3 posts tagged “apple”
I've got an email from a friend in Dubai letting me know that the Mac User Group have organised an event there to demo the new Apple TV:
We're arranging an Apple TV Event on March 29, where an Apple engineer will demo Apple TV in Dubai. It's our first major event and we think it will be exciting!
For more information, please contact:
contact@emiratesmac.com
www.emiratesmac.com
Unfortunately I won't be able to attend as I shall be in Doha at the Al-Jazeera annual conference I have been invited to, but if you are in Dubai, check the event out, it should be great!
Bastards. There's got to be a fly in the ointment somewhere. Once I burnt the required drivers CD, partitioned my disk, inserted Windows XP, rebooted, waited the required half an hour for Windows to decide to load its useless drivers and come to the blue screen which you have to press Enter to install, R to repair and F3 to cancel? I couldn't bloody well press Enter! No matter what I tried, and how I tried and whatever configuration I tried, it just would not select the damn thing. I couldn't select Repair nor the F3 keys either!
Weird.
I then decided to read the "Troubleshooting" section of the manual, nothing, I start at the start of the manual, and right there, in a bold quote box, it says that I need to use a USB keyboard and mouse for the installation as the MacBook's keyboard and trackpad won't be recognised!
Needless to say that although we have at least one computer in every room in the house, none had USB keyboard and mouse. They're all bloody wireless!!
Back to the manual to read how to restore the blasted thing, as every time I reboot, it just waits for you to insert the Windows XP CD. Again, back to the manual and at last I found that I have to keep the Option key pressed during restart which will allow me to select which boot disk to choose for starting from. I chose the only choice, and started the Mac OS X. I immediately then started Bootcamp Assistant, and restored the single partition... and to hell with Windows and with Avid. I'll force myself to continue to use that brain-dead iMovie HD for now.
I noticed it almost the first day it was annouced, and fell in love with it instantly. What's there not to love anyway? It's light, high resolution, black, fast, bags of disk space and memory, can run multiple operating systems, has a CD and DVD burder, and even the keyboard is sweet. Once you get used to it, you would ask yourself why didn't someone do something like this a long time ago... no more need for punching keys to type, just carressing them is enough! But even with all that I couldn't bring myself to buying one. The price I think was too much for what it is - but that's the usual thing with Apple, you pay for the name as well as quality, and as I intended at the time to write in Arabic, it was essential that I get a machine with an Arabic keyboard. Those were not available in the local Apple store.. so I just forgot about it. Until, that is, Hani came over to visit a couple of weeks ago, and then, my already crumbling defences were completely destroyed!
I called iMachines, gave them a bit of hassle to get me a better price, which they did, and I got my driver to pick it up and deliver it to me at home... the picture, I think, says it all doesn't it!
The machine hasn't been far away from me since. I even stopped using my MacMini since I got it and I think that my son Arif has taken that one over, but not officially I might add, the bugger wants me to buy him a proper gaming machine to play the latest series of online games on it. I don't mind doing that, but the agreement with him is that I'll only pay one half of the price if he saves the other half, which is more than fair I think.
So yes, I am very happy with my MacBook, except for a couple of niggly things: it runs very hot to be used as a laptop in the litteral sence, and the screen creeks when I move the laptop or open and close the machine, which is driving me nuts. Those and one other thing, it has far too many sharp edges.
I'll talk to iMachines on Saturday to see if they can replace it for me. This will be a real test of their customer service, especially since Sofyan (the owner) is away on holiday at the moment and I'm not going to tell him about this yet. Let's see how his staff take this..
