Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

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iPad pre-order frenzy

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Today is a big day for Apple fans (at least those in the U.S.) who want to secure an iPad as soon as they’re available. Pre-orders kicked off this morning at 8:30 am EST and I interrupted my morning get-the-craziness-out-of-your-system-so-I-can-work play session with the dogs to get one. After a few minutes of mad clicking and frantically searching for the in-store pick up option, I pre-ordered the 64GB 3G model and also reserved a 16GB wi-fi one to pick up on April 3 for the hell of it.

The beauteous order confirmation email

When the pre-orders were first announced, Apple stated that only the wi-fi versions could be pre-ordered and I only found out last night via Twitter (thanks, mac-fusiongirl!) that the 3G version could be pre-ordered as well. To be frank, that threw a bit of a wrench in my plans since I had planned to pre-order a wi-fi version to tide me over until the 3G one was available (after which I’d return or eBay the wi-fi one). I hadn’t counted on the 3G version being available for pre-order but I am quite happy that I was able to secure on in advance and I still might pick up the wi-fi one I ordered as well so I have *something* to play with on April 3.
I didn’t order any accessories for it like the keyboard dock or the case (I read over at iLounge.com that the case feels a bit cheap, surprisingly). I want to get a sense of how I’ll use it before I pony up for those. However, I can picture wanting two cases for it. One silicone/other skin case to make it easy to hold and for light protection around the house, and another one high-quality one with a cover that could double as a stand for use when traveling. Ideally, I’d love some kind of portfolio case with a notepad on the other side or something. Yes, it may sound cheesy but I have a thing for paper and pens (shopping for school supplies as a child was heavenly for me) and would like a case that does a little more than just hide my iPad.
I’m still counting on being able to somehow use the SIM card from my current AT&T 3G modem (I’m thinking I might find a shop that can duplicate the SIM to a blank MicroSIM instead of cutting the SIM so it will fit). If that fails, I suspect I’ll be taking advantage of the $14.99 250MB month-to-month plan from AT&T in months when I expect I’ll be out and about and will need it. I really can’t picture needing to use the unlimited data plan unless I am traveling without my MacBook Air for an extended period.
Did you order an iPad today? If so, which one? Did you order any accessories to go with it?

CES 2010 and Apple Tablet thoughts

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It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. The holidays thoroughly kicked my ass this time around, though I’m not quite sure why. In some ways, I was more organized than I had been in previous years – I didn’t need to go shopping on Christmas Eve and the majority of our Christmas cards arrived before Christmas day. Frankly, those two accomplishments are damn nearly miracles in and of themselves. Despite this, I found little time for “fun” writing from around Thanksgiving until now. It’s been a few days since I’ve been back from CES as I write this, having covered the expo for work (my job is awesome!). There wasn’t all that much Mac-related there and it was far less stressful than last year’s CES working for my previous employer. However, I was still exhausted toward the end of the week. I’m quite the introvert and meeting new people and being in large crowds regularly over several days at a time is tiring for geeky little me, not to mention the general craziness of CES and the evening activities that followed full days on the show floor.

On a personal note, I stayed at Excalibur on the strip in one of their newly-remodeled “plasma rooms.” It was my first time staying there and the room wasn’t bad, though without HD cable feeding the plasma, the experience wasn’t as good as it could have been. Also, I did get a chance to get lunch at In-n-Out – my favorite fast food burger chain – with Chris Meinck of EverythingiCafe.com, which was great (both the food and the company)! We had tried to meet for lunch at last year’s CES but I didn’t get a chance  since I was working crazily on a Palm Pre first impressions review on that day. Oh, and the Excalibur has a pretty good gym though I didn’t get there as much as I’d hoped to. A cab driver tried to convince me that having kids was the greatest thing a person could do (he did not succeed and I’m not quite sure why he tried – do I look like I need to have kids?) and I didn’t gamble once, even though I had intended to. I had a great risotto dish at at restaurant at the Wynn one night and avoided the free lunches provided for the press by the expo at all costs. And I finally met my boss in person (we had only spoken by phone, IM, and email before)!

I spent a good deal of time on the show floor on the first and second days of the expo and was focused on finding accessories and products related to the Mac, iPhone/iPod, and other Apple products. I didn’t really see that much that thrilled me and made me clap my hands together in anticipatory glee. While I read about Samsung’s transparent OLED screen, I never hunted it down on the floor to see it in person, though I think that’s one cool product that I look forward to seeing in mass production soon.  Though I’ve had my eye on the Barnes & Noble Nook for a while now, I finally got a chance to see one at the Digital Experience event at CES and it was nice enough to solidify my decision to buy one, though there is one snag in that plan: the rumored Apple tablet. No Nook – nor any other dedicated ebook reader, for that matter – for me until the Apple tablet is revealed. Of course, as I’m sure you can guess, I’m buying that Apple tablet no matter what. How can I not? What’s the tablet going to be like? The rumors are flying, as usual. Here are a few of my favorite ones:

The interface part is where I have the most trouble picturing the tablet. At CES, I saw a few of the new tablets with the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chipset that ran Android and they just felt like large cell phones. The on-screen keyboards were pretty much impossible to use with your thumbs since the device was too wide to be able to reach the middle keys, and the lines of letters were offset, making them impossible to type on with 10 fingers as you would on a normal physical keyboard. Of course, I’m not an Apple interface designer (and for good reason since conceiving of an elegant tablet interface eludes me) and I’m sure the bright minds of the software engineers and UI specialists at Apple have figured this one out. Well, at least I hope they have. Though I’m sure that Steve Jobs would never let a product that didn’t work elegantly out the door to begin with.

John Gruber made an interesting blog post on the tablet, most pertinently addressing this question: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

This is a question I struggle with as well. What will the tablet do that’s new and unique enough to differentiate itself from my iPhone and my ultra-portable MacBook Air? If Gruber is right, the tablet may be functional enough for me to sell my MacBook Air. However, my reaction may not be that of the typical Mac user/convert since my MacBook Air is now my secondary Mac – my Mac mini is now my primary Mac. Technically, I don’t need a second Mac, but I have it since it’s useful to me anyway and I have no burning urge or need to sell it. Still, I really hope Apple nails text entry on the tablet. While I’ll almost certainly still buy the Apple tablet if I can’t type as well on it as I can on my MacBook Air, it may indeed be a “surplus” device for me, with only my Mac fangirl status prompting me to buy and keep it.

At any rate, the rumored announcement (January 26 or 27) will be here shortly, so hopefully we’ll all know more soon.

Do you think that an Apple tablet is on the way? What do you think it will look like and what will it be able to do? Will you buy one?

My upcoming donations to Apple

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Apple announced some product updates last week which will cause me to make a donation to Apple in the very near future. Of course, this will not be a completely unwilling donation and I do expect something in return for it – one Magic Mouse, to be precise. Don’t get me wrong – I’d love to make a much larger donation in exchange for one 27″ iMac as well, but that would put one significant strike down against me in the Mac inventory tally my husband keeps, and no good would come of it. Unless “good” in your book means “I now have enough proof to show my wife is crazy and should be institutionalized.”

Getting a Magic Mouse would free me from the wireless Mighty Mouse I currently use for my left hand (my right hand uses a Logitech trackball – I switch mice hands throughout the day in a vain attempt to minimize repetitive motion injuries). The Mighty Mouse is a great concept and it’s kind of cute, but I will say that it regularly causes me to envision doing horrible things to the engineers who designed it, usually involving a frantic, pants-less game of musical chairs and lots of really sharp thumb tacks. The damn ball in the damn thing keeps getting gummed up so that I can’t damn scroll down – scrolling in any other direction always works. If they’d worked out a way to easily disassemble the mouse so it could be cleaned thoroughly, I wouldn’t be so upset. But they didn’t, and I do. Regularly.

The next Apple product that will join my collection
I am still coveting another Mac of some sort. That 12″ PowerBook I mentioned recently may still be for sale and I’m going to make an offer. 🙁 I really should save my money and wait until January or so to see if a tablet is released, which would change my whole game plan, anyway. In the meantime, I do want to buy the AppleCare extended warranty for my MacBook Air, which I have only a few weeks left to do at this point. I think that will help greatly with its resale value when I get around to selling it.
Speaking of the game plan for early next year, it’s shaping up thusly:
  • Buy a Mac tablet for portable use (but only if it has a usable keyboard or I can connect a Bluetooth one to it easily)
  • Buy an iMac for desk at home (27″ if possible, but that’s highly doubtful unless I win the lottery)
  • Sell current MacBook Air and 20″ Apple Cinema Display plus husband and/or firstborn child to fund new purchases/appease husband
  • Keep iPhone (duh)
Do you have any Mac purchases planned in the near future?

My new pet: Snow Leopard

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Fortunately, it’s not a real Snow Leopard or my Great Dane would have some serious issues with it – as would we, since I’m quite sure humans can be considered exceptionally convenient fast food snacks for Snow Leopards, always ready to give a good chase to kick in that predator instinct before being gulped down at a piping hot 98.7º.

Silliness aside, I finally installed Snow Leopard two weekends ago, backing up my hard drive twice (via Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner) before erasing my hard drive with Disk Utility and doing a clean install. I didn’t transfer any settings from the clone of my Leopard installation, only copying my music, photos, and emails directly. I did let MobileMe take care of mail settings and rules, my Safari bookmarks, and my contacts and calendars, which it handled without any problems. I’ve been slowly re-insalling apps from scratch and have been trying to pare down what I use. I was particularly frustrated with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6, which installs a bunch of other useless crap that I’d rather forego, but the installer doesn’t offer the ability to customize the installation to do this. Why does Adobe think I want an extra 345MB of my hard drive space for this Adobe Bridge CS3 crap? Hint to Adobe: I don’t want it. Space is at a premium on my 128GB SSD, thank you very much.

64-bit, baby!
My MacBook Air’s processor is 64-bit capable so I did a minor bit of system file modification to enable 64-bit by default. I didn’t do any scientific testing to time how long it took to do common tasks before enabling this, but my inner clock informally tells me that there really hasn’t been much of a difference in speed. I use Safari as my primary browser and I’m sad to say that it still gets bogged down and is not as responsive as I’d like it to be even when running in 64-bit mode. The new access features in the Finder (new Expose and Stacks capabilities) are nice, but not earth-shattering. I no longer have problems with Bluetooth acting up, which is great since that usually got me mad enough to pound on my poor Bluetooth keyboard in frustration. Time Machine operates less obtrusively before – I rarely even notice when it’s running anymore. And, I’d say that my MacBook Air is running a bit cooler – the fans don’t seem to run as much as they did on Leopard.
All in all, I see very subtle changes but nothing spectacular. So far, it still seems worth the $25 (thanks to Amazon and their slightly lower price for it) I paid for Snow Leopard and I have no complaints about it at all. Plus, the clean install I did really made me feel better about my Mac though I still have some cleaning up to do to get back some more hard drive space. My next major move is to install Parallels to run one measly application that won’t work with CrossOver, though I may see if I can get my husband to do it on his Mac (he has a shiny new 320GB hard drive in his MacBook now and has the room to spare) so I won’t have to. Muahahahahaha…

Someone may need to stop me

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My first Mac laptop was a 12″ PowerBook G4 that I bought in 2003. Prior to that, I’d been on the Dark Side for a while, owning PCs for a few years after having my very first Mac, an LC40, at university. My 12″ PowerBook was absolutely perfect, if a little hot on the lap, at just the right size to make it very portable yet with specs that made it powerful enough to do everything I needed. I sold that lovely little beast when I bought a black MacBook and regretted it despite the upgrade in processing power. I’ve come across a mint last-generation 12″ PowerBook for sale in a forum I frequent and I’m .35 millimeters away from making an offer on it.

Why? I have no idea. I have a MacBook Air which does quite fine as my main computer. I don’t need another Mac. If anything, I should be saving up for the rumored tablet that may or may not make an appearance early next year. I have such fond memories of that 12″ PowerBook, though. Maybe it was more Tiger than anything, but I don’t seem to remember as many glitches with it – it went to sleep on its own reliably, didn’t get bogged down by invisible processes, and was small enough to carry around in a bag that looked like a purse. I still miss the damn thing and it makes no sense.
Gah! What is wrong with me? Am I moving into the Collector stage in my Mac obsession? If I started at the Mac N00b stage and moved through the Mac Snob stage (the Fangirl/Fanboy status is not a stage – it is a permanent state of mind once one enters the Mac Snob stage, by the way), I must indeed be into the Collector stage where I will begin to obtain older Macs and reminisce about them fondly. I still have the urge to buy new Macs, so I must not have lost my Excited Mac Nut status (combined with the standard card-holding Geek rank I have held for many years now) yet either. Well, let’s just hope that I don’t go overboard in this stage. If I start talking about getting a Mac Mini and changing it into a Cube, someone plan an intervention, please.
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