jeremy.id.au

Almost three years ago, I was coerced into buying the Applecare Protection Plan for my iBook G4 at the last minute by the reseller. I still don’t agree with his tactics today, springing it on me when I went in to pickup my built to order machine that I had ordered weeks early. Resellers should be open and frank with their customers about these options from the beginning, if they don’t want to be considered by their customers to be dodgy. Neither did he tell me that I had to buy it then and there on the spot, but that I had up to twelve months to do so. However, the fact that reseller margins are slim on computers but much juicier on these plans probably explains it a little.

I later learnt that you can also withdraw from the AppleCare plan at anytime within the first 12 months without incurring any costs other than any phone support and perhaps a cancellation fee. Though I decided to keep it anyway. Two years in, however, and I was beginning to wonder whether it had been worthwhile as I never use the support and nothing had gone wrong. I enquired with Apple about having the keyboard replaced, as it was seriously fading and starting to lose some letters. They informed me that I had to take it into an Authorised Service Centre which seemed like a bit of effort for something relatively minor (except when you try to have non-touch typists use your computer) with no guaranteed outcome. Though I promised myself that I’d at least attempt it before the three year warranty plan expired. The keyboard became worse with time so it was on my mind to do something about it sooner rather than later.

Until suddenly last week, I got into uni to find that my iBook wouldn’t wake up nor even boot. No boot up sound or anything, just the fans going crazy along with a blank screen. Straight away I knew there was something seriously wrong with my iBook. Though I felt assured that I still had two to three months left under warranty. While in the corner of my mind I hoped that Apple would just replace it with a MacBook, I knew that wouldn’t happen. So I dropped it into a service centre near my uni where I also asked them to look into the keyboard. It seemed strange to be dropping it off for repair so soon after it had happened. Certainly, it was almost felt depressing to come home with an empty laptop bag.

Getting by for a week without a laptop, with only an iMac G3 to use, was rather painful. Being chained to the back wall of the study certainly doesn’t have that sense of freedom as a laptop on wireless. Six days elapsed before I decided I would give the service centre a call to see what the go was. As it turns out the Logic Board (motherboard) had died and there was no hesitation in replacing the keyboard. It certainly seems that the AppleCare had been worthwhile (and lucky that it happened now rather than after the AppleCare had expired). The cost of paying for such replacements myself probably wouldn’t be insignificant. After only waiting a week I was able to pick my laptop up yesterday.

Now while it may seem dubious to pay a considerable amount to keep an obsolete machine working so many years later, it’s certainly much better than being forced into making a two grand on the spot purchase. Possibly even waiting several weeks to receive a built to order system. It means I can defer such a MacBook purchase until later on when I really need it (and yes this time I’ll be planning to get AppleCare from the outset). Plus I’ll still have this machine as a backup or if that’s not necessary I may be able to get a bit of cash for it.

Well it’s nice to have my iBook back now with its nice shiny new keyboard.

Update: Seems I spoke too soon. Only four days after the first repair, I had the misfortune of having my iBook die again. Finally after another week without a laptop, I got it back and all appears to be well for the time being.

Well the time came to replace mum’s 14″ CRT monitor. In actual fact she started off with a 15″ monitor though when it died we temporarily hooked up the 14″ monitor, though she had no desire to replace it. Fortunately, for the best part of the last year she was able to use my brother’s 17″ LCD monitor while he was away in Canada but once he got back he was quick to reclaim it. In the end though, it wasn’t just the monitor we replaced, it was the whole computer.

Pictured: The old 14″ monitor, PC, our networked HP Laserjet 4 (with Postscript level 2 support) and yes, you get a glimpse of the replacement system already.

So it was a Mac I decided to get, mainly because I wanted something capable of running OS X. Previously, of all things, she had been running Linux. It was probably the right decision to run Linux at the time, after all we’ve had not a single virus infestation and I was immensely put off running Windows after a spyware toolbar got into Internet Explorer within weeks and just wouldn’t go away no matter what we did. Further more, contrary to what many people believe Linux can be simplified for the end user to quite a degree meaning that no technical knowledge at all is required to run it. However, even still in my opinion KDE still has a rather clumsy GUI and the Debian system resulted in quite a fair bit more work for me. For example, when we wanted to set it up for the digital camera, it involved quite a lot of messing around with file permissions and USB before I could get it working. Compared to the Mac, I just have to plug in the digital camera and iPhoto loads up automatically (not to mention that the program for Linux that I found for organising photos was rather second rate).

For budgetary reasons it was a second hand iMac G3 "Snow" (that being the colour) that we settled for. At 500Mhz it is a fair bit more powerful than the previous 333Mhz Celeron and at 512MB it has twice the RAM. Other features include a CD-RW drive which the previous computer didn’t have, as well as a 40GB hard drive which is the same size as the previous computer.

Pictured: Mum’s new computer; iMac G3 "Snow"

So how about the performance? The G3 is two generations back for the PowerPC platform, yet now three generations for the Mac platform as a whole. Still the first thing I noticed when I turned it on was the incredible boot up time. If you’re used to making a cup of coffee while you wait for your computer to boot up, you’ll probably find that it is booted up and is ready before you even had the chance to turn the kettle on. I know some people achieve the same thing by installing old versions of Windows on their computer, though this is Tiger, the latest version of OS X. Okay though my iBook probably boots in the same time or slightly quicker, while the new Intel Macs are said to boot in 20 seconds. Still, boot up time isn’t all there is to performance.

Overall, performance wise the system is very usable. Instead of running slow, Apple tends to cut back on the eye candy. For example, the famous Exposé feature works though isn’t as smooth as it is on say a G4 mac. At times it may not be as responsive as a new system but it’s not painfully slow either. So overall I’m not disappointed with performance. Even still, the aim was to give mum a taste of the mac and in a few years time when she’s retiring she may well get a new one.

With one feature of Macs that is really nice, I was able to do an install using my OS X Tiger DVD using the DVD-ROM drive on my iBook using FireWire Target Disk Mode. Took my a while to migrate all the data. Can’t wait until next time it’s just another mac we’re upgrading to as I’ll simply be able to use Migration Assistant.

The verdict, well mum is pleased and she’s finding Mac OS X easy to use. The style of macs is also something great and as you can see from the photos, the form factor is much improved.

Pictures of the New Zealand trip have been uploaded to a gallery. Though note that there is probably still some sorting out to do so only the best pictures are shown there.

Having come back from New Zealand I felt a new lease of life. This had me motivated to do some things that I perhaps wouldn’t have done for the past year. I thought of starting a small business or even getting a job. I thought up some marketing ideas for an IT business but didn’t manage to get out to test my ideas.

In the mean time I decided I needed a new computer. Well sure, my PC was fine, even though it was the same dual celeron 466Mhz (with 512 meg of RAM) computer that I’d been using for around 3 years (having inherited it when my dad died).  But I was fed up with being fed up with being tied to my desk to use the computer, instead, I wanted a laptop. My old laptop as nice as it was, weighing in at hardly a kilo, was ready for the trash as it constantly locks up. The next bit probably comes as a surprise to some people. I had been using Linux for over 5 years and here I was going out to purchase an iBook. Though I’d been contemplating an Apple purchase for a while. For quite some time I’ve thought that the hardware was nice, though I never really thought about what I’d do with such a machine, after all Linux runs on everything.

But there was perhaps something else lurching at me. Here we have Mac OS X, one of the most usable operating systems and it has a Unix core! Hardly four years earlier when I got my last laptop, I remember the joys of spending an entire long weekend fine tuning Linux when I should have been studying. Fortunately with a distribution such as Debian, once you install, you should never have to reinstall again. Though with a laptop, you usually want it to *just work*. Additionally, I was faced with other problems. Software in Linux was often lacking, there were no decent office productivity apps. I liked the way Abiword was so lightweight, but the dialogues stating to insert code at line 547 of abc.c for said feature weren’t too helpful. It wasn’t for another year or so until OpenOffice was an option.

I still like Linux. From a technical point of view it’s probably my favourite OS (particularly the Debian variety). However, Mac OS X Aqua is probably one of the greatest desktop environments that I’ve used. I couldn’t do without features such as Exposé. In fact when I went back to my Linux PC to do some things, I kept hitting F9 to no avail. Probably the main areas of disappoint are to do with things like terminal emulation. Terminal.app claims to be an xterm, however, it’s keybindings differ and so causing problems with backspace. With some work arounds the problem has been minimal. Other than that, there’s an annoying 802.1x bug. So I love my iBook, though I’m no Apple loyalist and remain skeptical of some their tactics. Still, I think it’s great that there is an alternative to the Intel PC running Microsoft Windows that everyone can use.

Only about a month after I had my new iBook, the inevitable happened. My PC power supply blew and took half the PC with it. One would almost think it had some concious of jealousy. Though in all reality it was probably going to happen anyway and it’s just as well I had a backup computer.

At the same time as purchasing the iBook, the Apple Centre owner offered me some work because he was interested in my *nix skills. I took the offer because I thought the general experience would be worthwhile. Worked there for about a month, though it was nothing exciting.