Respect Sakura

Update: Okay, looks like 10.5.2 now allows you to setup AirDisks for Time Machine again, so my bitch about Time Capsule is a moot point. Now I just have to stop myself from getting that RAID enclosure…Hay guys, y’know that thing about 10.5.2 fixing AirDisks for use with Time Machine? Well, it was all a load of bullshit and chips. Looks like I have to throw my AirPort Extreme away, and buy a Time Capsule instead. Way to go, Apple.

Just so people don’t go accusing me of being the next Walt Mossberg or David Pogue, I thought I’d write a few things about how Apple’s doing so far, this year.

So… first off the bat, we have the Mac Pro refresh and boy, what a refresh! We’ve got Quad cores in every model, except for the single processor version (and hey, there’s a single processor version!). We’ve also got a brand new chipset, bus speed, and updated RAM speeds which will stop all those PC folk laughing at the “low” speed of the memory in a machine that costs 4 grand.

To top it off, we also have an awesome array (well, 3) of PCI Express video cards that will again, stop PC folk laughing at the 2 year old graphic card options in a “state of the art” machine. What’s even better, is that they sell the video cards as separate components, so people who own the previous Mac Pro models can now upgr-oh wait :v:

That’s actually a lie, because as many older Mac Pro owners will tell you, the nVIDIA 8800 GT - pretty much the only card worth buying for the Mac Pro at this point - only works with the just released Mac Pro. The technical reasons as to why differ, depending on which rumour site to believe, but the common theory at this stage, is because the original Mac Pros had a 32-bit EFI firmware, whereas the barely-a-week-old Mac Pro uses a brand new 64-bit EFI firmware implementation.

In Apple’s defense, it appears to have been an oversight between nVIDIA and Apple somewhere, and the incompatibility with the GeForce 8800 GT and the earlier Mac Pro models was purely to do with differing EFI versions and stuff. Furthermore, Apple and nVIDIA seem to be on the case in regards to fixing this up. Truthfully, this doesn’t directly effect me, but I do have a couple of friends who are sighing a sigh of relief that they won’t have to go out and spend around $4,300 just to get a slightly better video card.

What would be nicer, is if Apple dropped the price of their X1900XT to something more in line with, say, PC video card prices (a PC X1950 Pro with 512MB is generally half Apple’s goddamn price, for fuck’s sake) to make up for the firmware bungling on the 8800GT. Then maybe they can start a cold storage business for Eskimos.

Then there’s the MacBook Air. A 13″ widescreen notebook with a choice between a 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz processor, a choice between an 80GB hard drive of slow and fail, or a speedy yet small 64GB SSD, and 2GB of RAM, with the same graphics and chipset as the standard MacBook, minus the optical drive, and possessing only a single USB port, micro-DVI port, and audio-out port. While this would normally sound like a budget notebook on specs alone (at least, the first configuration would), the thing costs $2,499. What’s more, the higher end model (1.8GHz, SSD) costs $4,338. Jesus Tittyfucking Christ, I hear you exclaim. Well, its gimmick is that it’s absurdly fucking thin, as in you can slide one into those internal mail envelopes you see in offices everywhere. It’s barely thicker than your index finger, and weighs only 1.5kg - which is pretty cool, if you think about it. In terms of the subnotebook market, this thing kicks the shit out of all the other subnotebook attempts out there.

However, it still doesn’t address the fact that you’re paying a whole lot more for something a whole lot less in comparison to the Macbook, when ultimately you wind up with half the weight. I only know of one or two people offhand, who could be in the market for a subnotebook, and said people are:

1. Rich, and
2. Complete fucking imbeciles

I think the MacBook Air is an amazing feat of engineering, but Apple couldn’t have missed the mark more if they were pointing in the opposite direction, and the mark was in an entirely different country. Sure, the world’s thinnest notebook is cool and all that, but when the MacBook Air weighs 1.5kg, while the MacBook weighs in at 3kg and is in every way superior in terms of performance and featureset, one has to ask precisely what kind of problem does the MacBook Air really solve? If anything, the MacBook Air seems to only produce more problems, with its inherent lack of an optical drive or ethernet port, and the fact that the battery in the thing isn’t user replaceable.

That last bit is a particular stickler for me, because unlike folks in the good ol’ US of A, we don’t have Apple stores on every corner - in fact, we don’t have Apple Retail in this country at all. The only option for Australians to get the battery swapped out, is to send the sucker off to Apple, and wait a week or so for it to come back. Not to mention if you’re travelling long distances with the thing, and want to keep a spare battery in order to keep you running if the time between power points is longer than the aforementioned 5 hours you’re going to get out of this thing.

I’d like to be able to say “Well, hey.. that’s kinda cool. Bit pricey, but I’m not really the market that Apple are aiming for with this”, but I honestly can’t think of any real market for the thing, outside of rich people or complete pussies. If any of my friends expressed an interest in this thing, I’d strongly advise that they harden the fuck up, and get themselves a MacBook or MacBook Pro, instead.

Last but not least, we have Time Capsule, which surprisingly enough hasn’t had much mention in the press, lately. If you haven’t heard, it’s a combination of a wireless-N base station, complete with 4 gigabit ports that can also act like a router only with the addition of a 500GB or 1TB hard drive in it that works seamlessly - and wirelessly - as a Time Machine repository, that wonderful, wonderful backup solution of Leopard’s. There’s just one problem. I already bought an AirPort Extreme to do this, in combination with the 400GB (for now, a larger one was planned) drive I have in a USB enclosure. In fact, I was kind of hoping that I’d be able to use my Windows Home Server for this exact purpose - but I can understand the need for a HFS+ volume to do it with.

That said, Time Capsule is pretty damn good. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of Windows Home Server, albeit not with quite the same level of expandability, but then again Time Capsule is a hell of a lot cheaper at the equivalent storage levels. It’s a hell of a lot more simple, meaning that real people (not geeks like you and I) will actually buy this thing, and be capable of setting it up themselves, as opposed to Home Server. The problem for me is that as of right now, Time Machine doesn’t play nicely at all with the AirPort Extreme - and that’s effectively all that Time Capsule is - an AirPort Extreme with a hard drive slapped inside. If the release of Time Capsule doesn’t coincide with either a fix for Time Machine, or a fix for the AirPort Extreme, then we’re going to end up assuming that Apple just made me their bitch.

Even so, I probably will end up buying this thing, simply because I’m in need of a NAS solution for backing up my Macs, and the Home Server just can’t do that, with or without Time Machine. WHS has this wonderful bug with corrupting data stored on shares, and basically stems from trying to modify the data directly on the server, as opposed to keeping a local copy and just copying over the updated version. I’m willing to bet that a backup solution (ie, Super Duper) would end up writing gibberish onto the Home Server, instead of backing up correctly. That, and the Home Server’s almost full, requiring me to look into alternative storage methods anyways.

So there you have it. Yes, even I can poo-poo Apple, once in a while. All in all, Macworld ‘08 was kind of pretty much disappointing, but the update of the Mac Pro a week before it was all I was personally hanging out for, anyways. I’d also hoped to hear mention of when/if the iPhone was coming to these shores, but I think I’ve got enough to spend money on for the time being.