Scot’s Newsletter Blog

I finally got around to requesting a MacBook Air, and received one last week sporting the solid-state drive and the 1.8-GHz CPU. The hardware that matters, though, is the super-thin case design.

At my Computerworld blog, I wrote recently that I’m changing my mind about the MacBook Air and embracing it for its elegance and usability as a travel computer. This contrasts with my three-month-old post in the days just before the MBA shipped in which, after a brief period of time with the early review unit Apple sent Computerworld, I took a harder line on the design compromises Apple made in creating the Air.

Check out my Computerworld blog for the details and my reasoning on the about-face. But if you want the bottom line, it boils down to this. I hope to acquire a MacBook Air as my “second” Mac for business use later this year.

My reaction to Apple’s announcements at this year’s Macworld earlier this month was largely that they were uninspiring. Hard to follow the iPhone, though. The big news is the debut of the sleek MacBook Air subnotebook. No doubt that this product has serious allure, but is it ready for prime time?

Check out my takeaways about MacBook Air at my Computerworld blog.

Besides, I could use some friendly faces over there!

– Scot

Back in July, I wrote a piece in the newsletter titled iPhone Lust? Get Over It. Apparently I didn’t, though. I bought an iPhone about a week ago, after learning that I could ditch Lotus Notes and my crummy Crackberry at work and use Apple Mail for work email and the iPhone. That proved to be an absolutely irresistible combination.

My wife, Cyndy, got a nice BlackBerry at her job several months ago, and it quickly became her main phone. Neither of us were using our circa 2005 LG flip phones from Verizon. I’m a jeans-pocket guy for my cell phone, and the LG phone felt like a brick in my pocket. My older model CrackBerry was great for email, but a very poor cell phone. So bad that I found myself carrying both at times, something that’s patently ridiculous. So we dumped our Verizon phones, and I went to the Apple store in a nearby mall.

The most surprising thing for me was the purchase experience. When I bought my Verizon air card (WWAN service) at the nearby Verizon store back in May, I had to sign in, wait 15 minutes for a sales rep, politely listen to the upsell and then indicate that, no, I just wanted what I wanted, and wait while she first brought the wrong card and then the right one from the back room. Then I was ferried over to the cash register queue, where I had to wait another 15 minutes to check out. Then there was something strange in my account that involved 20 minutes of head-scratching and furrowed brows by two Verizon salespeople. Eventually, I was allowed to pay and walk away with my air card.

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Last weekend I posted about issues with performing an Upgrade installation of Leopard on one of my MacBook Pros. That machine is happily running Leopard now with all my data fully intact. But I learned something in the process.

I made a backup of my Tiger installation just prior to performing the upgrade and was able to boot to the backup without difficulty. I also used Disk Utility (the Mac’s onboard disk integrity check and repair tool) to check both of the partitions on the computer’s hard drive. Everything checked out, so I went ahead with the upgrade.

As detailed earlier, I ran into the hanging blue screen after installation on the first restart that many other Leopard upgraders experienced. Many people had reported that the problem cleared up for them when they followed one of two methods for removing a Mac OS X customization utility by Unsanity called Application Performance Enhancement (APE). I didn’t have APE installed on my system, but it had been there and uninstalled with leave-behinds. I used Target disk mode to access the hard drive and remove the offending files. That didn’t solve my problem, so I decided to resort to my backup. So I removed the same offending files there just to be safe, wiped my boot volume, and copied my backup to the boot volume. During the copy process I got the error message that I didn’t have rights to copy three or four unnamed files — a message that made no real sense. And it was at that point that I knew I was in for it.

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Stop the presses! Something appears to be wrong with Apple’s Leopard OS X 10.5 upgrade-installation process — at least on some Macs. I ran into the problem on one Mac. It manifests itself as a never-ending “blue screen” (not a Windows term, mind you) after Leopard completes “successful” installation, on the first restart. Many others have encountered the same issue, and you can see evidence of that in the Apple Discussions area in the thread titled Installation appears stuck on a plain blue screen.

If you read through the thread (as well as many others on other forums), you’ll find that various things are blamed for the problem, including an add-on customization utility called Application Enhancement (APE) by Unsanity.

The Apple Discussion thread offers a solution that involves booting in single-user mode, which requires you to hold down the S key while your Mac boots. Apparently that works for some people, but on my MacBook Pro 15, the only boot option that worked at all was Target Disk Mode (which lets you plug in a firewire cable and address the drive from another Mac as if it were an external drive).

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With Apple’s new OS X 10.5 operating system due to ship at 6PM (wherever you are in the world) tomorrow, the question millions of Mac users are asking themselves is: Should I spend $129 on this thing yet? The short answer is: Yes and no, but probably not in that order.

At Computerworld, we’ve put together the quintessential examination of the new Apple OS commonly referred to as Leopard. Check out: In Depth: Apple’s Leopard Leaps to New Heights. Be sure to check out the First Look at Leopard Image Gallery for a complete visual tour of the new OS, complete with a screencam of the Stacks feature.

I like Leopard. The new OS X has over 300 new features according to Apple (I didn’t stop to count them). There are literally oodles of small tweaks and changes. Things like, when you select Shut Down from the Apple menu, the new default countdown time is 60 seconds, not two minutes. (Yeah, I went for something pretty mundane that you probably haven’t read in a hundred other Leopard reviews.)

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In early September I wrote a column titled Apple’s Taking a Pass on the Enterprise Prize. It appeared in Scot’s Newsletter and also on the Computerworld site. I was attempting to take Apple to task for its lack of an apparent big business strategy. Many Computerworld and Scot’s Newsletter IT pro readers have written me over the past year to say they prefer Macs but don’t feel that Apple supports business buyers as well as their Windows-related vendors. Many readers also feel the existing Macs are more consumer-oriented than business-oriented. So I wrote about that. And I wrote that I had contacted Apple weeks earlier and hadn’t gotten any real response from it about the company’s enterprise strategy.

The week after the column appeared (after I returned from a vacation), I received a call from Apple acknowledging for the first time that, yes, it has an enterprise division headed by Al Shipp, senior vice president of enterprise sales. Only hitch was, Apple’s PR department wasn’t authorized to let me talk to Mr. Shipp or, in fact, anyone in Apple Enterprise.

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It’s the unofficial motto of the lottery industry: You’ve got to play to win. A couple of decades ago, the vast majority of microcomputer companies realized that the jackpot was in sales of computers to businesses. Apple opted not to play, and as a result, it had a troubled history throughout most of the 1990s.

Now, for the first time since the Mac was introduced in 1984, Apple has a real opportunity to play to win by focusing some of its resources on selling computers to the enterprise. Apple isn’t a large company, however, and it’s headed in an entirely different direction, transforming itself from a consumer computer company to a consumer electronics company. But is that truly the right move for Apple? It might be, but it’s not without risk. And it may mean passing up a golden opportunity.

Small Window
Don’t believe the siren song emanating from Redmond about how well Vista is doing. It’s not doing all that well. That doesn’t mean Microsoft is in trouble long term, because as things stand now, Vista (and its mildly improved derivatives) will eventually take over the Windows marketplace and wind up being the largest-selling version of Windows ever.

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There’s no question about it. Last month’s Mac vs. PC Cost Analysis article struck a chord. I was praised and lambasted around the Internet for it. It was also republished by Computerworld, where it pulled in a lot of traffic. If you didn’t catch it, I recommend the Computerworld version of the story, which was lightly updated because of Apple’s release of its new MacBook Pro model line on June 5.

• Mac vs. PC cost analysis: How does it all add up? (Computerworld)

It seemed to me that people who criticized this story missed the key points I was trying to get across:

1. This was a pure, hardware-based, speeds-and-feeds kind of comparison. I was comparing the hardware goods only, including CPU, chipset, RAM, video, display, hard-drive capacity and specs, ports and upgradeability, dimensions and weight, and so on. In other words, I was attempting to make an objective comparison that did not inject any evaluation about the hardware, anything at all about the software, or my personal experience with the operating systems and hardware involved. It was an on-paper comparison.

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Hey, if I were you, I’d buy it. But I’m me, and I have to get over it. I’ve bought one too many things of late. Worse, I was a total iPhone Luddite. What, no 3G? Gawd, who wants that! Besides, it looks huge on in the TV ads. Plus, $60 to $100 a month, for AT&T’s network? I … don’t … think … so.

And then my buddy Ken Mingis placed the one he bought — after pledging with me that he would not buy one, I might add — in my hand. The universe tilted. I entered an altered state of being. And my mouth dropped open. I had to have one. Had to!

So 3G or not, I’d probably be buying one. If I could. But my wife, Cyndy, would probably make me sleep out back in the shed (along with the mystery mammal that’s living beneath it). And she’d have cause. Apple’s iPhone is darn expensive when you consider the two-year contract. And as you’ll see, I haven’t exactly been frugal lately.

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