Be Excellent To Each Other

I like the new MacPro. It's tiny.

This picture shows it best:


(Cue hilarious remarks about it being bigger than the man at the bottom)

It's bigger than the man at the bottom!!!

It's look nice with some lovely flowers in it.

I'd feel the need to try and throw rubbish in it though, I think.

While I applaud the free OS update, I feel it's a bit cheeky to take the piss out of MS for it given that this is the first time Apple have issued a new OS for free. And that they've a history of charging for updates that only contain things that MS would have released as free service packs.

Also: drawing attention to the amount of money you charge seems a bad idea when cost is the arena your rivals beat you in at every turn.

A new PC OS, you mean.

Actually yeah, ignore me. Having a nonsense morning.

I will be installing OSX TOP GUN on the Mini later. Might as well.

No one else charges for mobile OS upgrades either though do they?

I'll give mavericks a go, be interesting to see the changes to finder, as maybe it will become vaguely useable...

Other than that, i'm not currently in the market for anything they were flogging, so no interest from me.
The iPad Air looked nice, but i'm perfectly happy with my iPad 3 at the moment.
iPad Mini Retina. Again, looks nice, but still too wide to fit in my inside coat pocket, so i'll stick with the Nexus 7.
Mac Pro. I really like, but i'd never buy one.
Airs and MBPs, all very nice but i've just updated my MBP, so it'll be another 2 years before I get a new one.

So all in all, nice but of no interest.

I had to look up why the name convention change.

Apparently they'll now be places in California.

They ran out of cats

Sinister.

Hmm, dunno.
I've got a vague tingling in my head about buying a Symbian upgrade once, but that could be completely wrong.

Hearing that Coloursync is broken in Mavericks. Cannot confirm this at the moment.

Meanwhile if you are thinking of upgrading on day 1, I thank you for beta testing the software for me and I look forward to upgrading in a month when all the "must have nows" have found all the bugs and Apple have fixed them.

I love upgrading on day 1 - it's so exciting!

I didn't have any problems with Mountain Lion, to be fair.

I have now upgraded my non-critical, practically unused work Mac Mini. It's very similar to Mountain Lion.

I've been using Mavericks on and off for around a month now and installed the Developer Preview on my main work Macbook last week, purely for the Multiple Display support, which is vastly better than it has been in any previous OS X release. Considering I'm constantly using two screens, it's been an utter godsend. The tab support in Finder is quite nice too and I'm meaning to start using the tags at some point too, as they could probably be fairly useful, used right.

I really like the look of the new 13" retina Macbook Pro. My work laptop is a temporary mid-2009 white Macbook, so I'm currently trying to convince my boss to replace it with one.

Hi guys

It's that "help the Aged" time again

This time, the "conundrum" (probably solvable in 30 secs to someone even vaguely aware of what a computer is) concerns my 5S phone. All was well; the unit synched with iTunes and all the rest, but the other day the phone itself announced there was an OS update ready to install (which it had downloaded directly without recourse to be connected to laptop). I told it to install; it did its thing and everything appeared to be OK.

Now though, when I try to synch with iTunes (via usb cable connection to my ancient XP OS laptop), it reaches the last stage, Step 5 of 5, and says "Waiting for changes to be applied" before hanging/not transfering anything. Even more annoyingly, it has somehow screwed up much of the music that I already have stored on the phone, with a stupid 'square-in-a-circle' stop icon on many tracks, meaning they can no longer be played. In mean, FFS Apple, I can't even *synch the phone*...? How incredibly shit.

Does anyone have any ideas please? (Please, no "immerse the phone in water for 30 seconds" type advice, as I'm liable to do it )

TIA

Cavey

Two very quick things :

1) You no longer *need* to connect your phone to your computer to do stuff like download music or apps or other stuff - it can be done directly on the phone so you might want to just ignore the sync issue and fix things directly on the phone.

2) Make sure the version of Itunes you have on the computer is the latest one (there have been 2(?) new versions in the last few weeks) - if your using an older version that can cause problems.

Thanks Zaphod.

The iTunes version is deffo the latest one. I managed to download my latest purchases direct from the phone, but it's still "locked" quite a few tracks from stuff that was already on the phone for reasons unknown. Any idea on how to fix this please mate?

Nope - other obvious thing would be to try and redownload them - you mentioned the symbol on them has changed if you take a screenshot (press power and the main button at the same time) can you upload it to show what this symbol is ?

I think I would use itunes to delete the offending items on the phone, and then resynchronise them.

Malc

Cheers guys, success
Managed to backup to iCloud via PC then reset, all fine now.

Mrs AE's iPad Air arrived today, I've just finished setting it up for her and handed it over.

Fuck me it's one seriously sexy piece of kit, almost improbably so. How the fuck do they get a screen like that and so much processing power into such a svelte little form factor?

I've never seen a retina screen up close and personal before, it's pretty good.

I now want one too, dammit.

Dropped the second of the Airs up to the in-laws after work yesterday, I'd already set up their Apple ID and all that stuff, and got a few starter apps on there, so I gave them a demo of its various functions, they were very impressed with it all but the thing that totally sold them on it was Facetime.

They Facetimed Mrs AE who at the time was in the kitchen cooking AE Jnr's tea, and were gobsmacked that they were watching what was happening in our kitchen from their house just whilst just holding an iPad - my mother-in-law stated it was like something off Star Trek.

AE Jnr insisted on Facetiming them back from our house later on, which she found deliriously entertaining too.

Mrs AE is loving hers to pieces, to the extent that it's kind of taking over from her laptop for a lot of stuff.

Ugh, Mavericks.

My MacBook may not be the newest or most powerful (mid 2009 whitey with 4GB), but it's gone from lovely with Mountain Lion to near-unusable with Mavericks. It crashes (like, the spinny umbrella even stops moving) just running Chrome. Fuck this shit.

It's not like Mavericks is a brave new world kinda thing for the end user. It's a freebie, because it's not really all that different from my old OSs (I've had Leopard, Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion and now this); it's just more likely to fuck my laptop. And not in a fun way.

What do you other folk, with your £3000 mega boffo Macs think?

I haven't installed it yet, and don't intend to unless I have to

Put it on the desktop and the MacBook and no worries here. The desktop one was only running Leopard originally, so it's that old, but runs fine on mavericks.

I had it on the exact same MacBook (mid-2009, 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM) and it ran absolutely fine, exactly the same as Mountain Lion did. I had a bit of an odd issue with Dropbox slowing it down though. Have you had a look in Activity Monitor to see if there's anything causing your issues?

Work have replaced that laptop with a slightly newer Macbook now, but I ran Mountain Lion for at least a month (initially dev previews before the final version became available) and it really was fine that whole time. My current work machine is the late-2009 Macbook with a 2.26 Core 2 Duo and 8GB RAM and it's slightly better on this, but that's likely the extra RAM helping there. Performance is exactly the same as I was getting with Mountain Lion at any rate.

The mac mini (late 2012) on my desk at work runs it without issue. It doesn't have much on it though.

See, I normally have my MacBook plugged into an external monitor when I'm in the office, so I grabbed Mavericks as soon as I could. The massive, colossal improvement in it's handling of multiple displays was worth any risks in my book, but like I say, it's been absolutely fine whilst I've been using it.

The only issues I've found with Mavericks has been that it doesn't seem to play nicely with the Dropbox app for me and when we tried making a build for one of our customers, Symantec Enterprise Vault was causing kernel panics on startup - and sadly that customer is insistent on using SEV. It's a kext causing the issue, so until Symantec pull their finger out and update their drivers, that particular customer is staying on Mountain Lion for now.

Fine on my mid 2012 MBP Retina. I haven't noticed much difference though, features-wise.

My iMac is my main server that runs all my media stuff, some of which i've homegrown some aspects. I suspects parts of that won't make the transition that well

Eeesh... this is one of those incredibly unnecessary Apple-induced bum-aches. iMacs used to use external temperature sensors stuck to the outer shell of the hard drive to monitor operating temperature, but in your machine use the internal temp sensors. As there's not really any industry standard on these things, your iMac will only be compatible with drives that use the same sensor makeup as the one already installed in the machine (you can find out what drive you have from System Profiler, so you don't need to open the machine first).

If you install a drive that is incompatible with what your iMac is expecting with regards the thermal sensors, the fans inside the machine will kick up to full pelt and stay that way until you turn the machine off, making for one very loud iMac.

It's one of those dick moves that makes sense kind-of, but only to arseholes.

Activity Monitor is making things even more confusing. Idle is shifting from 88% to as low as 8%, and all I'm doing is watching that and running Chrome. A few tabs, but nothing my phone can't handle.

http://www.hddfancontrol.com/

I'd consider possibly a fresh re-install then. Not something you should have to do, but something is not right there at all.

DocG's link there should help you though if you're replacing the hard drive.

Might I recommend taking a great deal of care removing the glass panel and LCD screen - not just be aware of damage, but also dust. Cleaning those panels is, I'm afraid to say, a right cunt. Even when you work in a fully-equipped workshop with all the Apple approved screen cleaning tools. It's one of my least favourite jobs.

I've been umming and aahing over which iPad to get since the new announcements. I sold my iPad 3 because I found I wasn't using it all that much, but I find I'm missing it now, as the iPhone is generally too small to use for long periods and I don't always want a full laptop out (I often use it for watching TV anyway).

I think I just want a basic 16GB iPad Mini Retina as it's the least spendy, and I wouldn't be using particularly space hungry apps. My sister tried to convince me the iPad Air is 'only' an extra £80 so I'd be mad not to go for that, but if I went for a full size iPad again I'd want 32GB, so it ends up being an extra £180.

I think I'm liking the idea of having a smaller one. I think.

Hey, I've got an iphone 5S!

It's depressingly exactly-the-same-a-tiny-but-bigger-and-thinner! I'm reet excited about the hyper processing power as Simpsons: Tapped Out now runs 1.6x smoother.

I'm going to have to get a case for it as it feels like I could probably snap it in half with thoughts alone.

The Apple leather cases for the 5S are fantastic, if pricey. Heartily recommended.

If you want something that doesn't ruin the thin and light aesthetic, but still want protection, I can recommend the Incipio Feather.

My work yesterday announced a change in the company phone policy and I'm now told I can't take a subsidy to use my personal phone for work because I have an Android handset. Apparently we're only allowed to use a personal phone now if that phone is an iPhone 5, 5C or 5S. Bit crappy, but we are an Apple reseller so I guess it makes sense that I don't do work stuff on a Nexus 5. The upshot of this is that I'm soon going to be supplied an iPhone 5C. It's annoying I'm going to have to carry around two phones with me, but I'm at least slightly excited about getting another Apple device after so long and getting my teeth stuck into iOS 7.

I carry two phones about with me but I get around this by never answering my work phone.

I have two phones and prefer it that way. The work one gets turned off at the end of the day, unless I'm on call. I'd hate to be contactable 24x7.

A proper, back-up-yer-documents one?