4.whatever on it, so that's a start.

Will also pursue silver toilet roll tube addition for completeness...

Simon

[tufty]

Fuck me, Time Machine's the bollocks.

I mean, really. Fucking awesome. I was looking for a copy of the linux kernel source, that I had on my external drive a couple of weeks back, but couldn't be fagged to download and expand it again. So, a quick scroll back through the time machine, and there it was. Fuckin' awesome. On top of that, no need to actually restore it, all I needed to do was point textmate at the relevant folder on my backup drive. Sweet.

Just thought I'd share the love :)

[amanset]

Oh I know. I just love the peace of mind that all my documents, mp3s, photos, code and everything is backed up without me even having to think about it. The first time you restore something that you thought you had lost (for me a DashCode widget project) is a feeling just full of win.

[PinkFearie]

i just crashed my mac, i dont know how. was using pdf adobe view thing and it stopped doiung anything and then turned itself off

[RageMatrix]

i just crashed my mac, i dont know how. was using pdf adobe view thing and it stopped doiung anything and then turned itself off

Thats standard procedure for viewing PDFs on any operating system

[matt]

Apple's built in Preview application is a much better/faster/leaner PDF viewer.

[tufty]

Apple's built in Preview application is a much better/faster/leaner PDF viewer.

Not to mention that Apple's "print to PDF" is a much better / faster / leaner / cheaper PDF distiller etc etc

[goldfish]

Apple's built in Preview application is a much better/faster/leaner PDF viewer.

Not to mention that Apple's "print to PDF" is a much better / faster / leaner / cheaper PDF distiller etc etc

Not sure about that bit... Acro 8 produces far smaller, visually identical files to the Apple version.

Not that doesn't make it slower, clunkier, fall-over-ier, etc. just not necessarily always better/leaner...

Simon

[matt]

Depends what's in the PDF in my experience.

If I add my signature to a letter as greyscale TIFF, it varies wildly, but adding as 2bit PDF/tiff makes things a lot more similar.

[piku]

i just crashed my mac, i dont know how. was using pdf adobe view thing and it stopped doiung anything and then turned itself off

Yeah it does that. Kind of frustrating, but then again who really looks at BSODs on PCs?