I just upgraded the disk drive on my early 2008 MacBook Pro today to 0.5 TB 7200 rpm drive. Oh I remember my first disk drive was a 20 MB winchester on a DEC LSI-11/23. I also remember carrying around DEC RL-05 disks. I was running out of disk space on my MacBook Pro which had a 200 GB 7200 rpm Hitachi TravelStar drive. There was not enough space for things like large VMware Fusion virtual machines, terrain maps for Silent Wings, video clips, etc. A 5,400 rpm drive is a non-starter for performance reasons, so after some looking around the Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420ASG looked like the only drive to go with. The -G in the part number means G protection, but Apple has it’s own protection as well in the Mac Book Pro. And it feels good that Apple is shipping the Momentus 7200.4 in the latest MacBooks. I brought mine at Buy.com.
I was thinking of buying an external disk tray to mount the drive in while copying data off the internal drive and but then read the reviews at Maximum CPU and MacInTouch for the Newer Technology Voyager Q hard drive dock and deviced to go that route. I brought mine from MacSales/Other World Computing. At around $95 it is more expensive than a simple external tray, but it is also much more useful in jockying disk drives between systems. I connected it to my MacBook Pro over Firewire 800 and it worked great, including booting off the Firewire 800 to test the disk worked fine.
A small Phillips screwdriver and Torx T6 driver was all else I needed. I found the video below that shows how to do the physical drive replacement. I’ve had my MacBook Pro apart before so no mystery there but this is a great video.
The whole backup of the 200 GB disk using Carbon Copy Cloner took about two and a half hours over Firewire 800 to the Voyager Q. Physically swapping the disk took about 15 minutes. Piece of cake.
I was looking at the Apple Macbook Pro updates announced at the recent 2009 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. The MacBook Pro reduction in I/O connectivity is getting depressing. The 15″ and 13″ models get an SD card slot but they do so at the expense of an ExpressCard/34 slot. I reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984 “your chocolate ration has been increased”.
At least the SD card slot does support most popular SD size media as Apple clarifies here.
The MacBooks Pros have too little I/O connectivity. Yes I know Firewire 800 is great, but I thought these were Macs for professionals, not PC laptops. Now the 13″ and 15″ models have a single FireWire 800 port and two USB 2.0 ports and an SD card slot and that is it. And yes I know you just can’t count ports to measure really usable I/O performance but the sheer physical connectivity alone of the older MacBook Pros was very useful. FireWire 800 is great but many high-end users need e-SATA based RAID connected via an ExpressCard e-SATA adapter or for various other wireless connectivity or other uses. The 17″ MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard slot and is a great laptop but it is also a bit too big for many users. Adding an SD card slot and keeping the ExpressCard/34 slot would have been great – or they could have even bundled an SD card reader if they needed the marketing claim for SD card support.
I live and die based on my one year old 2.5GHz 17″ MacBook Pro with 3 x USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 and an ExpressCard/32 slot. A great laptop. And it usually has a SanDisk Multi Card Reader in the ExpressCard/34 slot. That reads more types of media (if anybody cares about Sony MemoryStick Pro) than the SD card slot built into the new MacBook Pros and much more importantly when I remove it I have an ExpressCard slot for other uses.
I am curious if Apple implemented a really fast SD card slot or if it works via USB 2.0 (like the SanDisk ExpressCard/34 adapter I use). Still that would not make up for losing an ExpressCard/33 slot.
Oh well with the matte screen only available as an option on the MacBook Pro 17″ many photography and video professionals and serious amateurs will see that as the only portable computer from Apple they can use. I thought at some time a matte screen for the 15″ MacBook Pro would appear. I take that as more consumer apathy or ignorance about color and color management than Apple making bad decisions.
This is some very obvious Monday morning quarterbacking. But I am extremely negative about Sun Microsystems. I think Sun’s board is crazy for not taking the IBM $7B acquisition offer. Maybe they think they can pull something better off, but it is hard to think who that suitor could be and why they’d value Sun at more than $7B. Sun has been churning though money and has been undergoing endless changes for ages. And while there have been occasional better days; the slumping economy must be hammering them and overall they are on a downward spiral to irrelevance. A sad outcome for this once strong Silicon Valley company. And now that an acquisition has been so publically aired that’s got to further hurt potential customer willingness to buy into Sun’s future.
The shit storm that Sun is about to be dealt from stockholders and their lawyers is going to be interesting to watch.
It’s winter, but I’m flying out of Truckee in the Sierra Nevada mountains on an amazing day, it seems like the middle of summer. I self-launched from Truckee Airport in my new Antares 20E. I’m now around 16,000′ just South West of Truckee airport heading towards Mount Rose. I have the amazing vista of Lake Tahoe off to my right. I decide to head across the Carson valley to the Pine Nut mountains, and reach over to my PDA and change my destination waypoint to Mineral Peak, …. slap. Oh no, it’s all just a simulation.
So here is the setup. The Silent Wings soaring simulator is running on a MacBook Pro and driving a iPAQ hx4700 PDA running SeeYou Mobile. The NMEA (GPS) data to drive SeeYou Mobile is coming from the (simulated) Cambridge 302 in the (unfortunately just simulated) Antares 20E glider I’m flying. The NMEA data is traveling over a Bluetooth serial link between the MacBook Pro and iPAQ PDA. Once set up properly all I need to do is just start Silent Wings on the Mac and SeeYou Mobile on the PDA and they just talk to each other. SeeYou Mobile works like normal, and you can even record an IGC flight trace on the PDA. But getting to this point can be a little involved. I tried describing this to people and then realized I really need to write it down in painful detail. So sorry for the length, but here goes…
So one of the neatest things Yahoo owns is Flickr. But I’m at a loss to understand the snails pace of innovation at Flickr. There is tons of stuff the could be doing with new features, tools and integration. But anyhow instead of wasting space on that I’ll just whine about Flickr Uploadr 3.0 — the down-loadable utility that is supposed to make uploading photos easier, well previous versions did, the current one is just broken.
Build 3.0.2 at least is broken on Windows XP SP2. Starting with the big one – the actual button to upload images never appears, oops bit of an oversight there. And lots of sloppy UI things — like not having any rollovers/hints in the UI. And when you view Upload>Preferences but don’t change anything you still get a dialog box saying you changed preferences and asking you whether you want to apply those changes to the current photos. Dragging the main window frame out larger and smaller shows strange behavior of an horizontal scrollbar on the right panel if you resize the window enough to have a vertical scroll bar on the right panel. Don’t they know how to do basic UI QA? There appears to be other strange things going on as well. The vertical partition between the panel should be re-positionable. And on and on…
How do you mess up something so simple and then actually want to release it?
Santa wears a black turtleneck and he is giving his usual keynote at the MacWorld conference on January 15th. I decided to hold off on a Macbook Pro purchase hoping to see an upgraded model coming. I need a high end machine for multimedia work, overall desktop PC replacement, including running VMware Fusion.
My MacWorld wish list would be for a 17″ high resolution screen model, with
An internal dual layer Blu-ray superdrive (ultradrive?), I guess that would make it something like a BD-RE/BD-R/DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD+RW/DVD/CD-R/CD-RW/CD optical disk, phew. The ability to play blue ray movies would be a bonus (but not required). Fastmac already has an aftermarket Blu-ray drive available for the MacBook Pro.
Increased express card connectivity. Ideally two seperate ExpressCard universal slots instead of the single /34 slot in the current MacBook Pro models. Universal slots accomodate /54 as well as /34 cards. I suspect there would actually be space to put two universal slots on a 17″ MacBook Pro. Failing that one universal and one /34 slot would do. These would give me the ability to carry around an expresscard/54 CF Card reader (for my Digital SLR camera) internally in the universal slot and an expresscard/34 SATA-II controller for hooking up lots of disk for video editing. I’d like Apple, to at least make the single /34 slot a universal slot.
C’mon Santa I’ve been a good boy can I please have these wishes
I stopped using a deskside PC about two years ago and like having my whole computing life in one place on a laptop. I’ve been thinking over what to do with my current ThinkPad T42 laptop which is just too underpowered for what I need. High on the list is buying a MacBook Pro and making the switch back to the Macintosh as a primary computer. Part of wanting to upgrade is driven by lack of disk space on the ThinkPad T42 and part of it is driven by wanting more horsepower and memory to run Photoshop on larger images and to do video editing. For video I have an old copy of Adobe Premiere 6.5 and I’ve been leery of upgrading this on my ThinkPad since most people I know who is doing video are working with Final Cut Express or Final Cut Studio on a Mac.
I’ve been looking at different options and thinking about the switch. Just some of the software I use is shown in the photo above. I thought it might be interesting look at switching from a Windows laptop to a Mac with a reasonable number of applications and so I thought I’d write about some of the experiences. Bottom line is it is going to cost me about $1,200 in software upgrades/cross grades and software relicensing to move to the Mac, and that is without a big splash on something like Final Cut Studio. I wish Apple had a program where I could get an upgrade credit for Premiere to Final Cut Studio, that would make the whole decision pretty automatic. Which will make the purchase of a high-end MacBook Pro something like a $4,700 purchase – Yikes. Sure I get a platform that can do a lot more, especially with video editing, but it’s interesting just how much it costs to move. Time costs of lost productivity and relearning things is going be significantly higher than a few thousand dollars but I look at this as having to bite the bullet some day.
Obviously any switch made easier with the availability of VMware Fusion and SWSoft Parallels Desktop. Don’t expect me to be impartial here, I’ll be using Fusion and I think it is a lot more stable than Parallels Desktop. But both Fusion and Parallels will perform much better than the old Connectix (now Microsoft) VirtualPC did on PowerPC based Macintosh systems.
The Palm Foleo has to be one of the most lame-brained product ideas in decades. Foleo is supposed to be a simple “companion” for a smart phone, essentially providing a keyboard and larger screen and ability to browse the Web, check email etc. Palm is claiming the Foleo will be the start of a whole new product family. Good luck trying to convince anybody of that. And I know that “the market” often does not recognize the need for new products until they have established themselves—but the Palm Foleo does not pass even the simplest sniff test for a reasonable product.
I was cleaning out stuff and found an old cookie from the VMware third birthday party. I certainly was not going to eat it and so as a social experiment I have put it up for auction on EBay. Is there a market for edible promotional and marketing items?
Interestingly this was from the VMware “brown period” where the logo featured the words VMware in brown and brown and blue were used thoughout collateral and other marketing material. This was planned independent of UPS starting to promote their brown color but that did lead to questions of wether VMware was trying to copy UPS with their promotion of their brown color including the “What can BROWN do for you?” advertisments. We were definitely not trying to copy UPS.
Brown is a difficult color to reproduce well so it looks good and not just a muddy mess, and so that it has consistent color across different media. I think the color brown fairly quickly proved a bad idea but the thought and design effort that went into all the marketing collateral look and feel was a step in the right direction.
Naviter has released improved resolution Landsat imaging for for their SeeYou soaring planning and analysis software. A nice improvement in resolution as you can see from the screen shots on the left. These screen shots show part of a flight I made last year from Minden Douglas Airport (KMEV) in Nevada. The 38th north parallel runs through KEMV. In these screen shots you see the new higher resolution imaging south of the 38th parallel and the previous resolution imaging to the north.
The release of improved resolution terrain imagery for SeeYou is likely a slow (there is no reason to hurry) response to Sierra SkyWare releasing WinPilot 3D to compete with SeeYou. One of the leading benefit claims Sierra SkyWare was making for Winpilot 3D was its 3D visualization and imaging resolution. 3D visualization is one of the sexier features of SeeYou so this was pretty much a frontal assault on SeeYou.
A frontal assault on the dominant market leader, including where when there are already other vendors (StrePla) in a market segment just does not sound like good strategy for me. You can run up to the castle and pound on the gates and not many people will care. But if you manage to annoy the owner of the castle enough they pour a little boiling oil over you, and you either die or you leave, a lot worse for wear…
