So yeah I was one of those nerds that waited hour in line at the Apple Store to get the new iPhone 3G. No I wasn’t hardcore enough to camp out for the week or even camp out over night. I woke up in the morning around 6:30 and got to the store around 7:30. That put me at about 500th person in line. The expected time was about 3 hours because of Apple requiring customers to activate it in the store. From my understanding, the idea behind this was to prevent people from jailbreaking it to use on any other network. No big deal to me as long as I get my phone. That is where the problem came in. AT&T’s servers crashed after a couple of hours and caused a 3 hour wait to turn into 8 hours for me. Now, I saw a few articles online where people were complaining about Apple and saying crap about the experience in general.
Mac OS X Leopard
Today I had the opportunity to try out the latest beta of Mac OS X Leopard. My boss had just arrived yesterday from WWDC in San Francisco and he installed the WWDC Leopard build on our G5 in lab. I am happy with the way Leopard is coming along. I find myself wishing I had Stacks in Tiger right now because they truly are useful and helpful. I am extremely happy that Apple made the decision to get rid of the brushed metal interface and made the entire operating system look and feel the same.
New Mac Book Pro’s Released
Today Apple has unveiled a significant update to its Mac Book Pro line of computers. This update includes LED displays, which will help out with battery life of the machine and the display no longer has to take time to reach full brightness. It is instant upon power on now thanks to the new LED displays.
Elgato Systems Releases Turbo.264
Elgato Systems has recently released Turbo.264, its h.264 hardware video encoder accessory for Mac computers. Some may be asking why should I buy a video encoder when my Mac can already encode videos with h.264? Well, whenever you use Quicktime, for example, to encode a video, it is using the Quicktime software and your processor to render out and encode the video. When videos are being encoded it pretty much uses 100% of your processors power, leaving you with next to no room to do anything else(browse the internet, listen to music, etc).
MacBook Pro’s Getting LED
Well, it has been confirmed by Apple that sometime this year that they are going to be switching out the old laptop displays with LED back lighting. What does this mean exactly? Many things. Back lit LED displays consume far less power so your battery will last longer. They are also much brighter and have more vivid colors, while still using less power overall. So thats something to look forward to when the MacBook Pro series laptops are updated.
