A TUAW szerint a javításra beadott Apple termékekbe sok esetben nem új, hanem már használt cseredarabok kerülnek. A cikk írója, Josh Carr, dolgozott egy időben a Genius Bar néven futó szervízpultnál. Tapasztalatai szerint a szervízeknek szétküldött cserealkatrészek és -készülékek nagy része úgynevezett “újragyártott” (re-manufactured).

Főként az amerikai Apple boltokban amúgy is kaphatóak “újrahasznosított” (refurbished) készülékek. Ezeket a használt gépeket a boltban átellenőrzik, ha kell megjavítják, majd megtisztítva újra eladják némi kedvezménnyel. A marketinges magyarázat szerint az újragyártott abban különbözik az újrahasznosítottól, hogy az előbbit senki sem használta abban a formában, hanem bizonyítottan jól működő esetlegesen használt darabokból rakták össze.

Nyilvánvalóan a külső borítás ebben az utóbbi esetben új. Például egy iPhone tokja és az üveg értelemszerűen csak új lehet, viszont minden más darabnál (alaplap, LCD, stb.) fennáll a lehetőség, hogy egy elromlott használt telefon belsejéből került át.

Josh-sal ellentétben azonban én nem gondolom, hogy ez probléma lenne. Éppen ellenkezőleg, minden nagyobb szervízhálózatnak így kellene dolgoznia. (Sejtésem szerint biztosan nem csak az Apple használ tönkrement készülékekből darabokat javításhoz amúgy.) Tonnaszámra dobáljuk ki az elromlott technikát, amiből sok esetben még rengeteg darabot lehetne hasznosítani.

Én is kaptam a fekete MacBookba csere Logic Boardot. Új? Nem tudom, de valószínűleg nem. Zavar? Nem, ugyanis hibátlanul működik. És legalább az én kontómra megspóroltak egy alaplapnyi nyersanyagot.

Az ehhez hasonló történetekre is csak egy nyugati ember tud skandallumként tekinteni. Japánban a közhiedelemmel ellentétben nem minden high-tech és új, hanem inkább vigyáznak arra, amijük van. Meg vagyok győződve róla, hogy sok shinkansen szerelvény öregebb, mint a MÁV kocsijai, csak éppen nem graffitizik meg verik szét őket. Nyersanyag nincs, úgyhogy mindent újrahasznosítanak. Ha már nem kell a lakásba a DVD-lejátszó, akkor vagy elvitetik egy erre szakosodott használtcikk-boltossal vagy kiteszik az utcára, és valaki más elviszi.

I swear I’m at class.

The Rokko mountains are known to mess with the 3G signal and the GPS so I assume under better conditions the device can refine the location much better. Still it’ll give a general idea when (not if) I lose my phone.

Időnként biztosan mindenki belebotlik újságírói tévedésekbe vagy hozzá nem értést világosan tükröző cikkekbe. A lónak négy lába van ugyebár…

Valahogy az utóbbi időben megszaporodtak a hasonló esetek. Időben legrégebbről kezdve ez a Beszéljükmac-cikk borzolta fel az idegeim: ReSwitch: egy elkeseredett Apple fun, avagy ellenérv a szeretett Mac ellen hirdette a szalagcím. A fan (egyrészt rajongó, másrészt legyező/ventilátor) már igencsak beépült a világ összes nyelvébe, de úgy látszik írásban még mindig nem sikerült megjegyezni közte és a fun (szórakozás) közötti különbséget.

Az olvasói levélből még kiderült az is, hogy a felhasználó Machintos számítógépet használ. Nem gond, én is szoktam elgépelni dolgokat a blogon, csak innentől egyre nehezebb komolyan venni a cikkíró mondanivalóját. Örvendetes látni viszont, hogy a portál elolvasva a beérkezett kommenteket korrekciót végzett, és kijavította az ominózus hibákat. Azért az oldal permalinkje még őrzi az eredeti írásmódot például.

Rendben, mondhatjuk persze, de egy olvasói levéltől nem várhatunk el pontosságot és helyességet. Leszűrhető belőle, hogy a beküldő valószínűleg helyesen választott karriert, amikor nem szavak papírra vetésével kívánta megkeresni a napi betevőt, de nem több. Ezzel szemben az Index Magyarósi Csabája ha jól tudom, akkor a techrovatnál dolgozik, és ennek a fényében eléggé égő, hogy rácsodálkozott tesztjében a 60 fölé nem kúszó FPS értékre.

A Qwerty MaxxX brutális konfigurációja állt a tesztasztalon, és nyilván előkerültek a játékok az izzasztás során. Ezek küzül mindegyik vagy 60 kép per másodperc vagy ennek valamely hányadosát produkálta, amelyből a cikkíró levonta a következtetést: hiába erős a gép, ennyit tud. Persze bármelyik tizenéves gamer rögtön szólt volna, hogy a v-sync a ludas a dologban: egy szoftveres kapcsoló, ami arra hivatott, hogy a játék frissítési frekvenciáját ne engedje a monitoré fölé menni, ilyen módon megakadályozva, hogy a képben esetenként csúnya törés keletkezzen. A modern LCD monitorok frissítése ugyanis pont 60Hz.

Ez a cikk is visszakerült kis szerkesztésre, és most már kevésbé otrombán naív (a v-sync is szerepel már benne), de a teszteket azért nem sikerült megismételni olyan körülmények között, hogy értékelhető eredményt is mutassanak. Egy játékosnak ugyanis a v-sync bekapcsolásával kapott számok körülbelül annyit mondanak, mintha a Totalcar összemérne egy Ferrarit egy Porschéval a belvárosban 50-es sebességkorlátnál.

Végül a tárgyi és az angoltudás hiánya kombinálódott a NOL-nál a Twitterről szóló cikkükben:

A csatorna, amin keresztül mindezt megtehetik, az lehet sms, a Twitter honlapja, lehetnek azonnali üzenetküldő alkalmazások és lehet egy speciálisan erre a célra a saját számítógépünkre letöltött kis program is, ez utóbbit nevezzük Twitter API-nak.

Nem így van, ugyanis API-nak (Application Programming Interface) azt a felületet (eljárások, szolgáltatások és ezek leírása) nevezzük, amin keresztül a nevezett külsős programok csatlakozhatnak a Twitterhez. A saját számítógépünkre letöltött kis programok azok nemes egyszerűséggel kis programok. Mondjuk ha a cikk írója rákeresett volna a rövidítés jelentésére – ha már leírja – akkor lehet, hogy gyanút foghatott volna. Illetve ez utóbbi sem biztos, hiszen itt is probléma az angol:

Ezek után mondja azt valaki, hogy nem egy kialakuló trendről, hanem csak egy divathóbortról beszélünk – ezt már Váraljay Gábriel, egy hazai “fun” mondja, aki nem csupán rajongó: hónapok óta időt és energiát fektet abba, hogy marketingeszközként használja a szolgáltatást.

Na, itt is megjelentek a funok. Ez biztosan valami magyar jelenség, vagy ő is ott tanult angolt, ahol Áder “I’m a meeting” János (immáron MEP).

Nem tudom persze, hogy működik az online média, de a nagyobb szereplőknél egy szerkesztő vagy ne adj’ isten korrektor csak elolvassa ezeket, nem? Legalább a fun/fan dolgot ki lehetett volna szűrni. Valamint azzal is tisztában vagyok, hogy nem lehet egy újságíró egyben polihisztor is, viszont csak lehetett volna találni valakit, aki szánt volna rá öt percet, hogy átfussa, és látott már webkettőt. Azt hiszem ilyen kvalitású cikkeket én is tudnék írni.

Illetve nem, I’m just a media-terrorist.

I wanted to write about something significant today.

Like how pointless I sometimes feel everything is.

Or at least my opinion on the new iWiW apps.

But it didn’t seem to work, no matter what.

So here’s something usless, but amazing.

No, I didn’t come up with the idea.

Stole it from hettie.

Yesterday afternoon I visited the Apple Store in Shinsaibashi to present my dead battery. In short the Genius found the battery defective and issued a replacement. The whole caper took about twenty minutes, waiting included. As always I was stunned by the professional and enjoyable environment of the store and the quality of the support.

I made a few observations during my visit. For one, there was a guy walking around checking the customers waiting for their Genius Bar appointment. He wore a T-shirt captioned ‘I can make things happen.’ In contrast, the Geniuses’ shirts read ‘Relax. I’m on it.’ I found these a lot cooler than the usual ‘Hello. I’m XY. Can I help you?’ name tags.

When checking the battery the Genius used the following method. First he consulted the System Profiler and checked the battery status. Then he attached an iPod (!) to reboot into a little battery checker program which reported in huge red text that the battery was bad. All this was done with me able to watch as well, so I even caught the line where the battery self-reported its bad status.

What I find remarkable is that he could have used some third-party USB stick, but in the name of product unity the battery checker was put on an iPod. Because little things like this matter.

The golden week ended today so in the morning I popped the MacBook open to update the Documents folder via Dropbox. There was no reaction to the on switch so I plugged the laptop in thinking that I managed to deplete the battery completely. However instead of the usual orange charging light the charger lit up in a happy green and the menu bar icon reported: not charging. The problem persisted…

OS X acknowledges the presence of the battery but reports its full charge capacity at 0 mAh and refuses to charge. Reseating the battery or resetting the PMU didn’t help either. In addition the laptop now often boots with a flashing white light similar to the PMU reset indication. All this after only 67 cycles.

I spent most of the breaks today hunting for power outlets in classrooms. Of course the newer ones have desks with outlets for each seat but I never seem to be able to have classes there. The newer auditoriums have a few along the walls, but in one of the old buildings I had to sit in the very first row and nick an extension cable from the professor’s pulpit.

Hopefully I can visit the Apple Store in Osaka on Wednesday. I bought Snowflake in June 2008 after the ominous grapefruit juice incident so it’s still under warranty (I hope).

I still shudder at the thought of such things happening when I’m in Hungary with no Apple Stores around.

I have been patiently waiting for the Last.fm iPhone App to appear in the Japanese iTunes Store but I guess the local mobile music lobby is way too strong to allow it any soon. All the mobile providers here offer some kind of music streaming service after all.

The Last.fm App for the iPhone is currently only available in the US, the UK, Germany, Spain, France and Canada. If you don’t happen to live in these countries you are basically shafted – in theory.

So I decided to hack my way into the US iTS. It is surprisingly easy with the introduction of the free applications since formerly the biggest issue was to somehow acquire a valid credit card number of the target state.

Apple itself offers a “tutorial” on how to create an iTunes App Store account without a credit card. The only difference is that at the bottom of the iTS screen you have to select the US store:

And as an address you need to specify a valid US location for which I used the San Francisco Apple Store’s. Remember to register a different email as well if you already have an iTS registration. Piece of cake. Note that this works for any free iPhone Application you’d want to get from the US iTS.

Very elegantly the iPhone can feature Apps from different stores. At least I managed to retain all my previous applications exactly the way they were and simply had the Last.fm App transfer over as if it was from the J-Store as well.

As for the Last.fm App itself: I went shopping with my phone in my pocket tuned to my recommendations and I was on cloud nine. Bless my limitless 3G data plan now I can listen to Last.fm stations anywhere with adequate reception. (To my great disappointment mountains are blocking some of the Kobe-U classrooms.)

One weird issue I have encountered using the app is that it is prone to run out of buffer constantly using my WiFi network. This is quite strange since it never ever had such a problem on the obviously much slower 3G network. I suspect it is some coding quirk in Apple’s networking implementation or in the Last.fm App’s streaming code. For now I just disabled WiFi entirely since 3G is fast enough for anything anyway.

Out of the blue, Apple announced a public beta of the latest fourth version of the Safari browser. Loyal to its version number the new Safari is claimed to be more than four times faster than its predecessor when it comes to JavaScript execution. It also boasts a number of sweet new features. Naturally the sesam.hu editorial office went for the upgrade at once.

All in all my experience is that the browser is quite a bit snappier. Pages just pop right in instead of assembling visibly. I tested the advertised JavaScript speedup with gmail and me.com and boy were those pages lightning fast to load. It’s not all marketing Safari 4 really is zippy.

Probably the first thing that everyone will notice when looking at the new Safari is that the tab bar has changed into a Chrome-style tabbed title bar. This is definitely a shocker at first but one can get used to it pretty fast. The tabs actually look good with the fake depth added, however this comes at the cost of space: with a lot of tabs open they start to be quite narrow and exponentially harder to manage. Also one can no longer pick a tab up just by clicking anywhere on it: a new hot spot is added to the right corner that serves as a pick-up handle. Due to my old habits however I tended to start pulling the whole browser window around instead of just one tab. (Don’t mind the little bug button, it is there only for the beta to report bugs. I left it on because I liked the little insect icon.)

The address bar has changed as well. Visibly, they removed the reload button. That one took me by surprise and I spent a good five minutes looking for it until I found out that it has moved to the end of the address bar as an icon rather than a button. Even knowing this I’m still reflexively going to the left for the nonexistent button. Old habits die hard.

I also couldn’t figure out why pages seemed to load in a different way when it hit me that the ingenious blue loading bar in the address field was gone too. Instead a very small rotating wheel indicates loading at the position of the reload icon. To be honest I liked the blue bar a lot and I hope it will make a reappearance.

Under the hood the address and google bars now offer a search in the history as well as autocompletion. I like it that they haven’t gone over the top with it, Firefox style. I didn’t mind the old spartan version, but the new list is useful and easy to get used to.

A spectacular new feature has also been added called Top Sites. It’s a curved black panel from which the most frequently visited sites can be accessed via refreshing thumbnails. Visually it looks stunning, even though I heard the design is basically stolen from Opera – a browser I have never used. It is now an option that new tabs and browser windows would open with the Top Sites. I originally suspected this would be slow and choppy but Apple has pleasantly disappointed me there: new tabs with Top Sites pop just as fast as if it was a blank page.

Top Sites originally uses your most frequently visited pages, but there is an edit button on the lower left to customise it. (Maybe you want to change the six porn sites it originally loads up with.) You can choose how many thumbnails you’d like to have from 6 to 24. Sites can be pinned to position, preventing them from being moved or swapped to another one. You can actually select the pages you’d want there but it’s a tad tricky and quite counterintuitive: bookmarks don’t work but you can open another browser window and drag the site of your choice to a slot from the address bar. (Kudos to wyctim for figuring that out.)

I set my Top Sites to the six pages I most frequently open with a new tab: IMDB, Wowhead, Wikipedia, Torrent searches and Last.fm. This way a simple command+T and a click is sufficient to reach them. Very neat and speeds up browsing quite a bit.

Another eyecandy is the introduction of cover flow to the browser history. It may seem frivolous but I actually found it useful. Countless times have I found that I only remembered how a site looked but not the actual address of it. Now I can just flip through the – again, surprisingly fast – thumbnails to find it.

It is also helping that the history search now indexes not only addresses but titles and site contents as well. Again, why would I remember some obscure web address, I only remember that there was a site I visited about this and that: now it’s all easily searchable. Results can be presented in cover flow as well.

I suspect though that the conspiracy theorists will not rest and quite soon we will have headlines like “Apple saves a picture of every website you visit” and “Safari 4 spies on you: it remembers everything you read” and so on. Much as people cried wolf about the iPhone snapping a screenshot of webpages for the shrinking effect of the home screen.

For the visually impaired and elderly Safari offers a full-page zoom. You can choose between text-only or overall options and use the command + +/- keys to zoom in and out. Luckily this is not a feature I’d need just quite yet, but it’s neatly implemented nevertheless.

Safari 3 is – I believe – the first non-development public browser to pass the Acid 3 test 100/100.

Quite awesome tools help the developers make their page faster and bug-free. I haven’t used these before so I am not sure how new some of these features are, but the web inspector sure looks pretty. I am going to need more delving in the developer menu to say more.

For you MICROS~1 people out there Safari now lost its Mac-like interface and offers a native look under XP and Vista with Windows-style scroll bars and whatnot. This actually poses and interesting dilemma if the Windows version of iTunes will follow suit in a later build or not.

One bug I have found is that the new Safari – funny it may sound – breaks the GrowlMail plugin. It has to do something with reading HTML email. Every time I got a HTML email Mail silently crashed until I disabled the Growl notifications. Hopefully a new build of the plugin will address this issue. Until then there is nothing to do but keep it switched off. Uninstall is not required.

Other than that the beta never crashed on me, not once. Everything works as intended and until now it has been proven rock solid.

Now what are you waiting for, go and get your new Safari! Available for the Mac and Windows.

I think it’s interesting how I wasn’t much moved by the feature list Apple unveiled at the 2009 Macworld upon reading until I saw the keynote Phil Schiller delivered. 

I gave up on trying to not read spoilers before watching the actual keynote. I am subscribed to too many Mac-related feeds just to do that. And also there are all the social networking sites, blogs, instant messengers that are buzzing with the news. So I read the lists and thought to myself: is that it?

Now even though I’m still quite disappointed by the lack of any Mac mini related announcements I started to like a lot of things just by watching the keynote.

For example the face recognition feature they built in the new iPhoto with Facebook and Flickr integration. Seriously, how cool is that? I’m sure the technology is nothing groundbreaking, but really does any desktop software do anything similar on the current market? Especially one shipping for free with a newly purchased computer? I’m quite eager to try having iPhoto create nice lists of pictures of my family, to check how well the algorithms deal with aging, etc.

Then there is the geotagging, which I guess critics will point out isn’t much more than Google maps built in. But the important thing is that as simple a feature as that it is still implemented with such finesse and attention to detail that is an Apple trademark.

The “it just works” is not only a slogan, I can see there is an actual desire by the engineers to make that true.

For example when Norbi left for Hungary he left his printer behind. It was simply too big and heavy to carry or send after him. So I got to use it and I plugged it in the MacBook. I waited, but nothing happened. No bubbles telling me that new hardware was connected, no pop-up questions if I wanted to search for a driver. Little did I know, that the printer was actually ready to use.

I only figured it out after checking the Print & Fax section of the System Preferences: there it was, Canon Pixus iP4200, ready to print. And all I did was plugging it in. Had I tried to print something right after connecting the USB cord, it would have been done. Simple as that.

Another time I recommended gmail to my brother, primarily because of the IMAP protocol. He was using the old black MacBook, the one I almost killed. He later told me he was a bit worried before he tried to set up the gmail account with OS X’s Mail. The unfortunate side effect of me being the tech savvy person in the family is that no one else really needs to know computer related things, they just ask me. So he was unsure if he could enter a correct server, select a port to use, etc.

However, the process went quite differently. First Mail asked what kind of mailbox he’d like to set up, where he selected gmail. Then he was prompted for the address, which he typed in. And that was it. Mail started to synchronise with gmail, and his emails appeared in the inbox. Simple, effective.

Apple can be accused of being all marketing, but so far I have a lot more positive first-hand experiences and reliable recounts of Macs being useful and jaw-droppingly user friendly than any other product. There must be something with these white, or lately aluminium-coloured, boxes that fills an auditorium with people just to listen to a speech about them. And I don’t think it’s just because of fanboys or brainwashed consumers.

DRM getting out of hands again: imagine the poor schoolteacher’s shock when his new aluminum MacBook refused to play a movie he bought from the iTunes Store because a “a display that is not authorized to play protected movies” was connected.

The technology is called HDCP – High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - and its main purpose is to protect digital content traveling through various high definition capable display ports from being copied. In this case it also prevented the teacher from showing a movie to his class on a projector.

Arguably a presentation of a movie to a classroom of kids stretches Fair Use or Private Viewing, and I don’t know what the relevant US laws say. But still I think that if any DRM causes this kind of frustration to the rightful owners of the content, then it is flawed, and very much so.

Also if we assume that the exact same thing could happen to anyone who would want to watch a perfectly legally obtained HD movie at home, it’s hard to argue that the protection used is effective. (In the teacher’s case the Mini DisplayPort – VGA adapter caused the error.) Rightful owners should not be treated like criminals.

Commenters pointed out that the incorporation of the HDCP technology is probably the price Apple had to pay for getting a permission to put BluRay devices in future Macs. Also, since Apple is in the unique position of offering a download-and-carry model with the iTunes Store – meaning the customers will have a fully assembled movie file on their end when buying content – the licensors can play all kinds of hardball games with Apple in exchange for letting their content in.