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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

UK iPhone details

To nobody's great surprise, Apple's press conference today was indeed about the UK iPhone release. First, just the plain facts:


We'll have a more in depth analysis of these facts tomorrow, along with our individual opinions. In the meantime, you can find more here.

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0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Tuesday, September 18, 2007 10:14 PM

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Apple press conference announced for September 18

Apple has invited members of the British media to a press conference in the London Apple Store on the 18th of September (next Tuesday). All anyone knows about it is that the invites bore the words "mum is no longer the word".

The rather cryptic phrase is generally being taken as an indication that Apple is ending its long silence on UK (and European) iPhone launch details. Nothing else seems to fit the bill of being very important, very secretive and justifying the hype.

We'll update more when the news appears.


With any luck, it'll get delayed to the day after, thus increasing the chances of Steve Jobs saying "arrr, mehearties!". We here at the MacTake deem this "unlikely, but awesome".


More details can be found here.

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0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Thursday, September 13, 2007 4:58 PM

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

New iPods and iPhone price reduction

This is just a brief post to mention that we're aware of the redesigned iPod line. These include a new Nano, a Classic version and an iPhone-esque Touch version. Follow the link or browse the newly-updated Apple Store for more details.

There have also been some pricing reshuffles for the iPhone, which obviously only apply to the US.

We'll have more tomorrow after we've more thoroughly read and analysed the news. Just thought I'd let you know that we are keeping track of this sort of thing.

Oh, and a friend of mine has just coined the term "iPhod" for the Touch. Expect to read that a lot around here.

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0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Wednesday, September 5, 2007 9:59 PM

Monday, August 27, 2007

Alasdair Visits Glasgow's New Apple Store

So I visited the new Apple Store on Buchanan Street in Glasgow this morning.

And that nicely summarises all I can say about the experience

I mean, it's a nice enough place and the staff, from what contact I had with them, seem to be pretty knowledgeable and friendly, which is more than you can say for a lot of places, computer stores in particular.

There were, unsurprisingly, a great many Macs scattered around, including various laptops and the newest iteration of the iMac (complete with new keyboards, but I'll get to that in a moment), all running various pieces of software that you could walk up to and play with. At a few places, staff were demonstrating OS X to users and there was one section, with curiously spherical “chairs”, running children's software. Well, they weren't really running it but the 4 iMacs did have a really nice looking rotating display of the boxart for about 5 different games. Which is nice, I guess.

The interior of the shop has been much talked about in reports, including that standard Apple minimalism combined with some flashy combinations of metal and glass, contrasted with the much older exterior of the building. The whole design wouldn't have looked out of place in, or as, a modern art gallery.

This, I think, is the problem. With all the emphasis on demonstrating stuff and looking cool, the Apple Store, at least here, has forgotten that a “store” is somewhere people go to buy things.

That glass spiral staircase looks really cool, but I'd appreciate some kind of sign indicating what items could be found on the upper level it leads to. Actually, I'd appreciate some signs anywhere, of anything. Something next to the product to tell me what I was looking at. The headphones all neatly lined up next to the different models of iPod tell me that they produce noise of some sort but should I want to know how much of that noise they can store or for how many hours they can play it back to me, I'm in the dark.

The same seems to go for everything else: MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Minis, (there wasn't a Mac Pro in sight, presumably because they're for the professional market) all were laid out, widely spaced, on big white tables with nary a label in site. Even outside, the only indication of the store is a large white Apple logo hung over the door.

Upstairs, software and cables were hooked to the wall roughly according to what they did, but again, nothing to indicate what this was. I was looking for one of the new keyboards and eventually found it, tucked in at the back of a shelf, though it wasn't the wireless model that I wanted*, beneath the more prominent old-style keyboards and amongst some AV cables.

Should I have decided to buy it anyway, there's no way of knowing how. It looks like the checkout is located on the ground floor, stuck under the stairs as an afterthought. As an aside, I have no idea how you would go about purchasing one of the computers. Presumably it involves grabbing a member of staff and discussing it with them.

Now, I've never been in any other Apple Stores so I can't judge anything but the Buchanan Street branch. What I will say about that, is that there's room for improvement, without a doubt. Personally, I'd start by labelling things but going further, I'd suggest putting things closer together. This seems like a very minor nitpick but as it is, the computers are very widely spaced, especially along the back wall of the ground floor, and it just looks very barren and dull. Nobody's going to complain if they can't straighten out their arms and spin around while testing the iMac, guys.

Next, separating out the shop and demo sections would be useful. I don't appreciate having to squeeze past the guy learning how to use a Mighty Mouse just so that I can grab a copy of The Sims 2 off the rack. But that's what I have to do as things are laid out now. In fact, the design of the shop even lends itself very easily to physically separating the two – move the accessories downstairs and let people do more extensive trials up above.

“More extensive trials” would also be useful. The whole place seems to be geared towards acquiring new users and showing them the wonders of OS X, which is all well and good, but what if I want to just sit down and try something out? I don't want to purchase the new keyboard without at least trying it for ten minutes. I've read much about the iLife '08 and the chance to try it out would have been great.

All this can hypothetically be done on the demo machines right now, but anyone who's ever tried just leaning over a desk and typing for more than two minutes will know how much of a pain this quickly becomes, figuratively and literally.

So, in the end, what do I think of it? Well, it's an interesting enough place to poke my head into for five minutes and I suppose it may well be useful to first time Mac buyers and those looking for tech support. I may use it some day if I happen to be walking past and remember that I need a cable, or if I find myself faced with a problem that can't be solved by applying Google and a Dummies book.

But until it tidies up a bit and becomes more practical for existing Apple users, I reckon that I'll stick to buying my tech gear, Apple and otherwise, online.





*while this might be an issue with supplies to the store, the Apple website is giving delivery times as 4-6 weeks so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that it's a company-wide shortage due to demand.



(MacNN has a brief article regarding this, but they have plenty of photos which may give you some idea of what I was talking

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3 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Monday, August 27, 2007 6:24 PM

Friday, August 17, 2007

Class-action suit filed over iPhone batteries

I rarely post here but since I do have the ability to do so, I thought I would bring this little nugget of information to your attention.

As you may well know, iPhones, like iPods, do not have user serviceable batteries and thus must be sent off to Apple in order to have batteries replaced should they fail. This fact was not made obvious, or available before purchase, to consumers who managed to nab an iPhone on the day they were released.

A lawsuit, apparently the second of two so far, has been levelled against Apple for failing to inform consumers of this potential expense, on the basis that the iPhone battery will die completely after 300 charges, forcing users to replace it, and pay Apple $86, once a year.

According to official documentation and Apple's response to the first class-action suit, the iPhone battery should last between 300 and 400 charges at full capacity before slowly diminishing. This is pretty much what batteries do.

However, without getting into the legal details and the responses, one thing about this struck me as very odd. Let's do some maths.

iPhone release date: 29 June 2007
Current date*: 17 August 2007
Number of days the iPhone has been available: 50

50 * 24 = 1200 hours since release

Minimum battery capacity on iPhone: 6 hours (while web browsing)
Charges after which the iPhone battery will allegedly fail: 300

300 * 6 = 1800 hours usage time needed


So to summarise, the plaintiffs here would need to have been browsing the web for 1800 hours since the iPhones launch. 1200 hours ago. And that's not even counting the time it would take to charge, or the problems with the case filed in July.

The only possible conclusion here is that these people have been using their iPhones while travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light. As far as we at the MacTake are aware, this is not a documented feature of the iPhone but it's possible that these people were beta-testing new firmware that adds travel functionality at relativistic speeds. If this is indeed the case we're sure that Apple will have worked out the problems that this causes with the battery by the time they release the "iWarp" app.

You can read more here.



*used for simplicity, since I don't know when the suit was filed

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0 Comments. | By Alasdair Corbett, Friday, August 17, 2007 7:08 PM

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