Applepeels

Apple's laptop math doesn't work for me

I know that I am in the minority of Apple users when I complain about Apple's prices.  Most Apple users absolutely love their products and happily pay more than one might expect for the privilege of using Apple products.

In October of 2010, I willingly shelled out a substantial chunk of cash to get an I5 iMac.  Over the years I have bought lots of wonderful Apple products whose purchase made my computing life much nicer.

Included in those purchases was a MacBook that I bought in July of 2006.  That trusted MacBook recently got to the point that it had to be retired.  Five years of use is a worthy accomplishment for any  laptop.  The MacBook made one trip back to a service center.  I also upgraded its memory, did a couple of hard drive transplants, and had to buy a power supply over its useful lifespan.

Because I also work in the world of Windows, I have been using Windows laptops since the fall of 2005.  At that time I was using my one year old Aluminum G4 PowerBook which built up enough problems to require the purchase of the MacBook in July 2006.

In fact I have had three Windows laptops in the last six years and two Mac laptops.  Of the three Windows laptops only one is no longer working.  My youngest daughter's big dog managed to sit on the screen of the 2005 Dell Latitude last summer and crack it.  The other two Windows laptops are still alive and mostly well.  My second Windows laptop which I used for something over three years had Vista on it.  While it runs, it is a stretch to call anything with Vista "well."

I personally concluded that Vista was a quagmire.  That was one of the reasons that I bought myself a new I7 HP laptop in February 2010.  Both my wife's I5 HP laptop and my I7 HP laptops have been very reliable.  I did recently have some software issues with my I7 due to the software that came with an external USB backup drive. 

Those issues seem to be resolved, but I am nearing the two year life span that I hoped to get out of the HP.  With the replacement battery and new power supply that I bought, the cost per day for the system will be around $1.38.  On top of that I can clean the hard drive off and give it to my daughter with the hope she won't leave it somewhere her dog will sit on it.  She would dearly love to have an upgrade from her white half moon (lamp tower) G4 iMac with an eighty gig hard drive.

With my MacBook dead, I would really like to have a Mac laptop, but once again Apple seems to have made it hard for me to make that decision.  I really don't want to spend more than a thousand dollars for a laptop.  The money per year that I have spent on Mac laptops and Windows laptops is roughly equivalent, but the difference is that 67% of the Windows laptops are still running and none of the Macs are.

Some of my Apple friends have been pushing me towards a MacBook Air, and it looks like a lovely machine. However, the $999 MacBook Air does not meet my minimum specs.  First off it only has two gigs of ram, second I have to buy an external CD drive, and third it doesn't come with a SD slot.  Finally it only has an 11" screen.  It might make a fine second laptop, but I would not want it as my main laptop.

That leaves me with the 13" MacBook Air as the lowest cost viable Mac option.  With the external CD drive, it would cost me $1,378 except I would likely have to add an external storage drive for my photos.  In the end I am carrying around too many pieces and still don't have exactly what I need for the money that I want to spend.

What I would really like to have is another MacBook just like the one that died except with an I5 processor, 4 Gigs of ram and a nice fast 500 gig hard drive.  I think Apple could build one of those for under $1,000 dollars if they wanted to get serious about being competitive in the low end market.  If Apple would build something like the White MacBook once again, I would buy it in a heart beat and not even complain about the 13" screen.

However, with all the web work that I do and my aging eyes, I really need a laptop with a 15" screen for my main laptop.

So I went out and configured a 15" MacBook Pro to meet my needs.  It came out to a stunning $2,249 which happens to be more than twice what I want to spend on a laptop.  I am sure it is a great laptop, but the math just doesn't work for me.  On something that expensive, I would have to add another $349 for extended AppleCare.

So I went to the Lenovo website and after looking closely decided to order one of their 15.6" I7 laptops.  It has a base price of $799.  You can see the specs here. While it doesn't have Thunderbolt, it supposedly comes with USB 3.0, but I will wait and see how it works before commenting.   By the time I added Microsoft Office Home & Student Version, a cable, and NC tax, the total came out to $997.96.  All the rest of my software will transfer, but I decided it was time to upgrade from Office 2007. 

The Lenovo has everything that I need and want at a price that meets my budget. Had I bought the MacBook Air, I would be able to solve my iCloud issue since it would have given me a Mac OS X Lion system to administer iCloud, but it would not have fit the other things that I needed.

I know that I am going to get plenty of Mac users telling me that I have made a mistake.  I believe what I have chosen does the best job of meeting my needs especially since this is my desktop replacement laptop.  However, I would dearly love to have a MacBook Air so I could write about the product and about Mac OSX Lion.

So instead of trying to argue specs and life cycle costs with the people who think I should have gotten a Mac laptop, I am going to give people a chance to do something about it.  That's why you will see the PayPal donate button at the top of the right panel.   I would love to review more Apple products, but the reality is that I cannot afford to buy them, and there is less than a snowball's chance in hell of Apple ever sending me a product to review.

I have been writing about Apple for over seven years now, and all the product reviews and commentary have been based on products that I bought with my own money. Before I recently pulled a lot of content in preparation for my book, I had over 1,000 pages of Mac commentary on the web.

Unfortunately the extra dollars are just no longer there for Apple products that don't match my needs. I would love to give the new Mac Mini a whirl, but I have a perfectly good Dual G5 system still doing the job, and I can't justify the expense of buying a Mini.

If I get close enough to the price of a MacBook Air, I will kick in some dollars to get the project rolling. I like to think that I add a somewhat different perspective to the world of Apple.  If enough people think what I write is worth a dollar or two, then it won't be long before I write my first MacBook Air review. 

If the donation thing works, I'll keep the product reviews flowing interspersed with the Apple company insights that I will do one way or the other. (Update) Upon further reflection, I think it makes sense to put any hardware that I buy with donations up for bid after I have spent three months with it.  I'll set the minimum bid at 20% less than I paid for the item.  Winning bid will get the product for their bid minus any donation that they made towards that purchase.  I'll take the proceeds and buy another Apple product for review.

If too few people are willing to donate to buy something from Apple, I will take what comes in and make a charitable donation with it.

With that, I'll have to say that we have enjoyed a wonderful holiday season with some homemade treats and a few games of Rook.  The cold weather has me thinking of Canada and happy not to be living in a world where shopping is at the epicenter.  There are benefits to hanging your hat along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where December can still bring some stellar beach days, plenty of shorts weather,  and a peaceful end of the year.

My book about Apple is finished and just waiting for me to talk to an agent when they come back to work the first week in January.  More details will be available here as they reveal themselves to me.

There are a few other changes to my blog.  There is a search option for the blog now available in the right side panel.  There is also a new way of sharing at the end of the post.  I appreciate anyone who takes the time to send my posts onto their friends.

Have a great New Year's celebration.

Apple's "free iCloud" services? Not really.

I guess that I am guilty of not paying enough attention to the world of Apple.  However, I have been a loyal and long suffering paying member of Apple's .Mac and MobileMe services.  I lived through all the changes such as my web pages coming down and my photo albums disappearing into incomprehensible folders.

My account was also one of those whose renewal coincided with the announcement of the new free iCloud services.  That meant that my account got extended until summer of 2012 which is probably why I have paid so little attention to iCloud.  The other reason is that the cloud that has my attention is Google's.

However, when I got the notice below last week, I thought perhaps I should spend some time investigating iCloud's free services.

Actually it turns out to not be so easy to move to iCloud unless you have already jumped onto Apple's newest bandwagon with both feet.

Apple's "free" services are actually free only if you already own an IOS device or have already upgraded to Lion.  Apple doesn't hide this fact, but I have missed any discussions that you have to be running Apple's Lion operating system to enable iCloud from a Mac.

Since I saw Windows 7 mentioned, I thought that I might be able to sneak by with that, but I had forgotten that this was Apple that was offering a "free" service.

I though surely this must not be the case so I contacted one of my favorite Apple system engineers, and he confirmed that you do indeed need to be running Mac OS X Lion.

Now I am not exactly out of date on my Macs.  I did buy an I5 iMac about fourteen months ago.  However, I have seen no reason to upgrade to Apple Lion's operating system, and a couple of good reasons to not upgrade.

First I don't like the on-line upgrade process, and second, I am afraid it might break the older version of iPhoto which I am using.  I quite like the older iPhoto, and as you can see from my posts, I detest the newer version of iPhoto. 

So I have happily stayed on Snow Leopard. While it is not perfect, I no longer have to enjoy the latest and greatest to get my work done.  I am even a version behind on Microsoft's Office on my Windows laptop though I do have the latest Office on my iMac.

It is interesting that Apple's new "free" services are only available to Apple customers with the latest and greatest operating systems.  I might sound like a technology party-pooper, but I have a very usable dual G5 tower that I bought in December 2004.  It has a couple of one terabyte drives in it, and I still use it almost daily.  I can't upgrade it to Lion.

Until late last month, I was still using my 2006 MacBook. While it isn't completely dead, it doesn't run for more than a few minutes before dying on me.  I even tried a new hard drive, but beyond backing up all my data, I had no luck in fixing the MacBook which happens to be our only other Intel based Mac.  I should mention that we still have a very usable white half moon iMac at our other home.  Our youngest daughter is also using one of those.  I bought three of those one summer.

So I guess I am stuck trying to figure out the best, or more properly, the cheapest way that I can enable Apple's new "free" iCloud services. 

When my MacBook died, I was actually thinking about perhaps buying a new laptop of some sort from Apple.  I have been carrying an Apple laptop since Apple started shipping them.  It feels a little funny to not take one into a hotel room when we are traveling.

However, I got a quick reminder of why I am sometimes hesitant to buy Apple products.

Those of you who are regular readers will know that I am writing a book about about my career at Apple.  In the fall just before my MacBook died, I sent Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, an email congratulating him on re-instating Apple's charitable match.  I saw it as a very positive change at Apple.  I mentioned in the note in passing that I was writing a book about Apple and would send him a copy when it got to market.

The next week, the day my MacBook died, we got an envelope from Apple's legal department reminding me of all the non-disclosures that I had signed with Apple.  They also included copies going back to the first one that I had signed in 1984.  I took the letter as a not very subtle attempt at frightening me into dropping the book.

However, I sent Tim back a note thanking him for the reminder, but also telling him that I have been writing about Apple for over seven years and until I pulled down much of the content in preparation for my book, I had over 1,000 pages of articles about Apple on-line.  Not once in the seven years did I receive a note from Apple complaining about the accuracy of my posts or about my disclosing any proprietary information.

I did tell Tim that the letter from his legal folks had convinced me that there might be more friendly alternatives to an Apple product such as a Kindle Fire.

So here I am stuck between some family members who would like to keep their old email addresses that go back to the .Mac days and Apple which is requiring me to buy something before I can use their "free" services.

It is hard to believe that even Microsoft is better at free than Apple.  Microsoft's Skydrive which is truly free now even works on Firefox.  Of course Google has a host of free services which seem to work from just about any platform.  Actually Google pays me more in my Adsense account each year than I pay them for the extra storage that I need on Picasa.  They also host one of my domains for free, and their email has become a favorite of mine.

The truth is that Apple is one of the most proprietary companies in the computer business. They are also among the best at mining their customers and accumulating a huge pile of cash.  Much of what Apple does is dedicated to getting you to buy their latest gear and only their latest gear.  I don't have a problem with Apple making money, but I find it wasteful to throw away perfectly good hardware that is still doing the job.  Perhaps that is one reason I love what Ubuntu is doing.

So I am wondering how Ubuntu can create a very simple distribution disk that I can download from their servers and use to install the latest and greatest flavor of Linux on my old Dell Pentium III while Apple wants me to go to their store?  The obvious reason is that Apple wants to lock me into their store and only their store.

Well I might have to figure out if I can buy an iPod touch and use that to migrate my Mobile me services.  That might be the cheapest and least painful of the solutions that are out there.

Any suggestions from others facing this dilemma would be appreciated.  I am not giving up my Android phone because I love the integration of the mapping apps with Google Maps. Besides I like the choice that the Android world gives me.  Also my Droid won't be two years old until March, and it is still doing a good job of keeping me connected.

My Apple book is now being edited by my trusted family staff, my wife and my oldest daughter.  At this stage, it is 295 pages and covers the time from September 1982 when I started selling Apple IIs in an Atlantic Canadian dealership to July 2004 when I left my position as director of Apple's federal sales in July 2004 just after sitting in a Senate hearing with Avie Tevanian.

I feel like I have done a commendable job describing life at Apple, but it has taken me seven years to get far enough from the situation to write a book, so I will await the judgment of others. I am glad that it is all down on paper.  Some of it is still hard for me to believe even though I lived it.

I am grateful that I wrote down about twenty-five pages of thoughts the fall after I left Apple.  That and a habit of using a daily planner have helped me nail down many of the important dates.  Not so surprisingly, the more I wrote about the old events, the more that I remembered.   Somehow I still haven't remembered any secrets, but that might be because I didn't know any even when I worked at Apple.

I have talked to a number of ex-Apple employees to get refreshed on a few things, but the story is mine.  Next week I am talking to agent recommended to me by someone well known in the Apple world.

Beyond that fishing has been good here this fall on the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina.  We were still in shorts weather through December 16 when I had a spectacular afternoon over on the beach.

While there have been signs of the seasons changing, somehow, the warm weather has managed to help us forget last winter.

With all the great weather, I am glad that I still have the ability to focus, or I would never have gotten my Apple book written in this fall to remember.  Hopefully my next post will have some details on how the book is going to published.  However, after the letter from Apple legal, Tim Cook will have to buy a copy if he wants one.