This is hilarious…

via macfidelity.de

I just watched Steve’s keynote about the iPad and I am happy to announce that this is the first Apple gadget that does not trigger the “must have” effect.

Seeing the keynote I really don’t get the excitment about this thing:

• It’s yet another device to carry around, too big to fit in a pocket and too limited to really be of any serious use.
  Seriously, do you’d want to write a 30 page Pages document on this thing?
• Oh yeah I forgot: it’s an eBook reader…
  Wait, I’ve never seen one of those – and it comes with an eBook store – now there’s some real innovation.
• The battery lasts for 10 hours… Yay, great. And then? You’ll have to carry some huge Mophie Juice Pack…
  The battery of my Sony eBook reader lasts for 1500 page turns.
• And most of the really needed stuff is missing. I fully agree with this article.

Friday afternoon just before heading home from work, streaming radio playing on my MacBook Pro while working on my work PC…

Suddenly no more sound… Lost the WIFI connection. No panic, just reconnect, but to my big surprise there are no more hotspots detected (there are more than 10 in my office space).

The basic troubleshooting begins:

• Reboot
• Reset PVRAM
• Creation of a WIFI hotspot on the MBP (Create Network) and nothing detected by my iPhone or my Dell PC.

To no avail.

I have to jump the shark and call Apple Care (I’ve been in the IT business for more than 20 years, so this is kind of humiliating ) for the first time.

I get a very nice and knowledgeble lady on the phone who walks me through the basic steps:

Reset PVRAM (yay, been there already)

Create test user

Hold Left Shift-Alt-Cmd when switched off and press the on button (nothing seems to happen) wait at least 5 seconds, then do the reset PVRAM thingy 3 times in a row.
This was quite interesting, as I never heard about this one. Must be some sort of super-reset

So in the end she (has to, it’s a hardware fault) has to give up and tells me how to get a appointment with a Genius at the Geneva Apple Store.
Unfortunately the next slot is for monday afternoon but I take it…

Comes monday I go to the Apple Store with mixed feelings, as I’m sure they will have to keep the MBP for some days to fix the problem.
So I get to talk to the Genius at 16:03 (I had the appointment at 16:00 – hats off Apple) and he does the same stuff that I already did and indeed concludes that it is a hardware problem…

“Repair will take some days…” and ” Have you made a backup?”

After “No, no backup” (lying only so slightly ) and some minor whining on my part we get to:

“OK, I have the piece to replace in the back (the airport card in fact was grilled), come back in 30 minutes”

So I went to have a coffe, came back and five minutes later and went home with my repaired MacBook, working perfectly.

Why am I writing this?

Because as a switcher (in fact I did switch officially 3 months ago, if you don’t count my hackintosh adventures) I always found Apple products extremely sexy and well built, but terribly expensive.

Now if you look at my experience with the iPhone(s) and the MacBook and the service that goes with it I’m a very happy camper tonight and I would switch again if I had to.

Turn off this baby monitor, let the baby cry and finally get full WIFI throughput…

A very interesting article on ars technica gives some details on possible bandwidth limiting, wave emitting devices in our household that interfere with a healthy WIFI reception.

The ones that are have a big part of the responsibility to create these interferences are wireless video extenders and – drum roll – baby monitors.

Now that’s a catch, I never thought about this one and I’ll think I’ll give it a try when baby is NOT sleeping.

So what will it be? The baby’s security or bittorrent bandwith ???