Category: Apple
Not If, But When
Last week Jordan’s four-year-old white plastic MacBook started to freeze up. Fearing the worst, I immediately cloned her machine to an external drive. A few days later the dreaded folder with a ? appeared (has that replaced the sad Mac face?) and it refused to boot up. I ordered a 250GB, 7200rpm drive off Amazon as a replacement. I guess that 250GBs is the new entry-level for laptop drives.
When the drive arrived today I dropped it into my toaster dock, fired up Super Duper! and cloned the backup drive back to the new drive. It took about one hour. Once I found my Torx screwdriver it was just a matter of popping the battery off, taking off three screws, pulling out the drive bay, and swapping the dead drive for the new one. I put everything back into place, fired it up, and…the ? folder popped up again. But only for a second. The Apple logo showed up after that, and the machine booted up cleanly.
The whole experience reinforced what I always tell my friends: hard drives will fail. Not IF, but WHEN. I think I’ve had three hard drive failures over the last ten years, including this one. Cloning your drive regularly can get you back up and running much faster than trying to take your computer in to your local computer repair shop and hoping they can dredge some data out of your dead drive.
What could I have done better? I should have been backing up to a laptop drive, so that I could have just popped that in instead of waiting a week for Amazon’s super saver shipping to deliver the replacement drive. I also need to start cloning both of our laptops on a more regular basis. I’ve gotten lazy with mine, since I also have online backup via Backblaze. A local, physical backup is still preferable to online backup for quick restores, however.
John Gruber on Wireless Syncing and iOS
A long, but very well-articulated piece on the state of iOS and wireless syncing. This bit jumped out at me:
I’ll bet nearly all Android users have Google accounts, and thus get calendars and contacts and many other bits of application data synced over-the-air a few minutes after they take their phones out of the box.
That experience was the single biggest revelation for me when I got the Optimus V on Virgin Mobile. I entered my Google Apps account, and everything appeared, as if by magic. On my iPhone 3G I was able to sync with my Google info as well, but there were always a few things that annoyed me: deleting Gmail messages in the iPhone app, for instance, never seemed to work properly. Likewise Calendars didn’t seem to update if I accepted/rejected a meeting invite on my desktop computer. Little annoyances like those were magnified because the rest of the iOS experience is so polished.
MacBook Air 11″ as Dev Machine
Programmer Jeff LaMarche with a post on switching to a Macbook Air 11″ as a primary dev machine:
Despite being considerably less powerful, the 11″ MacBook Air rarely feels slow thanks to the SSD. Certain things take noticeably longer (compiling large applications), but the vast majority of day-to-day tasks feel downright snappy.
The note on the SSD drive being the key performance driver is something I’ve been hearing a lot lately. I’m currently using a four-year-old black Macbook 13″, and I’ve been weighing a possible upgrade to SSD instead of replacing the entire laptop. I did swap out the standard 5400rpm drive with a 7200rpm model, but even then it’s starting to feel a little bit pokey.
The price-per-GB of SSD drives is still fairly high, however, and there’s quite a jump in price when moving from the ~100GB level to the ~250GB level. Still, $500 is a lot less than shelling out $1000+ for a new laptop.
Android Battery Life
I recently switched phones to a Virgin Mobile Optimus V, and one of the main disadvantages compared to my old iPhone 3G has been the battery life. Marciano Siniscalchi has some good notes on Android OS battery life. This one surprised me a little:
Second, turning GPS and WiFi on only as needed makes very little difference. This was a surprise to me, but I spent a few days recording the battery level at roughly one-hour intervals with GPS and WiFi both off, and with GPS and WiFi both “formally” on (more in a sec). In either case, I lose about 2% charge per hour while idle; the phone may discharge marginally faster (between 2% and 3%) if GPS and WiFi are both on, but the difference is so small that, honestly, you would need much more careful measurement, and more extensive tests, to be really sure. If there is a difference, in my opinion it is more than compensated by the fact that you don’t have to turn on these services as needed.
In my own use I’ve noticed that turning off 3G data overnight has a very real impact on how much of a charge is left in the morning. If I leave it on overnight I see that the charge left in the morning can dip by a pretty large amount (10-20%). When I turn off 3G the battery drain is normally less than 5%. I haven’t formally tracked those numbers, but that’s been my rough observation.
The NY Times Digital Subscription
I’ve read lots of good takes on the New York Times’ recently-announced digital subscription, but this final bit from John Gruber nails it:
If I’m paying for the content, what difference does it make how big my screen is? To me, the extra $5/month they’re charging for iPad app access indicates that they see iPad users as suckers to be fleeced.