Lorax is Obsolete?

October 15, 2008 Timothy Sanders

Say it ain’t so! Ah Lorax, we hardly knew ye! (For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, Apple announced new laptop models.) Well, I announcing Lorax’s demise is an overstatement in any case. Don’t get me wrong, the new machines look pretty sexy and I think they are going to be great value for the money. But the difference between what they are selling now and what’s inside Lorax is pretty minimal. The changes to the Macbooks (as opposed to the Macbook Pros) are more substantial and I think all to to the good. The Pros get a new shell, a bigger hard drive, and some new video chips. (Actually the Pros can get a CPU boost at the high end as well but the default MBP now is the exact same CPU as what Lorax has.) The video chips sound nice, but Spore runs just fine on Lorax and that’s all the laptop game playing I’m likely to do in the near future. The chipset in Lorax is good enough for light development work and that’s what I wanted. (I’ll note that when I bought Lorax a large part of my model selection was hinged on the fact that the Macbooks had the shitty Intel “integrated” chipset. It’s a major win now that all the laptops have real video hardware. And this could become more important next year when Snow Leopard comes out and suddenly you can run “general purpose” code on a GPU.) The new trackpad sounds nice, but I’m not going to buy a laptop for *that*, or even whine too much about it. And Lorax has a multi-touch trackpad anyway. It’s unclear to me whether the new four-finger swipes are only for the new hardware or whether they’ll show up for the older machines, but at the same time I have trouble imagining I want to app switch by using the trackpad anyway. (As opposed to the two-fingers+plus click=right click.I use that all the time on Lorax.) The new case sounds sweet, and it’s ecologically friendly and all, but I don’t have any issue with Lorax’s case. All in all I’m happy with the laptop I have now. I mean I wouldn’t turn down a new MBP if somebody offered me one but I don’t lust after one. The new Macbooks are much more compelling to me than the old ones - it’s down to more a question about 13″ or a 15″ form factor. But I like the 15″ MBP. I think for me it was the right choice. The fact that this new model is a tweak as opposed to a major new version I think is more a confirmation about how much about the “mid 2008″ version of the MBP was solid. Except maybe the graphics chip reliability.

I don't care for this!

October 10, 2008 Timothy Sanders

Affected MacBook Pros and symptoms Among the models affected are those that were manufactured between approximately May 2007 and September 2008. They include the MacBook Pro (15-Inch, 2.4/2.2GHz), MacBook Pro (17-Inch, 2.4GHz), and MacBook Pro (Early 2008). Customers who own one of these systems should look for instances of distorted or scrambled video on their screen, or the absence of video on the screen (or external display) when the computer is running.

From AppleInsider I haven’t seen any video problems on Lorax, but it’s definitely affected by this issue. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, and if I need it later, well it’s blogged here.

2 year service, even if it’s out of warranty.

A Triumph of Materialism

August 19, 2008 Timothy Sanders

Yesterday was a particularly successful day of technology acquisition. I ended up buying and configuring an Apple Time Capsule (802.11n WiFi + network storage for backups) as well as a Wii Fit. Of course setting all that up took a big chunk of time, but there you are. I needed to acquire some more data storage and I had been debating a Time Capsule or biting the bullet and getting a Drobo. But in the last week I had several network outages that ended up being fixed by rebooting the Airport Extreme (my router), so it seemed like the Extreme needed to be replaced. As a bonus that meant I could move the Extreme as a relay in my office (the iPhone has been having some problems lately getting a good signal when I'm in my office). The thing about configuring WiFi is it's always a mess. There are three nodes in the network - the new Time Capsule, the Airport Extreme, and an Airport Express (which also streams music to the kitchen). Getting the Time Capsule to replace the Extreme was pretty straightforward, but getting the Airport Express to reconfigure took well over an hour. And the frustrating thing is that I can't say what I did differently. I'd swear I configured it the exact same way three or four times and then suddenly the last time it went "Oh, you want me to join the existing network? I can do that." And the Time Capsule insisted that my previous WiFi password wasn't the correct length so I had to change the WiFi password and then go teach it to all of the relevant devices. Whee. But now I've got a Time Capsule and can backup Horton (the Mac Mini) and Lorax (my new laptop) using Time Machine. On Wii Fit, they are fairly difficult to find (surprise! Stupid Nintendo!) On our recent vacation we checked out a fair number of Wii games, and Wii Fit, which is only sort of a game. Karin ended up wanting WarioWare and a Wii Fit, and neither is very easy to find. (If you want WarioWare the only choice I found was ordering it from bestbuy.com. It wasn't in any local stores and it's not available from Amazon or Gamestop.com.) Several Amazon Marketplace stores are selling WarioWare at higher than MSRP, so it must be out of print. And what is up with that? If I grudgingly accept some sort of hardware issue with Wii supply and then with Wii Fit, but WarioWare? That's just a DVD for crying out loud! The Wii Fit had worked out that I was just calling a few stores every week and trying places like Target or Best Buy when I was there anyway. We were at Target on Sunday and I figured I'd ask in the electronics department and they seemed to have just discovered they had "two to four units" in the back. Which makes no freaking sense, but whatever. There was a guy already waiting for one, a girl asked for one while I was waiting for them to find the stock in the back. So if they had four they sold three of them before they could even get them. Frankly I have trouble believing that the Wii Fit board is tough to make. It's a neat piece of hardware, but there's nothing cutting-edge inside it. Nintendo really needs to stop screwing around and get their manufacturing sorted out. I'm done trying to guess what the problem is, but it's really getting ridiculous now. Having WarioWare not be in the stores is just absurd. They have plenty of shelf space in the stores for crappy third party titles, and it seems like WarioWare is a game that people might actually want.