Thank you Steve
You did not know me, but you had profound impact upon my life and career. Thank you. Rest well.
Very helpful: How to: install an SSD into a unibody MacBook Pro
Today my MBP locked up on me forcing me to do a hard power down. Upon next attempt to boot up, the system would not boot, kernel panic … which ultimately caused me to panic! Macs, BTW, have the most graphically well designed kernel panic messages of any OS (see image above). I spent all day working on it (about 4 hours now) and finally have my system working … with all data in tact (I believe). What happened to me was that my disk only had about 5GB of free space. I was running VMWare Fusion (Ubuntu guest), compiling a large C++ program, which I guess caused VMWare to eat up the remaining disk space (not sure how VMWare works under the hood, but I do know that it ramps up and down its disk consumption throughout the course of your session … I presume for persistent memory snapshots or something similar). Ultimately, my system ran out of disk space and came to a screeching halt forcing me to do the hard power down and ultimately the kernel panic on startup — this is my hypothesis. For those that run into this or a similar kernel panic issue with Mac OS X, you will want this link and access to your installation media so you can run Disk Utility. Also, when doing a “safe boot”, I highly recommend SHIFT+CMD+V so that you can see the boot messages as they occur rather than the gray apple with spinning gear. Now, I need to rsync my home directory to my backup disk just in case this happens again and I am not so lucky as to be able to get my system back up and operational.
So, in follow up to this and my rant, my iPhone4 came in the mail today. It is really very nice and so far I really like it. Much improved in many ways over the original iPhone. I had checked out the DroidX when I was contemplating canceling the iPhone4, but unfortunately, no matter how nice the Android software is, the handset itself is very clunky in comparison to the iPhone4. Anyway, as much as I wanted to start my break-away from Apple by getting an Android phone, I have to admit, right now, I am glad to have the new iPhone. That may change in the (near?) future, but not today.
As a follow-up to Apple’s press conference today, it looks like they are publicizing their antenna test labs on their website to show how serious they are about addressing the current iPhone 4 problem. These anechoic chambers are pretty funky. The picture above is from when I had taken our smart-wheelchair to Radiometrics for EMC testing in order to acquire FDA approval of the chairside electronics of ATRS. While there we tested both 900 MHz and 5.8 GHz radios so we could be approved in both the US and EU. The particular test above was the radiated emissions test. We had to go through several other tests as well (conducted emissions, radiated immunity, electrostatic discharge, etc.). Either way, when I saw the pictures on Apple.com today, I had flashbacks to being in the chamber myself so I dug up a picture from when we were out there.
Interesting narrative by Dave Winer on Apple’s imminent “leveling out”. Frankly you could have seen this coming from a mile away. I’ve sort of vented recently on Tumblr regarding my disgust with Apple. The root of my frustration really comes from the fact (?) that they really are a marketing company at this point. It’s pretty gross and very “Stepford” with all of their tight fitting black mock turtle necks, Steve Jobs wannabe mannerism, superlative adjectives, and passive aggressive Mac vs. PC guy commercials. It is pretty funny, back when Mac OS X first came out (I think around 2000/2001) and the “MacBook Pro” was colloquially (i.e. unofficially) called the tiBook (b/c it was made of Titanium and it screwed up WiFi reception … sounds similar to the current iPhone 4 debacle) many of the geeks (real geeks, those who are on the bleeding edge of the technology curve) started migrating away from using Linux on their desktops to using Mac OS X on tiBook laptops b/c it was a real UNIX with a pretty UI and productivity apps that just worked (I was one of these people). Apple first captured the geeks, then everyone else followed. Very similar to Google. I remember when Google was basically this unknown search engine used by the Slashdot crowd and academic types (I was one of them). Google first captured the geeks, then everyone else followed. Well, guess what Apple, the geeks are slowly leaving you. I am one of them — it will take time given the level of investment I have in Apple tech right now, but, I really cannot deal with the overhyped marketing and second rate crap (that they charge a premium for) that they are turning out these days. Enjoy your time on top Apple. It is only a matter of time until the mass exodus of geeks sways the general public to the next big thing in tech.
This and this made me think that I too should give a little lecture about backups, for those of you who don’t do them (you know who you are).
YOUR HARD DRIVE WILL FAIL. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a year, maybe in three years, but it will fail, and on that day all of the data on it will be…
I think I am going to heed Brandt’s warning. He is a sharp guy who is echoing advice that I know is sound yet knowingly ignore. I’m up a creek w/o the information stored on my laptop. I was doing the “Time Machine” thing, but it wasn’t clear to me how to overwrite older backups once the back disk is full. Time Machine was just giving me warnings that the backup disk was full. I guess I need to budget some time to learn that software as it really is just too important to keep your data backed up. Thanks for giving me the push I need Brandt. I’ll be spending some time with this in the next few days … my fingers are crossed that Murphy doesn’t rear his ugly head until then.
Dear Steve,
Please turn down the dial a bit on the marketing hype. This thing is neither magical (do you even expect the teeny-bopper fanboys to believe that crap??) nor revolutionary (it’s a big iPhone minus the phone part). Oh, and with prices starting at $499, the price is hardly unbelievable — I believe you probably have ~50% gross margins on this thing.
I appreciate your products as much as the next guy (I grew up on Macs … since the 1980’s) but your marketing, IMHO, has reached the tipping point to (dare I say) tacky. Tone it down and divert some of that marketing budget to R&D (I can give you a whole list of things I’d like to see improved in OS X and MBP) and customer service (I’ve had two unpleasant experiences with your customer service department ever since you moved your manufacturing over to China … yeah, your stuff breaks more now but you act like it doesn’t).
Thanks for your attention to this matter.
-Tom.
