Ethan Rose – Apple fanatic, Blogger, Guru, Technologist.

07-31-11

My First Day with the New Macbook Air

Design

The design of the MacBook Air is not particularly new to Apple however, over the last 3 years or so nobody seems to have been able to replicate it. This is a telling indicator that Apple’s R&D department have a plenty of capital and time to go after future thinking design concepts, coming to market with something other manufacturers don’t seem to even thought of yet. The day this approach to hardware dies, is the day that Apple becomes run of the mill.

Even thinner and more precisely put together than my old MacBook Pro I find myself wondering how a computer can fit in a space this small! The keyboard is laid out perfectly (I love Apple’s keyboard design so much I even bought one for my work PC a few months back), the space between the keys helps you to avoid mashing two at once. There is a good feel to the scissor keys and while they have relatively shallow key travel, there is no doubting you have made the keystroke you intended to. The LED backlighting under the keys is very welcome and in my opinion essential on a portable. The display is still glossy but not the glass glossy panel that makes the MacBook Pro hard to use in bright spaces or near windows.

Apple’s unibody design has shone through again as being strong but incredibly light – holding the laptop by one corner while moving between rooms is natural and no flex or weaknesses are apparent. The one thing instantly apparent is the lack of ports – there are now 6 in total, that’s four less than the 13” MacBook Pro. Unless you are someone who connects to high-speed peripherals or needs wired network access often, this shouldn’t be a problem.

If anyone was looking for a compact well-designed ultraportable – this is it.

Speed

The new MacBook Air has already been hyped for it’s benchmark scores the world over – “2x faster”, “better than the 2010 13” MacBook Pro”, “biggest leap Apple has made in a long time”, etc, etc but that speed in performing image resizes and intricate maths for a score translates incredibly well to daily computing tasks. I ran a GeekBench test myself and the results put this Macbook Air in the same league as the base 27″ 2010 iMac.

Booting from power off takes under 20 seconds, opening Mail or Safari is faster than you can reach from the trackpad to the keyboard to input the URL you are looking for. Even more complex applications such as Photoshop CS5 and Aperture open snappily and respond quickly. I can’t name any task which this MacBook Air could do faster or better.

Bloggers and pundits put this down to the SSD and the i5 processor (I opted for the BTO i7 option) but I put it down to a great meeting of the hardware and modern OS. Apple is at the pinnacle of optimization with their personal computers – they have taken realistic hardware and paired it with an excellent operating system to create a winner.

03-08-11

My New [old] Apple Cube

“Never has so much supercomputing firepower been engineered into such a small space. The remarkable Power Mac G4 Cube, measuring less than eight inches per side, delivers more computing power than PCs four times its size. Yet while it’s packed with advanced technology, there’s still room for more inside.”

I am writing this post to celebrate my acquisition of an Apple Power Mac G4 Cube.I have always loved these computers and have longed at listings on eBay.

I’ve always been drawn to the Apple Cube because of it’s simplicity. One small box houses your whole computer. It makes no noise, has no fan to remind you this is a computer you are sitting in front of. It’s nice to have on your desk – quite a departure from the old beige boxes Apple used to make before Steve came back and a nice change of scenery from almost every PC of the day. And, despite being spec’d at year 2000 speediness it still handles general use very well, certainly browsing, email and music.

This is now a cult collectors item and rarely found in a full set as it is here. I am most proud to own this amazing computer.

[For extra fun value, check out the original PowerMac Cube product page]

11-29-10

NZ is on Sale!

Yesterday I launched a new Twitter brand which a friend and I had been talking about for a little while; it’s called @NZonSale.

So the idea I’m running with is that we all love sales and discounts – real ones.

Say you are at a party or gathering of your favourite people, and you remember a great carpet sale you saw on the TV yesterday. Do you whip it out and dazzle your friends with your utilitarian charm? Perhaps not, but what if it was cheap flights to London or that iPhone 4 you’ve been pining over. Bit more likely?

I think people want to know about sales, daily deals and bargain deals. They would like to save money and have the opportunity to jump on awesome stuff at a good price. The problem lies here – who can be bothered trawling a million sites and bringing the junk mail to mull over? Radio and TV ads? I think there is a better way.

Why not have them announced to you via Twitter or Facebook! Follow @NZonSale or check out the Facebook Page and tell me what you think. If you’re not keen on following just yet, check out www.nzonsale.co.nz for a taster.

At this point my aim is to simply see where this can go. Perhaps one day I can sell slots for the day or monetise in some other way, but that’s all to be decided!

So please, check it out, follow for a bit, let me know what you think and if you would be so kind, tell your friends!

09-13-10

High Res ✔

Pixel for pixel, this is a screen shot of my iP4.

07-15-10

How to get Pandora, Hulu in New Zealand

A lot of you reading this will probably have seen the ads around the web for completely anonymous, secure, proxy, VPN and whatever else they like to call it..

I wager your first reaction would have been, who would need that? Only kiddie-porn rings and undercover agents right?

There is a less publicised and far more legitimate reason that you might want to use one of these services – to obscure your location. Services like Pandora, Hulu, Spotify, Netflix, Veoh, ABC and many others employ IP checks on their users, to protect themselves from getting in trouble over their lisences, but where does that leave people like me, in New Zealand, who want to use these awesome services, who are willing to pay for them?

Out to dry.

There is an answer! Pay for (safer) or otherwise procure a free VPN service which will send all your traffic to the US or wherever it is you need to comply with the IP checks. Be aware – all your personal traffic is going trough someone else’s server. This means, should they have malicious intent, they are in a very good position to hijack your info.

As long as you are careful, choose and trustworthy provider and be sure to employ SSL on your email and web logins you should be more than safe.

There is an added bonus to this setup – should your ISP be trying to throttle your torrent downloads of all that open-source software, this will obscure the type of traffic and you’ll be home free!

Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android all support VPN so get to it!

Thanks to SuperVPN for giving me a free VPN account, you guys are awesome.

07-06-10

SuperVPN

So this morning I woke up and checked my Twitter.

There was an update from RazorianFly talking about how to get free VPN.

I followed the link and it lead me through to SuperVPN’s free VPN offer page.

All I had to do was Digg their page and a few other social niceties and they hooked me up with Free VPN. How kind!

So far set-up has been easy and I am able to browse quickly. I will post up a review soon after I have used it a while but so far it seems to be great!

07-02-10

Why I’m getting an iPhone 4

I have to admit there is a degree of Fanboy to my upcoming purchase of the iPhone 4. But that’s not the only reason.

The iPhone 4 is what we have been waiting for in a phone all these years. The hardware is beautiful, stunning even.

iOS4 has matured and become what everyone always hoped it would be. With multitasking added it’s reached a whole new level of awesome and it’s Apple awesome not generic battery wasting all at once awesome.

Can’t wait for them to be released in New Zealand!

Are you getting one? Let me know in the comments below.

06-16-10

2Degrees, carry on

After today’s announcement of awesome calling rates, 2Degrees you seem to have it all covered.

Calls, texts AND data (This is quite important for smartphone and iPhone users like me).

Carry on like this and you might just become the new favourite underdog network like Vodafone made themselves out to be. (Good move targeting the Indian and Chinese demographic in New Zealand, just by the way)

Looking forward to 3G!

06-10-10

Customer, Service?

So here I am on XT, enjoying my awesome 3G service when I decide to check my data cap.

I know I am near the 120mb cut off mark but I expect to get some sort of notification if I go over. Dail *333, press 2 for data.

“You are on the 120mb data plan. You have used 135mb, that’s 15mb over your cap and you will be charged 50c per mb.”

Why did I not get any notification? Oh well, better buy some more data.

I look for a text facility and end up using a form on the website, clicking on 120mb in the hopes to get more data.

Nope, text plan gets canceled and no more data. I call up for some help and get told I can’t get the text plan back without paying again and I can’t get any more data till next month. Period.

No sir, you cannot have an account credit, sorry there is nothing else I can do for you.

Confused? Frustrated?

Yes.Yes.

06-01-10

What is 4G and what will it mean to me?

Wikipedia defines 4G:

4G refers to the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. It is a successor to 3G and 2G families of standards. The nomenclature of the generations generally refers to a change in the fundamental nature of the service, non-backwards compatible transmission technology and new frequency bands. The first was the move from 1981 analogue (1G) to digital (2G) transmission in 1992. This was followed, in 2002, by 3G multi-media support, spread spectrum transmission and at least 200 kbit/s, soon expected to be followed by 4G, which refers to all-IP packet-switched networks, mobile ultra-broadband (gigabit speed) access and multi-carrier transmission.

So that all sounds nice but what will 4G actually mean for day to day use?

4G hopes to provide the following:

• A nominal data rate of 100 Mbit/s while the client physically moves at high speeds relative to the station, and 1 Gbit/s while client and station are in relatively fixed positions.
• A data rate of at least 100 Mbit/s between any two points in the world.
• Smooth handoff across network cell towers.
• Seamless connectivity and global roaming across multiple networks.

Sounds really good doesn’t it?

Vodafone and Telecom intend to deploy 4G networks in 2012, though they are likely to have to wait till 2013-2015 for radio spectrum to be released. So it’s a bit far off…

Do we think it will suffer the same overloading/not-as-good-as-promised fate as 3G?