Spoke too soon?

Last week I wrote about my predictions for a holiday refresh to the Apple product lineup and how they fared against reality.

The MacBook Pro part of the refresh will only minimally update the top-tier MBPs with more processing horsepower, maybe a 10-20% increase, and possibly quad-core options on the top-end $2000+ models. The focus is going to be on the low- and mid-end systems, so I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if there was no update at all to the MBPs.

0/2 here, but +1 to overall score for calling no update. I was close on the quad-cores – this update did include quad cores, but for the iMacs, not the MBPs. I should have figured, since no one uses quad-cores in their laptops today, but I was letting my hopes for the update cloud my judgment.

Well, it turns out I might have been less wrong than before! According to 9to5Mac.com, who were rather accurate in their predictions about the latest refresh, Apple may be about to unleash quad-core MacBook Pros after all!

… [W]e’ve heard that Apple Store Geniuses are being trained on new Quad-Core (possibly Core i5 and i7) processor MacBook Pros and they expect to take delivery of the new machines at the same time that the new high-end Core i5 and Core i7 iMacs hit stores in November. That would probably be timed right with a 10.6.2 release.

Apple has traditionally used the same processors in iMacs and high end MacBook/Powerbooks with the exception of the G5 iMac.  iMacs and MacBook Pros were also the first Macs with Intel chips, introduced simultaneously in 2006.

But then there’s this:

We haven’t heard anything about outer design changes which would be unlikely – the current MacBook Pros were updated earlier this year with SD cards and enclosed batteries.  We also expect these things to top out at 8GB of RAM.  The iMacs can go to 16GB but that is with four RAM slots.

Repeat after me Apple: HDMI-out, antiglare standard, and Blu-Ray. Everyone else gets it, why not you?

I know, I know, it will never happen, Apple wants to promote HD downloads, etc. A guy can dream, can’t he?

I wasn’t 100% wrong

About a month ago I posted a prediction over on Brian’s blog at ESPNish, and I’m happy to report that I wasn’t 100% wrong!

I’m predicting the focus here will be on price, unification, price, cashing in on the “halo effect,” price, minor speed updates, and price.

First paragraph, 3/7. Cashing in on the “halo effect” is purely subjective, so you can’t say I’m wrong there (nyah nyah), and there’s no doubt there were speed increases. In fairness, whether those were “minor” or “major” speed increases depends on your POV. There was also a bit of unification (as described below) by bringing the Macbook up to par in some ways with the rest of the family. Unfortunately, I really believed Apple was going to drop some prices seeing as we’re, like, you know, in the middle of the biggest recession in, like, a billion years.

I’m betting on lower price points for the iMac – at least one sub-$1000 price point should be coming. No style changes – they’re going to want to make this look just like the existing systems to keep the idea that it’s a high-end system out there. Minimal changes to the top end, just faster processors and minor tweaks, if anything.

This one is a toughy, but I’m going to give myself 2/3. The style did remain largely unchanged – it was just tweaked a bit, thinned out, with enlarged screens. Definitely bigger additions to processing power than I was expecting. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the price drops again.

Ditto on the MacBook refresh. I’m going with one price point below $1000 (not counting the $999.99 they have today), probably at $699 or $799, with the same basic specs as the 13” has today, but in alumninum. Plastic is history – I’m calling everything going aluminum unibody from here on out, gaining the benefits of the new battery layout, if not reaching that 6-8 hour longevity on the lowest end. It will still have a good battery life, maybe 3-4 hours. This is a gamble, as I think they might have wanted to get this out for the back-to-school season, but continuing economic woes may have forced their hands here.

Ugh. This one I really boned up here. Being generous, I’m giving myself 2/5. I would have sworn Apple would go 100% aluminum here, but I do get keeping the plastics around as a distinguishing feature. At least I got the unibody and battery predictions right! I’m pleased to see Apple claiming a 7 hour battery on this one, too – I’ll be waiting to see full benchmarks in the next few days to see if the reality matches the specs.

The MacBook Pro part of the refresh will only minimally update the top-tier MBPs with more processing horsepower, maybe a 10-20% increase, and possibly quad-core options on the top-end $2000+ models. The focus is going to be on the low- and mid-end systems, so I wouldn’t be terribly shocked if there was no update at all to the MBPs.

0/2 here, but +1 to overall score for calling no update. I was close on the quad-cores – this update did include quad cores, but for the iMacs, not the MBPs. I should have figured, since no one uses quad-cores in their laptops today, but I was letting my hopes for the update cloud my judgment.

That leaves me with 8/17, or 47% accuracy. Not too shabby for a guy whose only Apple product is an iPhone!

As a side note, the Magic Mouse is a very cool idea, and I can’t wait to play with one and see if it’s what I’m looking for. At the very least, it’s cool to note that Apple has come full circle back to a mouse with no buttons!

Honeymoon Gallery

And here’s the honeymoon shots from Nassau, The Bahamas! (click the Read More link to see the gallery if you’re coming from the front page).

Read more

Wedding Gallery

Hello, all!

Here (below the fold) are pictures from all three of our weddings. Some of these are official shots from our amazing photographer, Sarah Edwards; some are from my iPhone, and others are from our Canon PowerShot SD750.

Check them out! If you want to see larger-size ones (suitable for printing) from Sarah, you can get those from her here!

Read more

An honest man

She finally made an honest man out of me!

My primary PC is still toast (I haven’t even shipped out the parts for RMA), so updates will be slow in coming.

Wedding photos will come along shortly, while I work with our photographer on getting the digital negatives and such uploaded, but I’ll come out right now and say that we could not possibly be happier with the photos – they turned out fantastic!

I’ll try to get the honeymoon pics off my camera and iPhone and posted as a gallery here this weekend, along with a write-up.

I still have three draft posts kicking around in the queue, but obviously the wedding comes first!

Fail

Last week my computer started acting up. Windows 7 was restarting spontaneously while i was AFK, and I was stumped as to why. 7 had been treating me well, with almost no significant crashes that couldn’t be explained away as a driver issue or something similar.

Indeed, it wasn’t until I was sitting at my system and actually saw the BSOD flash up that I realized I had a problem. I disabled auto-reboot (quick aside: why does MS still ship with that option enabled?), fired her up again, and waited. Sure enough, I returned a few hours later to find the error waiting for me. The words at the top spelled it out for me: Memory Management Error

I didn’t have to guess on this one: something was wrong with my RAM. Ok, not too big a deal, let’s just memtest test the sticks, all at once to confirm the issue, then one-by-one to isolate. Find the dead stick, RMA it, and get back up in running in short order. I have 8 gigs in there, I can afford to drop to 6 for a few weeks, right?

Memtest completes a full pass on the whole set. Then another. And another. On the fifth pass, it finds errors, and lots of them. Hmmm.

Ok, so, let’s test all four sticks, one-by-one. They all pass. Multiple checks, and they all pass … I can’t repeat the error … Hmmm again.

Ok, let’s put all four back in, run memtest overnight. Wake the next morning to see … no errors. Run Windows memory diagnostic tool all day, come home to find errors.

Ok, so let’s reboot, see if we reset the BIOS, make sure we didn’t mess with something along the way. Press reboot. And.

Nothing. Power on, fans spin, things whir … but no POST. HDD is silent. CD light never flashes. Check my connections; everything is hooked up right. Power up again. Nothing. An act of desperation: pull the RAM, power up, pray for a beep.

Nothing.

Well, fuck.

Call Asus. No POST, problems started in memory, must be the MOBO, right? Nice try, hotshot. AND put the memory controller on the processor – your quad-core Phenom could be busted instead.

My best bet? RMA them both. UPS ground (the cheapest I could ship) is 5-10 days from here to both their facilities. Warranty service is the standard 10 days, and UPS ground back is another 5-10. So we’re looking at 20-30 days without an operational system. And that’s assuming either of them approve an RMA replacement.

You know, I’ve been eyeing a Macbook Pro for three generations now…

– posted via my iPhone, the only damn computer I have that works well enough for me to write something this long –

How We Spent Our Labor Day

When we were just starting to plan our wedding stuff, one of the things Maggie and I agreed on was that we didn’t want to have off-the-shelf cake toppers. We wanted to make that our own thing – to add a degree of “us” to the cake, I guess.

I (of course) had this extravagant idea about modeling our characters in 3D and having them printed by a professional printer. Maggie, as ever, simplified things to a point where they were actually workable She bought these simple wooden dolls online called Naked Peggies (link is totally SFW, I promise), and some basic hobby paints from AC Moore. Her idea was that we should paint each other, so we set up shop in the living room and went to town. The hours just flew by, and by the end of the evening we had another item knocked off the to-do list!

It took us around 4 hours to finish them, but I think they turned out really great! Hope you like them!

Where the hell am I?

I sure am glad I didn’t post anything last month about posting more diligently…

The title here is meant as a double entendre – I’ve been absent from more than just my blog lately. The last two months have been a whirlwind.

• Maggie and I have entered the final countdown to the wedding – 27 days and counting – and we’re still not done. We have an engagement shoot in a few days; we still need to order some pieces for the wedding (vases for the centerpieces, cake toppers, etc); and we have some other projects to work on, such as writing vows, picking music, etc. We did book our honeymoon, so that’s got us excited – Nassau, here we come!
• Meanwhile, I’m actually into my third straight week away from home on business. At the end of all this, it will have been a 3 week, 7 city (or more, depending on how you count them) tour. I’m writing this from a Doubletree hotel in Seattle right now, and I’ll be in Calgary later this week before finally (finally!) heading home on Friday.
• Blizzcon was insane – roughly 29 hours of work in 2 days, but with enough play mixed in that it was worth the whole effort. I’m done working for the day, so I’ll post about that separately in a bit.
• I’ve done some more painting, and now have a fully painted Cygnar battle-box, as well as a good start on my Journeyman Warcaster. I’ve increased my collection by another few hundred points, and found some killer deals while I was out and about the last month. More in a separate post in a bit.
• I downgraded my phone from a fresh Apple iPhone to an intensely rotten piece of fruit. Likewise, more on that in a bit.

Times have been crazy,  but it’s a necessary part of the job. With any luck, I’ve been successful enough that this is the last of it for several months.

I’ll have more of those posts up to follow up in the near future…

I hope.

End of Q2

Hey all, sorry it’s been a few weeks since I updated. Q2 just ended, and it was a doozy. In the last month I have:

• Attended a wedding in Delaware
• Spent a week in San Jose and San Francisco on business
• Booked the photographer, DJ, cake designer, and JP for my own wedding
• Spent several days in Boston’s Chinatown
• Started work on an MMO project for the iPhone
• Added 1500 points to my WARMACHINE Cygnar army
• Stripped 500 of those points of all their paint, glue, and primer using a series acetone and Simple Green, baths and a manual toothbrush
• Turned the bases of all those models into a gooey paste, and spent several hours picking them clean of the residue
• Celebrated Maggie’s birthday on 3 separate occasions – including today. Happy Birthday, babe!

I would promise to try to be more dilligent, but I hate breaking my word ;P

The Last Airbender

Wow. Just … wow …

I’m only about half way through the first season on Netflix, but I’m pumped about this trailer. I guess the score is an original work for this trailer, and it sounds amazing! And when we pull out and see the Fire Nation armada approaching … crazy!