Repairability

With the advent of the MacBook Air and more recently with the new Retina MacBook Pro, there has been a lot of teeth gnashing and disgruntlement about the increasing lack of repairability of the new Mac laptops.

No memory upgrades possible, no chance to upgrade the hard drive.

I have been fairly dismissive about the moaning and groaning on various podcasts, as well as on this blog.

Until yesterday.

My son is in his final year at Uni and his MacBook Pro stopped working.

Transpires, his hard disk had crashed.

There was no problem with his data. He saves all his important stuff to DropBox and we also have BackBlaze running in the background. The problem was how to get him back up and running quickly.

His MacBook Pro is the version with the removable battery and easy access to the Hard Drive.

A quick search on Amazon and I found this Seagate 750GB Momentus XT Serial 2.5 inch 7200 RPM 32MB 6GB/S SATA Solid State Hybrid Hard Drive [Affiliate Link]

A 750GB Hybrid drive for £96 with free overnight delivery - Ordered!

Next day, with drive in hand, I popped over to Sheffield, popped out the faulty drive, popped in the new one and re-installed the OS from a USB thumb-drive. An hour or two later he was back online and all was hunky dory!

Had the MacBook Pro been one of the new models, I sure the Apple store would have been able to sort him out but how long might it have taken? It was just so easy to replace the drive myself and very quick too.

So I still appreciate why Apple have gone down the path of less user repairability, and I realise we get sleeker and more sexy stuff because of it.

But when the time comes when you need to get something fixed quickly, it's probably best not to be too be too dismissive of the fact we can't upgrade or fix things ourselves as easily as we used to be able to.

Lesson learnt.

The Price is Right?

This blog post contains very little original thought of my own, but is a concentration, not a reduction, of various thoughts and opinions I've been reading (see what I did there)!

We were all hoping for the iPad mini to be cheap. Really cheap. Jaw droppingly cheap. Game over cheap.

Most people were hoping that it would come in between $249 and $299, some even optimistically $199.

But the entry level iPad mini - 16GB Wifi Only - came in at $329

So what do you get for your money.

• A full blown iPad but smaller
• Superb build quality
• Very fast WiFi - up to 802.11n both 2.4Ghz & 5Ghz
• 7.9 IPS screen 1024x768 at 163ppi
• Dual core A5 processor
• HD 720p FaceTime Camera
• 5MP iSight Camera with 1080p HV Video recording
• 10 hours battery life
• Lightning connector
• Gyro, Accelerometer, Digital Compass
• 720p Airplay mirroring
• 1080p video Streaming to AppleTV 3
• Full suite of Apps
• iOS6
• Full accessibility features
• Access to the entire Apple ecosystem

Not a bad bit of kit, not bad at all.

And the initial reports all say the same thing - build quality is astounding, you need to hold it to fully appreciate it. It's light, very light. And thin, super. super thin!

As anyone with half a brain would predict, even before we saw the specs or the device itself, Apple will not be able to keep up with demand over the Christmas holidays, even at the $329 price. In fact, I would imagine that this isn't the sweet spot, and most people will go with the more expensive 32GB model, or hold out for the WiFi and Cellular model.

So if Apple can't keep up with demand at $329 and above, why sell it for $249 - $299 and leave money on the table. There's always some wriggle room after the Christmas period if they find the price to be a factor. But Apple have always created a premium product and have never pandered to the cheap end of the market, and they probably have zero concerns at losing any market share to cheaper competitors. Heck, they've sold 100 million full size iPads for a lot more in just two years.

And what about when the iPad mini 2 comes out later next year with updated specs and a retina display. They can use their usual tactic of dropping the price of the current iPad mini to $199 and bring the new one out at the same price of $329.

Then there's the whole issue of Apple needing to keep the required margins on the iPad to keep Wall St happy. They could easily have absorbed a price drop and taken reduced margins, but why?

There's no point at this stage of the game to use price as a selling point of the iPad mini.

One thing that's going to be really interesting is Apple's guidance on their projected earnings for the next quarter - New iPad, new iPad mini, new iPhone 5, new iPod touch, new iPods, new Mac mini, new iMac, new Retina MacBook Pro, performance bumps to the entire laptop line.

All lined up for the Christmas quarter.

Good grief!

Just don't get me started on the whole UK vs US pricing thing.

Update on Wednesday, October 24, 2012 at 12:32PM by Don McAllister

From Maurice Kelly on ADN -

The US v UK pricing seems fairly reasonable.

$329 * 20% VAT = $394.80

At todays exchange rate thats £247. RRP is £269, so it's a £22 premium. There may be EU extended warranty factors included? 

At least it's not $ == £ like the Apple TV!

Overnight Obsolescence?

So that shiny new 3rd Generation iPad that you picked up a mere six months ago, has been rendered obsolescent overnight by the untimely introduction of the new 4th generation iPad?

Except it hasn't.

Your 3rd generation iPad works just as well today as it did yesterday. Just because there's a new iPad doesn't mean you have to upgrade.

I have to say, I was one of the ones who were shocked by the unexpected introduction of the new iPad, but it's not a must have upgrade.

Yes, the front facing camera have been upgraded and there's a significant performance bump with the new processor. New connectivity and perhaps the most significant change for the UK is expansion of LTE support. But even with these new features, it's certainly not a no-brainer upgrade or even required. If you can afford it, go ahead, but really, your iPad 3 will give you sterling service for some time to come - probably until the next major upgrade to the iPad - the 5th generation.

We most likely won't see this now for another 12 months, so Apple might have done you a favour by not bringing out radically new machine in March ;-)

The iPad 4th generation is aimed at new customers and perhaps may give a push to those people on the fence about upgrading from the 1st gen iPad or iPad 2. It's really not targeted at 3rd generation iPad users.

So yes, it's always good to have the latest and greatest, but you don't need to fret about upgrading to the 4th generation iPad, there's plenty of life left in the old new iPad.

ScreenCastsOnline Studio Revamp

If you follow my twitter account, you may already know I've had a busy weekend.

I've been using my 11" MacBook Air as my main production machine for quite a while now, recently acquiring a 27" Thunderbolt display to go with it. The 27" Thunderbolt display was a game changer in conjunction with the 11" MBA - the responsiveness of the machine, the clarity of the display not to mention the convenience of the ports built into the display - all accessible via a single Thunderbolt connector.

I still used my 2008 Mac Pro for encoding and storage as despite the 11" MBA being a little powerhouse, the Mac Pro still outperformed it on encoding. I also use a Mac mini as a dedicated development machine for Xcode and publishing the SCOtutor Apps.

Consequently, I had a triple monitor setup - 1 x 15" for the Mac mini, 1 x 15" for the Mac Pro and the 27" for the MacBook Air.

The only thing is, the two 15" monitors were not used. I've started to use Remote Desktop and it works like a dream. I can view the desktops of both machines in high resolution on my 27" monitor. So both monitors were superfluous.

The only three issues I had with the MacBook Air were:

• Lack of Memory - the MBA maxed out at 4GB
• Lack of Screen Real Estate - for video editing on the go, the 11" screen didn't really hack it
• Lack of Grunt - It's a super responsive machine, but for really processor intensive tasks, it could use a touch more horsepower

The solution to all three issues was the introduction of the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display - ordered! I placed an order for the following configuration - 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM, 512GB Flash Storage

At the same time, I started to think about a revamp to the studio.

The two 15" monitors had to go, but I decided to replace them with a second 27" Thunderbolt display. The new MacBook Pro can drive two monitors at full resolution via Thunderbolt plus a third display via HDMI. I can continue to use Remote Desktop to the other machines with plenty of screen real estate.

Usually with a laptop and 2 x 27" displays, you'd tend to use the laptop in clamshell mode and just used the external displays. With having the Retina Display, I didn't want to do this and thought of a way to utilise the 15" display also (See photo). I'm not sure if this is the way to go but I'll use it in this configuration for the next week or so.

I also wanted to tidy up and move some of the more noisier components into a rack. This would both give me a quieter environment and give me lots more under desk storage. So a new rack was ordered and duly installed. This now contains:

• 24 port Gigabit Ethernet Switch (no more daisy chained switches around the office)
• DBX 226XL Limiter/Compressor
• 2 x Mac Mini - Xcode machine & Media Server
• 1 x 4 bay Drobo
• 1 x 8 bay DroboPro - I didn't bother with the rack-mount kit - £150!!!

The Drobos are starting to show their age and are the noisiest bits of kit in the room. I think they will be the next things to go when I start looking at Thunderbolt rack mounted storage.

So most of the new equipment is in place and I now need to spend a couple of days tidying up the inevitable boxes of cables and detritus that seem to accumulate when you take on a job like this.

Oh and by the way, the MacBook Pro outperforms my 2008 8 core Xeon Mac Pro in encoding. I'll do some tests later in the week and post some comparisons.

If you want to see the flurry of activity over the past two days, checkout the embedded YouTube video below (looks like the 1st version won't work on Mobile devices such as iPad as I've included some music YouTube identified as copyright - use the second version for iPad/iPhone)

Desktop Version

iPad/iPhone Version

Mac mini for Video Editing?

My previous blog post Real Life MacBook Air 11" Benchmark - Video Encoding showed some spectacular results whilst video encoding when comparing the 1.8Ghz i7 MacBook Air with a 2008 MacPro with 8 cores and 16GB RAM.

I can only assume that the new 2.7GHz i7 Mac mini would actually be comparable to my ageing Mac Pro especially if upgraded to the full 8GB RAM (or even 16GB using third party kits)

A ScreenCastsOnline viewer (and Video Professional) Allan Tépper, sent me a link to a recent blog post on using a Mac mini as the core of a professional video editing rig.

It makes for interesting reading!

Mac Mini w/Thunderbolt: preferred platform for many new editing systems

There are still some missing pieces (especially the Thunderbolt enabled professional interfaces from AJA, Blackmagic and Matrox) but hopefully they will be with us soon, along with a wider selection of Thunderbolt enabled drives.

It really makes it interesting to see if Apple actually do come out with a replacement for the Mac Pro, or if this is the future of Pro level machines.

My gut feeling is that they will produce a monster Mac Pro, but with a Mac mini configuration like this, how many people will actually need one?