Life is Full a Vit

Contrary to what every single Mac and Apple fanboi would have you think, Mac’s do not “just work”. In fact, they are full of more fail than the Linux distributions I have run and even more fail than Windows XP/Vista/7. I have never seen kernel panic or BSOD when plugging in a USB device into my PC’s running Linux and Windows. My now-year-old MacBook Pro? Yup, kernel panic when it doesn’t like the USB device. What happened to graceful error handling?

How about handling Windows shares (SAMBA)? Linux (and of course Windows) handles them just fine. My MacBook totally barfed and completed refused to recognize my media server. Total failure when it came to copying my photos from my Mac to my media server over the network. Well this was the last straw. Out of five (5) computers I regularly use in my household, the Mac is the ONLY one consistently having issues and also gets the LEAST use. Why does it get the least use? Because it simply is NOT useful. My Windows-based laptops do everything the Mac can do, and do it better and with less fuss. Hell even my Linux laptops were less of a PITA than my Mac. So this is how we say farewell to a piece of shit Apple computer.

And this is also how we pry the hard drive out of said piece of shit Apple computer. Then we use the Windows based laptop to transfer all my data off the HFS formatted drive (which, I’m shocked to say, survived the impact of tossing the MacBook hard at the ground and then snapping the LCD clean off).

In conclusion, friends do not let friends buy Apple. If you think your Mac is the greatest thing since sliced bread, then you are retarded and extremely delusional. Go buy a $500 Acer laptop, which will cost you 2x-3x less than a comparable Mac, and it’ll browse the internet and word process just as well as that overpriced Mac. If you think your Mac “just works”, then you obviously don’t do anything more than simple email and web browsing and you don’t need a $1500-$2000 machine anyway. Any of us sane people actually paying $2000 for a laptop are buying much more advanced hardware than Apple is stuffing in your overpriced Mac.

To come: photos of me unloading shotgun shells into the remains of the MacBook.

FutureMark has long been providing benchmarks for gaming (and their related PC rigs), but they also provide a benchmark suite for the latest and greatest web technologies. This is a browser benchmark labeled PeaceKeeper. It runs a suite of tests to see how fast the browser can execute the underlying code. I ran it about 3 months ago when Safari was the quickest browser, just barely beating Google Chrome for the #1 spot. Well things have changed since then.

PeaceKeeper Results

Chrome is the top dog and my favorite browser to boot. It’s developer tools are outstanding and make my web development tasks much more streamlined, especially when it comes to JavaScript debugging and inspecting elements on my page (why in the world is it doing THAT?). Of course, FireFox 3.5 has improved as well, but the coolest thing to note is that FireFox is still improving, look at the results of the 3.7 Alpha 1 release! It’s biting at Safari’s heels. The results are to the right, click the image to view the full results.

Of course, Internet Explorer is still right where it is… dead last and not really looking like it’s going to go very far, very quickly (try getting 30fps of animation out of IE8… ha!)

Now I know those aren’t the biggest #, but this was run all on the same device. My Dell laptop, 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a nVidia 8400M video card.

Well I’ve been beta testing iPhone OS 3.0 on my 3G since it went beta months ago. I got to experience the ultimate crap that Beta 1 was and watch it mature into the complete OS that went public last week. Apple has finally implemented several long awaited features. I have to say, the copy & paste implementation is absolutely brilliant and I have yet to see any other mobile device do it better. Apple certainly took their sweet time on what is generally accepted as a “must have” feature.

Another feature that we have taken for granted is…. MMS. Again, Apple dragged their feet on this wonderful feature, but their implementation of it is, again, very elegant. I’m able to send and receive MMS and the functionality is implemented with grace. Snap a photo or use an existing one. Nice and easy… and all on AT&T’s network. Though supposedly they have to make “changes to their network” to support this update? Wonderful bullshit they are feeding to the public. Their iPhone SMS plans simply disable the ability to MMS. Way to go, corporate giant. No matter, if you’re creative you can get around AT&T’s bullshit.

Internet Tethering. Yes. I just said it. Apple has implemented internet tethering, and the implementation is much better than what PDAnet provides. Of course, AT&T is tight lipped about their support for this feature. They’ve said absolutely nothing one way or the other about this new functionality. I’ve had a chance to test internet tethering over USB and Bluetooth and it works great!

Do take note… AT&T iPhones do not even make it apparent that they have MMS & Internet Tethering at the moment… that is, unless you know how to update the carrier settings file on the device to “unlock” these features. I’m not going to say very much about how this is done since a simple Google search will tell you all about it.

But this isn’t the end! The iPhone Dev Team has been hard at work and very tight lipped about any exploits that may be in development while we were waiting for the new version of the OS

and phone to be released. RedSn0w has been updated to jailbreak every iPhone and iPodTouch device other than the 3GS (the new phone that was released). More details here: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/126908912/redsn0w-in-june. I’ve tossed a few screenshots of my jailbroken device for your viewing pleasure. I definitely missed my Winterboard theme!

Last but not least… As long as your device can be jailbroken (only the 3GS can’t be as of this writing), you can unlock your device with the updated version of UltraSn0w! More info available here: http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/128573459/ultras-now. And that’s all I have for now.

Well… first the major bummer. And this should of been expected all along. The MMS feature is currently disabled on the phone and on the carrier side. I even called AT&T to bug them about it and their customer service reps had no clue 3.0 was even available to developers yet. I ran across a post on the Apple developer forums that stated the MMS feature was not considered a developer feature and its functionality was disabled. Lovely. However all the functionality is there. I’m sure you’ve already seen screenshots or videos of how it works (and it’s pretty slick), so just this one from me.

On to the other things of note… Landscape view of emails and MMS/SMS is a definite improvement and in my opinion was needed from the beginning. The orientation changes currently can be a bit buggy, with the keyboard sometimes not switching to landscape mode (maintains portrait mode when phone is in landscape). This glitch can be seen throughout the OS currently, including bookmarks in Mobile Safari. No big deal, this is a beta OS release.

The new Bluetooth functionality I haven’t played with. I never use Bluetooth anyway, but I would love to see Apple enable OBEX so I can do file transfers to the phone with my PC, as well as send contacts to my friends via Bluetooth. Maybe someday, huh?

On the developer side, the Push Notification framework is in place. Maybe I’ll start playing more with iPhone apps finally… Anyway, there are more things to note, I’m sure. Maybe on another day.

PS: This is amusing (Pwn2Own interview): Safari the easiest to exploit.

Is out! And look at this… I’m a registered Apple Developer. The SDK is downloaded, the MacBook Pro is updated. Time to figure out how to load this from the SDK (I’m sure it’s pathetically easy) and overwrite my Jailbroken 2.2.1. It looks like the Dev Team is already working on jailbreaking 3.0… so I shouldn’t have to deal with the locked firmware for too long… I hope.

Well lets say that at least my trip to Portland wasn’t uber boring. As much as I tend to hate all things Apple (ironic given I own an iPhone, iPod and MacBook Pro… but that’s another story all together), I gotta say their customer service is great and they honored the warranty on their iPhone.

However this makes it my third iFail… err.. iPhone. The first had a wonderful FAIL of it’s own, again, another story. Now I’m left “customizing” this current iPhone. Wonderful.

And now to the point… at least I had a blast in Portland. It’s 11:21pm and I just got home. Wewt!

… FAIL.

And it just sits there indefinitely….

… but in the end… FAIL. Spent over an hour on the phone with AppleCare to come up to the same results… I have a lovely iPaperweight. Something even Tim pretty much chuckled at. I mean what more can I say? I spent that time on the phone doing the same restores I had just previously attempted… but now it encompassed two machines with the same results… FAIL.

So now I have an appointment in Portland at the Apple Store to deal with this at the “Genius Bar”… yay. I get to try the restore one more time on my MacBook Pro at home… probably to watch it fail (I mean statistically if it’s failed 100% of the time I attempted the restore on two different PC’s, what’s the likelihood it will be successful on the Mack?).

Does anybody notice the PATTERN HERE? Maybe I should bring my camcorder with me to the Apple Store…

That is the ultimate question as I sit here at work ticked off beyond explanation. But another question might be…. why does Apple suck? Oh but where do I begin?

Today started out like the average day. Got absolutely no sleep last night since it was Sunday night and as always I was out way later than I should of been. Then I get home and watch a movie. Get to be around… oh 3am. Roll out of bed at 6am groaning and cursing the world. Do the usual junk, grab my spiffy iPhone and unplug it from my MacBook Pro (which I’ve also handily named the HDD to ‘Apple Sucks’, but I digress). So all in all… a fine morning.

Yeah right.

I get to work, everything is dandy. Send a few texts to certain people you don’t need to know about (maybe I’ll tell you one day). Send a few more texts to my sister then ultimate start ignoring her. She claims I’m driving her crazy. I don’t believe that’s possible as I believe she was crazy to begin with. Ok… I do some of the usual work that involves… well, work.

Around 11:30am PST I look at my phone… and it’s complaining. WTF. “Unknown” ICCID and IMEI. WTF does that mean? Well it’s simple really… it means my iPhone is a dandy iPaperweight. I grab a copy of iTunes and the latest iPhone 2.2.1 firmware from Apple’s site. Do you see where this is going? Yeah… I have to “restore” my dandy phone. Un-f’ing believable. It was just working FINE, then out of the blue… it doesn’t work? WHAT? I did absolutely NOTHING to the phone.

Way to go Apple. You SUCK.

Now it doesn’t end here… this is still just the first nuisance. I launch the restore and yeah, sure, it runs. The status bar on my phone is full… however the PC still things it’s restoring my iPhone firmware… and the phone still thinks it’s restoring my firmware… for the past HOUR. WTF?

Ugh… if I have to take this thing to the Apple store I’m going to be that much more ticked off.